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I Received an AI Email

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Re: I Received an AI Email

#351

Post by altdataseller »

nostromo wrote: post #63
themanmaran wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's truely a race to the bottom. Cold email response rates are already ~1% industry average. Every outbound tool is adding the AI customization, and there is a slew of 'AI sales rep' companies promising more and more personalized spam. There will likely be rewards at first. An uptick in response rates as most of the market won't recognize emails are AI generated. But because it's trivial to send AI personalized emai…

1% is also about how well this worked, according to the sender's blog post. 10 signups / 970 emails sent

Thats actually a very good rate. 1% conversion rate is drastically different from a 1% response rate

Re: I Received an AI Email

#352

Post by ayewo »

jstummbillig wrote: post #257
lmm wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you do nothing that is discernible from noise (be that manually or through AI), unless your explicit goal is to generate noise, your ROI is 0. We're talking about a group of people whose core skill is convincing people to pay for stuff that isn't worth it. You and I may know they're worthless, but that doesn't mean they're not getting paid.

Let's assume you have a mom that loves you very much and she let's your know by text on a semi-regular basis. She asks you to come by on Friday. That might seem like a nice idea to you. You reply yes, and you go. Now, imagine you got messages from what appears to be not 100 but, oh I don't know, 1 000 000 000 000 000 of the very best moms that have ever existed. And they all do love you so very much. And they do let…

We all get to have only one mom and moms dont live forever.

So once someone’s mom passes away, you can’t really fool them with 1 or dozens of message from other moms anyway.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#353

Post by block_dagger »

k8sagic wrote: post #287
richrichie wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't just not create value Value is a subjective concept. One could argue that its value is that arbitrary quantities of it cannot be created by dictat. > - to be able to allow exchanging value, it fundamentally requires ever increasing waste, as the waste is what gives its mathematical guarantees. One could argue that it takes a lot worse to maintain any currency such as USD as a currency. Full force of gove…

But we do know that the Proof of Stake system we currently have, is a lot cheaper and more advanced than what Bitcoin does. Bitcoin doesn't solve any problem yet which is fundamental to our society and a fiat system like the trust issue: If i exchange 1 bitcoin with you for any service or thing outside of the blockchain, i need the whole proof of stack system protection of our normal existing money infrastructure lik…

Proof of Work is far superior to Proof of Stake in a network with absolute fairness (security) being fundamental. Satoshi himself said he could find no other way.

Compare energy spent on global hash rate to all energy spent by mining metals, physical banking, financial services middle persons, etc. if you want to talk about energy usage and make any kind of sense.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#354

Post by fattegourmet »

k8sagic wrote: post #292
tiew9Vii wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony Everyone is playing lip service to global warming, energy efficiency, reducing emissions. At the same time data centers are being filled with power hungry graphic cards and hardware to predict if showing a customer an ad will get a clock, generating spam that “engages” users aka clicks. It’s like living in a episode of black mirror.

I disagree. Datacenters save a lot more energy than they make. Alone how much co2 is saved when i can do my banking online instead of having to drive to a bank is significant. The same with a ton of ohter daily things i do. Is video producing co2? yes. But you know what creates a lot more co2? Driving around for entertainment. And the companies running those GPUs actually have an incentive to be co2 neutral while bit…

> how much co2 is saved when i can do my banking online instead of having to drive to a bank is significant.

And if the online bank wasn't sending a bunch of requests to a bunch of third party ad networks on every click, it would save even more.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#355

Post by unraveller »

Can anyone explain why the SUBJECT LINE of the email was REDACTED in this blog post intro other than to give a false sense of being already drawn in to the email contents?

I'm not after shallow interactions today and I would use it (much like a dumb spam filter) to judge a new sender's respect for my time expecting them to have stated their business with total upfront clarity, not mystery.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#356

Post by account42 »

doesnt_know wrote: post #90

I think the end result for email is going to be the same as with mobile numbers. Just block everything by default unless they are in your contacts. Enormous amounts of email will be generated but no one will ever see it.

This isn't the case with mobile numbers everywhere in the world. Spam calls here are pretty much nonexistent. It doesn't have to be this way with E-Mail either - we just need to prosecute spammers (including marketers) and make new laws where needed. Then you can accept almost all mail from cooperating countries and only need to block mail from countries that do not care about preventing spam.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#357

Post by tjoff »

lytefm wrote: post #335
tjoff wrote: post #65

This is disgusting. Cold spamming is illegal where I'm at, probably Europe as a whole?

Cold emailing someone who makes their contact information publicly available and might be interested in a sales pitch is not illegal in Europe. Sending SPAM is. The lines get even more blurry with automated AI tools that offer personalized sales pitches as a service. I'd be curious how this plays out in court. Probably something like: - If you use an AI tool to scrape leads and to generate the content but then still…

Marketing, if sent to individuals, that was not opted into is per definition spam and illegal.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#358

Post by brabel »

mns wrote: post #276
ossyrial wrote: post #238

The 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…

I keep seeing these posts on HN and thinking, man, these are some smart people. Training LLMs, doing all this amazing AI stuff like this guy with the email agents and the other guy with the dropping of hats, and then I open the posts and it's just some guy making API requests to OpenAI or some similar disappointment.

Nowadays, an "AI Expert" is someone who knows how to download an AI client lib and prompt the AI to perform tasks. These are people who are not even technical and have no idea how all this works, but they can at least follow a Youtube Tutorial to get a basic website working.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#359

Post by fbrusch »

Could this be addressed with cryptography, digital ids and signatures? Imagine it were possible to add a signature that proves that I own some "human" identity (like a national id), or that I possess some scarce resource (like a github account with some level of activity) and that today I sent no more that 20 emails. If I want to conceal my identity, I can use zero knowledge proofs. If you don't sign this way, or if your daily email counter exceeds 100, your mail ends up as spam.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#360

Post by account42 »

nstj wrote: post #117

PSA: GitHub has a “private” email feature so you don’t have to use your real email in commits. https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...

This is for commits (including merges/rebases) made through the web interface. You don't need a GitHub setting for your local mail. And in any case you could just use a dedicated commit author address if you are that worried.
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