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I Received an AI Email

timharek.no

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Re: I Received an AI Email

#391

Post by sandworm101 »

thrance wrote: post #373
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 remember seeing a talk from Jonathan Blow where he made a comparison: in the 1960s top engineers worked for NASA and put a man on the moon in a decade, basically doing computations by hand. Today, we have super advanced computers and tech companies enjoy 100× times more of the top engineers than NASA ever had, and they are all working toward making you click on ads more.

Someone decided that marketing is now a tech problem. Artists have been replaced by software engineers. The net result is creepy AI emails.

I fell for oldschool marketing yesterday. Im moving into a new appartment in a couple months. The local ISP who runs fiber in my new building cold-called me. I agreed over the phone to setup the service. That was proper target marketing. The person who called me knew the situation and identified me as a very likely customer with a need for service (the building has a relationship with the ISP). I would never have responded to an email or any wiff of AI chatbot. They only made the sale because of expensive human effort.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#392

Post by mirzap »

There must be a new communication method for the upcoming AI age. Actual, person-to-person direct communication.

Just as most of us ignore calls from unknown numbers, we may also default to ignoring emails from unknown senders in the future. This could lead to a reluctance to send emails, as they might be perceived as "unknown" to the recipient.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#393

Post by yard2010 »

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

That's boasting, not admission

Re: I Received an AI Email

#394

Post by lambdaone »

dvrp wrote: post #19

Anti AI art people remind me of anti AI marketing people from hackernews. Guys, it’s a tool like any other.

It is, indeed, just a tool like any other. And just like any other tool, like a gun or a knife or a pepper spray, having one does not give you the right to use it on other people.

Your right to swing your fist stops at my nose.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#395

Post by yard2010 »

taurath wrote: post #348
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…

This is sort of why I feel somewhat pessimistic about AI - the inevitable most profitable usecases being so bad in aggregate for a society with almost no bounds or values other than profit. It will never be easier to waste peoples attention.

This is not a problem with AI but with a system in which there are no other values other than "make the most money fast".

Re: I Received an AI Email

#396

Post by pseudalopex »

safety1st wrote: post #165
ChilledTonic wrote: post #6

I’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…

I don't really think that AI is the central issue here. The issue is that Kurt, the founder of Wisp, is a liar. He misrepresented himself as a big fan of all these blogs, who's read their posts etc. and that's how he achieved such a high response rate. In effect he deceived people into trusting him enough to spend their time on a response. Now ordinarily this would be a little "white lie" and probably not a huge deal…

Wisp founder Raymond Yeh is a spammer and liar. Kurt was a victim of Raymond Yeh's fraud.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#397

Post by biztos »

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.

When “altcoins” took off I spent a while racking my brain trying to figure out what special tech I could offer, how I could build my own blockchain, incentivize miners…

When I realized it was just dudes copy-pasting a “smart contract” and then doing super shady marketing, it was already illegal in my jurisdiction.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#398

Post by yard2010 »

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…

Don't even get me started with the rant about taking planes.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#399

Post by biztos »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #343
tsukikage wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At least one sci-fi novel iirc had an AI spam filter achieve sentience, because the task basically amounted to contrastive-learning a model of humanity.

Having worked in the field, I think you’re more likely to achieve AGI by intelligently watering tomatoes in a hothouse.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#400

Post by superhuzza »

rogual wrote: post #363
j_maffe wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry but I'm fairly confident it's spam - they just want you to look at their startup/substack links. That's why they included the links at all.

The compliment is a "foot in the door" so you don't immediately dismiss the email, and keep reading until the links.

I get the same type of comments on all my blog posts. Here's 2 examples directly from my blog:

"Awesome post! Keep up the great work! " (+ a link to their SEO service)

"Nice website, love the theme! Can I use it?" (+ a link to their WP service).

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