Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Received an AI Email

timharek.no

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 597 posts

Re: I Received an AI Email

#441

Post by suoduandao3 »

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 do believe that commodified attention is the most logical currency of a postascarce society, so best case... quite a lot.

Note my 'best case' scenario for the near future is pretty upsetting.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#442

Post by segmondy »

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.

Which do you think is more important? Putting man on the moon or ecommerce? I reckon you been able to get on a device, see a biscuit ads, order one from foo.com and have it shipped to you. Think of how much tech it takes for that to happen, that is more tech than NASA built to send many to the moon, the internet, packet switching, routing, fiber optic, distributed systems, web servers, web browsers, ads, cryptography, banking online, and so on and so forth. We love to trivialize what is common, but that clicking on an ad is not an easy problem. Clicking on ads has generated enormous wealth in the world which is now bootstrapping AGI.

Clicking on ads helped with our goal to AI today. Showing you the right ad and beating those trying to game it is machine learning heavy. When was the first time we started seeing spelling correction and next word suggestions? It was in google search bar. To serve the correct ads and deal with spam? heavy NLP algorithms. If you stop and think of it, we can drop a think line from the current state of LLMs to these ads click you are talking about.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#443

Post by mattgreenrocks »

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.

It’s more about being on the front of the hype train and being endlessly positive versus competence.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#444

Post by grugagag »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #266
chillfox wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, I treat my email inbox like a dumpster that I occasionally search when I know there's something there that I need to retrieve. The spam has won, I have moved to chat platforms for my communication needs.

I get -no exaggeration- several hundred spams a day. I have an OG email address that was grabbed by spammers, since the days of Network Solutions (so it’s been awhile). I maintain Inbox Zero, much of the time, and seldom have more than three or four emails in my client at any time. I get there by being absolutely brutal about tossing emails. I probably toss a couple of legit ones, from time to time, but I do have rul…

What are pig butchering operations?

Re: I Received an AI Email

#445

Post by EasyMark »

castigatio wrote: post #17

It's a sign of things to come. We're going to have our own AI agents that filter and respond (or not respond) to these kinds of messages. Agents interacting with other agents. The bar to get hold of a real person is going to become that much higher. It is going to be messy for some time as agents war with other agents to reach the human eyeball. Some assholes are going to make a ton of money in the short term exploit…

If it gets that bad, I’ll simply not respond to anything outside of my circle of friends and family. That is 95% of the communications I need. I think we’ll all have to have some kind of pop type verification for each other that we’ll share in person or over verifiable communications channel, no one will read this morass of horseshit.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#446

Post by mooreds »

saturn8601 wrote: post #94
castigatio wrote: post #17

It's a sign of things to come. We're going to have our own AI agents that filter and respond (or not respond) to these kinds of messages. Agents interacting with other agents. The bar to get hold of a real person is going to become that much higher. It is going to be messy for some time as agents war with other agents to reach the human eyeball. Some assholes are going to make a ton of money in the short term exploit…

Technology ruins everything it touches doesn't it? I was recently thinking about this Ozempic fad and how it will lead to no one being overweight but just be dependant on Ozempic...until food producers that made everyone fat in the first place with their processed junk will produce Ozempic resistant foods...and then we are really in a world of hurt.

Here's an Odd Lots podcast on that exact topic:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-is-how-the-food-i...

Title: "This Is How the Food Industry Is Preparing For a Post-Ozempic World"

Re: I Received an AI Email

#447

Post by unraveller »

bilsbie wrote: post #429

We’ve lived with billions of spam emails for decades. I don’t know if the method of writing the emails matters much. Spam is spam?

Spam can now be hyper-personalized to your latest online data points such that the inattentive might not expect certain things to be fakeable the first time they see it.

Some people struggle with learning new ways of controlling for scams but it's never going away, just something they must consider more and use better tools to solve.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#448

Post by aswegs8 »

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.

Financial incentives, huh?

Re: I Received an AI Email

#449

Post by batch12 »

segmondy wrote: post #442
thrance wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which do you think is more important? Putting man on the moon or ecommerce? I reckon you been able to get on a device, see a biscuit ads, order one from foo.com and have it shipped to you. Think of how much tech it takes for that to happen, that is more tech than NASA built to send many to the moon, the internet, packet switching, routing, fiber optic, distributed systems, web servers, web browsers, ads, cryptography…

Marketing manipulation and spam is less important.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#450

Post by lmm »

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…

I don't know what you're trying to say. The people making payroll decisions have the same amount of people under them as they always did.
Post reply on HN