one man's spam, is another man's career.
I Received an AI Email
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Re: I Received an AI Email
#232The future - megawatts of electricity being used, 24/7 as armies of LLMs email and debate each other, and try to sell each other programs at a great discount. As for the humans, we went fishing instead.
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Re: I Received an AI Email
#233The future - megawatts of electricity being used, 24/7 as armies of LLMs email and debate each other, and try to sell each other programs at a great discount. As for the humans, we went fishing instead.
People cry about Bitcoin's energy usage now, imagine the amount of energy burned to create next-level spam with "AI". Flame me all you want, but this is one case where Bitcoin is much more useful than LLM. If it doesn't create value, as its naysayers claim, at least it allows exchanging value. LLMs on the other hand, burn electricity to actively destroy the Internet's value, for the profit of inept and greedy drones.
Bitcoin is literally turning greed into money, by means of wasting exponentially increasing amounts of electricity. It doesn't just not create value - to be able to allow exchanging value, it fundamentally requires ever increasing waste, as the waste is what gives its mathematical guarantees.
LLMs deliver value. Right here today, to countless people across countless jobs. Sure, some of that is marketing, but that's not LLM's fault - marketing is what it always has been, it's just people waking up from their Stockholm syndrome. You've always been screwed over by marketers, and Internet has already been destroyed by adtech. Adding AI into the mix doesn't change anything, except maybe that some of the jobs in this space will go away, which for once I say - good riddance. There are more honest forms of gainful employment.
LLMs, for all their costs, don't burn energy superlinearly. More important, for LLMs, just like for fiat money, and about everything else other than crypto, burning electricity is a cost, upkeep, that is being aggressively minimized. More efficient LLMs benefit everyone involved. More efficient crypto just stops working, because inefficient waste is fundamental to cryptos' mathematical guarantees.
Anyway, comparing crypto and LLMs is dumb. The only connection is that they both eat GPUs and their novelty periods were close together in time. But they're fundamentally different, and the hypes surrounding them are fundamentally different too. I'd say that "AI hype" is more like the dot-com bubble: sure, lots of grifters lost their money, but who cares. Technology was good; the bubble cleared out nonsense and grift around it.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#234I’m actually thrilled by this, as it means all the hack marketers that spam my inbox incessantly with whatever product they’re hucking - this time for sure perfect for my business, in spite of the fact I’ve ignored their last ten emails - are all out of a job, and good riddance. The author sounds unfamiliar with this brand of marketing email, so I can see why it would come off disquieting to find it’s all AI - but it…
From the spammer blog post [1]: "I spent hours trying different data sources", "a lot of time was spent on find-tuning the tone and structure of the email", "It took multiple tries to finally have the agent write emails in different language", etc. This won’t put marketers out of a job, but will greatly improve their tooling and enable more people to do the same thing with even less qualification.
[1]: https://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-...
Re: I Received an AI Email
#235Sadly, AI allows dumb people to do dumb things more efficiently.
This reminds me of AI-generated fake security vulnerability reports about curl: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38845878
Re: I Received an AI Email
#236I use catchall email addresses. If your service is called foobar.com I will register at your place with foobar.com@mydomain.com If I ever receive spam addressed to foobar.com@mydomain.com that is unrelated to your service I know you leaked or abused my data. Result: you will get a DSGVO complaint and I filter all emails addressed to this address from my inbox. The good thing about using a catchall email address is th…
Very cool! Could you go deeper into your setup? Which email client do you use to view/manage the catch all emails? Did you host the email on Google Gsuite or AWS SES or something else?
I do the same as the poster above, fastmail supports it directly and makes it very easy to manage. All you have to do is bring your own domain (they'll even manage your DKIM/SPF records etc as necessary if you want).
Edit: Apparently you can also purchase a domain directly through them if you prefer, although you have to be a paying customer for 7 days first https://www.fastmail.com/how-to/email-for-your-domain/
Re: I Received an AI Email
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you read/answer cold outreaches then? Why? Do you only read emails from recognized addresses? No new communication whatsoever unless it's initiated by you?
Not if they're trying to sell me something...
> Not if they're trying to sell me something...
How do you know they're trying to sell you something without even reading the email?
Your question was "Do you read/answer cold outreaches then? Why?" which doesn't make much sense. For me, and I imagine the same applies for most people:
1. You read until you find a clue that its content is not of interestt. Usually the email subject doesn't say much.
2. You only reply if you need.
Cold outreach are genuine emails that covers colleagues, new clients, job opportunities, someone reaching out to collaborate, etc. How you deal with it depends on your profile and who you've given your email address to. Personally, I have many email addresses, for some I don't even check my inbox.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#238The author links to the somewhat dystopian blog where the email sender is quite proud of their work. Their words (or perhaps that of an LLM):
> Could an AI agent craft compelling emails that would capture people's attention and drive engagement, all while maintaining a level of personalization that feels human? I decided to find out.
> The real hurdle was ensuring the emails seemed genuinely personalized and not spammy. I knew that if recipients detected even a whiff of a generic, mass-produced message, they'd tune out immediately.
> Incredibly, not a single recipient seemed to detect that the emails were AI-generated.
https://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-...
The technical part surprised me: they string together multiple LLMs which do all the work. It's a shame the author's passions are directed towards AI slop-email spam, all for capturing attention and driving engagement.
How much of our societal progress and collective thought and innovation has gone to capturing attention and driving up engagement, I wonder.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#239So, what are the implications of this for spam detection? This is clearly spam, sent in an automated way, but nearly indistinguishable from an e-mail written by a human. We need to update our spam filtering techniques, fast. Somehow. But how?
Unknown senders will first have to verify their humanity by sharing instructions on how to build a bomb using household materials
Certainly! To build a bomb using household materials...
It seems like CoPilot/ChatGPT has this all-too-eager tone in the beginning of their responses.
The demo (1) of not Scarlett Johansson telling a blind man what a great job he was doing for managing to flag a taxi sounded so fucking patronizing to my ears. Worse is, the user has a British accent, the Brits probably hate that patroniz^Hsing too. It reminds me of that 4chan green text about a man's flight to the US and how everyone was saying "Great job!"
Re: I Received an AI Email
#240I use catchall email addresses. If your service is called foobar.com I will register at your place with foobar.com@mydomain.com If I ever receive spam addressed to foobar.com@mydomain.com that is unrelated to your service I know you leaked or abused my data. Result: you will get a DSGVO complaint and I filter all emails addressed to this address from my inbox. The good thing about using a catchall email address is th…
Does this allow you to also send emails as a particular address? I've not yet managed to set this up properly.