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I Received an AI Email

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Re: I Received an AI Email

#361

Post by corobo »

squigz wrote: post #344
rogual wrote: post #283

I received a nice email the other day after one of my blog posts got posted on HN. It said: Hi - Just a note to say I'm a big fan of your writing. I always learn something and love your voice, which is hilarious and singular. Write a book! Best, {Name} {Link to sender's startup} {Link to sender's substack} New to writing online, it made me feel really good that someone enjoyed what I wrote and took the time to write…

I can't imagine leading a life this paranoid. There is practically no reason to suspect that email was generated by an LLM. This is like HN users who imply that some user comments are LLM generated...

Nice try, GPT

Re: I Received an AI Email

#362

Post by spion »

To make this less spammy, the person sending out the emails could've instead used AI to filter through a smaller set of people where their product is likely to generate very high interest, based on a prompt containing the product description and perhaps a summary of the things the potential recipient blogged about. Then, they could've used that short list to write a set of _actually_ personalized outreach emails with high chance of impact.

You could refine this in further iterations by also adding examples based on previous correct/incorrect interest predictions, thereby effectively reducing the amount of spam / making cold outreach suck less.

There are different ways to use AI to achieve the same goals, some more responsible than others.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#363

Post by rogual »

j_maffe wrote: post #328
rogual wrote: post #283

I received a nice email the other day after one of my blog posts got posted on HN. It said: Hi - Just a note to say I'm a big fan of your writing. I always learn something and love your voice, which is hilarious and singular. Write a book! Best, {Name} {Link to sender's startup} {Link to sender's substack} New to writing online, it made me feel really good that someone enjoyed what I wrote and took the time to write…

Since there's no personalized content, it was probably just copy-pasted. I get the constant fear though.

I'm leaning towards genuine, to be honest. Just thought it was interesting that I even questioned it, which I wouldn't have done before.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#364

Post by k8sagic »

croes wrote: post #327
k8sagic wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Is video producing co2? yes. But you know what creates a lot more co2? Driving around for entertainment What's more likely, watching a movie online, drive to watch a movie in a cinema? You know what creates a lot less CO2? Staying at home reading a book vor playing a board game. >Datacenters save a lot more energy than they make I think you mean CO2. And I doubt that they actually save anything because datacenters a…

Have you checked how much co2 a normal car drive creates vs. watching a movie online?

We need to be realistic here. We know what modern entertainment looks like and its not realistic at all to just 'read books' and play board games.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#365

Post by jacobgkau »

rpgwaiter wrote: post #349
highspeedbus wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things I wish become taboo: Admitting to use AI content. Everyone is so comfortable doing shit like this.

I much prefer admission to hiding it. It lets you easily see who doesn’t deserve your time

While that might work great on the individual level for a little while, it's unfortunately not how normalized taboos seem to work long-term. You're just going to see more and more people who don't deserve your time until you're wanting for anyone who actually does.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#366

Post by k8sagic »

fattegourmet wrote: post #354
k8sagic wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. But what are you implying? Entertainment + ad garbage still is a lot more co2 efficient than printing flyers and sending those out.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#367

Post by EdwardDiego »

k8sagic wrote: post #350
EdwardDiego wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which gigantic issues has it solved? Curious to know.

I actually listed them up directly after. For example alphafold: Protein folding. It is also now used in fusion reactor plasma control

It didn't solve protein folding. It led to new areas of inquiry, but it didn't solve it.

May I recommend reading Derek Lowe's "In The Pipeline" blog for a realistic discussion of the actual impact of Alphafold? [0]

And seeing as we don't have viable fusion yet, saying it "solved" it is really reaching. I'm sure it's helping, but solved? No.

[0]: https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/ai-and-machine-l...

Re: I Received an AI Email

#368

Post by hippich »

fbrusch wrote: post #359

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…

Something like hashcash? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Re: I Received an AI Email

#369

Post by macocha »

brabel wrote: post #358
mns wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also in most cases they were a "crypto expert" just two months ago.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#370

Post by brabel »

cornholio wrote: post #274
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…

News at 11, spammers use sophisticated techniques to increase the profitability of spam. This is absolutely shocking and never before seen, what is the world coming to. In all seriousness, manipulation and bullshit generation emerges as the single major real world use of AI. It's not good enough yet to solve the big problems of the world: medical diagnostic, auto accidents, hunger. Maybe just a somewhat better search…

> X bots that amplify the current line of Chinese and Russian propaganda...

Do you think those countries are the only ones doing this? Just the other day there was a scandal about one of the biggest Swedish parties, one that's in the government coalition, doing exactly this. And that's just one that got caught. In countries like India and Brazil online disinformation has become an enormous problem, and I think that in the USA and Europe, as the old Soviet joke went: "Their propaganda is so good their people even believe they don't have any".

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