I get one of these every week or two. If someone says they're "impressed with the work you're doing" at my family S-corporation that magically W2-ifies my contract gigs, it's kind of a giveaway.
I Received an AI Email
451–460 of 597 posts
Re: I Received an AI Email
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who actually has a university degree in Artificial Intelligence, I feel like this is always how it's been. Before, an "AI Expert" was someone who knew how to use Tensorflow, PyTorch or Keras. Before that, an "AI Expert" was someone who knew how to write a Monte Carlo simulation, etc etc. You could of course say the same for frontend engineer or backend engineers. How many frontend engineers are simply impo…
I would liken it to cars. There is a difference between engineers, mechanics, and mechanics that know a certain car so well that they fabricate parts that improve upon the original design.
Good comparison. Engineers who build cars and understand their intricacies oftentimes just work on one small thing at a time, even in teams. Like a team just working on breaks. The mechanics can piece the stuff together and keep it working in a real world setting. But nowadays a self-declared "AI Expert" in that metaphor might be just some person who knows how to drive a car.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
"No other values"? When and how is such Doomer Hyperbole getting into HN articles?
This is half of major reddit subs now and I fear the same low quality comments will take over HN.
People need to go out and touch some grass.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#454Earlier 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…
That last line kind of makes the point. Is any of that actually inspiring to a young child?
Re: I Received an AI Email
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As someone who actually has a university degree in Artificial Intelligence, I feel like this is always how it's been. Before, an "AI Expert" was someone who knew how to use Tensorflow, PyTorch or Keras. Before that, an "AI Expert" was someone who knew how to write a Monte Carlo simulation, etc etc. You could of course say the same for frontend engineer or backend engineers. How many frontend engineers are simply impo…
i draw the line at people claiming to be experts in something they have only done for a year
Re: I Received an AI Email
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. The dead giveaway is multiple paragraphs of bullshit where one sentence would suffice. People ain't got time for that.
That is the giveaway for some of the high-profile LLMs. The ones I run locally with ollama can be VERY close to perfectly human, subtle typos and all
What’s your local setup? I run llama3:8b and it works well
Re: I Received an AI Email
#457Earlier 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.
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 situatio…
It's the tech that put you on a queue to be called
Re: I Received an AI Email
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
"No other values"? When and how is such Doomer Hyperbole getting into HN articles? This is half of major reddit subs now and I fear the same low quality comments will take over HN. People need to go out and touch some grass.
or maybe you need to touch some grass.
Re: I Received an AI Email
#459To 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…
and this would be better how?
Re: I Received an AI Email
#460Earlier 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.
Just wait. Enough of us will get pissed off that we will develop AI agents that sit between us and the internet. A sufficiently advanced personal assistant AI would use multimodal capabilities to classify spam in all of its forms: - Marketing emails - YouTube sponsorship clips - Banner ads - Google search ads - Actual human salespeople - ... It would identify and remove all instances of this from our daily lives. Fur…
This was present in the book Fall;, or, Dodge in Hell. (Published in 2019; takes place in the near future) Everyone had a personal AI assistant as you describe to curate the internet. A big part of the motivation was to filter the spam. A secondary affect was that the internet was even further divided into echo chambers.