The future is now, old man.
I Received an AI Email
311–320 of 597 posts
Re: I Received an AI Email
#312I already delete unread emails like this that are written by humans. Unless there’s a specific bit of text in the email that’s generated by the new enquiry button on my website or someone has left an answerphone message then it’s deleted unread. There’s no way I have time to read every marketing email I receive like this guy.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far, I haven't seen a useful application of LLMs. So far. I've seen things that are wildly hobbled, and wildly inaccurate. I've seen endless companies running around, trying to improve on things. I've seen people looking in wonder at LLMs making mistakes 2 year olds don't. Most LLM usage seems to be in two categories. Replace people's jobs with wildly inaccurate and massively broken output, or trick people into do…
There is one clear (albeit somewhat boring) application of LLM: data extraction from structured documents. That field has made a leap forward with LLMs. Positive impact on society includes automated extraction in healthcare pipelines.
Unstructured*
Re: I Received an AI Email
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 n…
Delivering value is not the same as creating it. Spam takes lots of value from many people, destroys most of it, and delivers a small fraction to the spammers.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>No real humam has been using email anymore in the last 5 years or so Wow, that's some extrapolating from a personal bubble if I've ever seen one. Plenty of workplaces still have email as their default communication method.
There is obviously a little bit of exaggeration but when I open my email at the workplace the bulk of the mails are: - semi automated reminders (you haven't filled your timesheets!), usually sent by humans but that do not expect answers - internal newsletters - general HR news - special news: electrical issues at the office, stay at home! - spam Bottom line: none is addressed to you as a particular human, nor require…
Right, but that's an anecdote - and if we're sharing those my last company that I left very recently everything was an email. If you needed to speak to a lead or a developer from another team you'd email them, even though we had MS teams. You'd maybe ping the person on Teams for a quick thought, but if it was anything more complicated than couple messages you'd send an email. And that was a a big corporation of 40k people.
>>But on personal side, I haven't received anything from a human for years.
I actually have an old friend back from high school and we talk daily using emails. He doesn't use any IM apps so it kinda stuck as our default way of talking.
And of course I exchange emails whenever there's some kind of customer service thing that needs to be dealt with - it's always best to have things in writing.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, that's quite right. That's why I created EtherGPT, an LLM Chat agent that runs decentralized in the Ether blockchain, on smart contracts only, to make sure that value is created and rewards directly the people and not big companies. By providing it just a fraction of just a bit north of 10% of the current fusion reactions occuring in our sun, and giving it a decade or two on processing time and sync, you can ask…
Another AI response, or humor from an actual person?
Re: I Received an AI Email
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is talking about semantic noise. Something that appears to have substance but is just slop actually. When everything is that. Then all email will become equivalent to slop. How could it not? Someone will be burned once or twice, but after that, there is a semantic phase shift.
"How could it not?" There are ways. Consider that we have fairly decent anti-spam measures which do not look at the body of a message. To these methods, it is irrelevant how cleverly crafted the text is. I reject something like 80% of all spam by the simple fact the hosts which try to deliver it do not have reverse DNS. Works like magic. E-mail is reputation based. Once your IP address is identified by a reputation s…
These IP blocklist services also have a reputation of their own: if you are trying to send legitimate mail, there's a good chance your IP is on several of these blocklists for reasons you have nothing to do with. You can only remove it by grovelling and paying lots of money (extortion). So using one of them will cause you to reject legitimate mail.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, that's quite right. That's why I created EtherGPT, an LLM Chat agent that runs decentralized in the Ether blockchain, on smart contracts only, to make sure that value is created and rewards directly the people and not big companies. By providing it just a fraction of just a bit north of 10% of the current fusion reactions occuring in our sun, and giving it a decade or two on processing time and sync, you can ask…
I'm an Ethereum fan and I found this funny.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like all immoral things, it's only bad if you get caught. :( Most perpetrators will nog blog their shenanigans. I wouldn't have figured out this was Ai, and might have engaged had if the topic was relevant to me. I would not have engaged with a traditional spam email even if it had been relevant to me, so there's a real incentive to do stuff like this.
I highly doubt that people employing this scheme are thinking it through though. Lets say you indeed engage with this email, not knowing its AI. Then when things are getting serious a human approaches you after all and you find out you were talking to AI all the time. Would you not be completely outraged by being fooled like this? I think marketers underestimate that they may turn people off their brand in the long r…
I would be outraged IF I found out. If the AI-to-human hand-off is smooth enough, there is no way to figure this out. In your scenario, if the AI's only task is to send gazillions of emails to generate leads, and then the human takes over when the leads come in, the respondents have no way to figure out that the initial email was an AI.
Of course, the answer is to have AI send a response with a CAPTCHA (assuming those still work), before showing the initial email to the recipient.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#320The 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 spam…
This process should not require a human in the loop.
Consider:
* spammers have access to large amounts of compute via their botnets
* the effectiveness of any particular spam message can easily be measured - it is simply the quantity of funds arriving at the cryptocurrency wallet tied to that message within some time window
So, just complete the cycle: LLM to generate prompts, another to generate messages, send out a large batch, wait some hours, kick off a round of training based on the feedback signals received; rinse, lather, repeat, entirely unattended.
This is how we /really/ get AI foom: not in a FAANG lab but in a spammer's basement.