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I Received an AI Email

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Re: I Received an AI Email

#481

Post by thih9 »

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…

Also from that blog post:

> As founder, I'm always exploring innovative ways to scale my business operations.

While this is similar to what other founders are doing, the automation, scale and the email focus puts it closer to spam in my book.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#482

Post by thih9 »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #443
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.

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

I can't see this working long term though. Being endlessly positive and ignoring your actual competence sounds like a recipe to eventually bite off more than you can chew.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#483

Post by commodoreboxer »

brabel wrote: post #381
b112 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far, I haven't seen a useful application of LLMs. So far. I've seen things that are wildly hobbled, and wildly inaccurate. I've seen endless companies running around, trying to improve on things. I've seen people looking in wonder at LLMs making mistakes 2 year olds don't. Most LLM usage seems to be in two categories. Replace people's jobs with wildly inaccurate and massively broken output, or trick people into do…

> So far, I haven't seen a useful application of LLMs. So far. What?! Whole industries have been changed already due to products based on them. I don't think there's a single developer who is not using AI to get help while coding, and if you aren't, sorry but you're just missing out, it's not perfect but it doesn't need to be. It just needs to be better than StackOverflow and googling around for the docs or how to do…

> I don't think there's a single developer who is not using AI to get help while coding

It's banned at my company due to copyright concerns. Company policy at the moment considers it a copyright landmine. It does need to be "perfect" at not being a legal liability at the very least.

And the blog post image thing is not a great point. AI images for blog posts, on the whole, are still quite terrible and immediately recognizable as AI generated slop. I usually click out of articles immediately when I see an AI image at the top, because I expect the rest of the article to be in line: low value, high fluff.

There are useful LLM applications, but for things that play to its strengths. It's effectively a search engine. Using it for search and summarization is useful. Using it to generate code based on code it has read would be useful if it weren't for the copyright liability, and I would argue that if you have that much boilerplate, the answer is better abstractions, libraries, and frameworks, rather than just generating that code stochastically. Imagine if the answer to assembly language being verbose was to just generate all of it rather than creating compiled programming languages.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#484

Post by echelon »

Bluecobra wrote: post #461
echelon wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I get what you are saying but what is the end result when someone is so shielded from the outside when they decide to block everything that irks them and stuck in an echo chamber? What if the user is a conservative voter and considers anything counterpoint to their world view the worst part of the internet and removes all instances of it from their daily lives? Not to say that isn’t already happening but they are con…

Same as it ever was.

Growing up as a southern evangelical before the internet, I can promise you that there has never been a modern world without filter bubbles.

The concept of "fake news" is not new, either. There has been general distrust of opposing ideas and institutions for as long as I've been alive.

And there's an entire publishing and media ecosystem for every single ideology you can imagine: 700 Club, Abeka, etc. Again, this all predates the internet. It's not going anywhere.

The danger isn't strictly censorship or filter bubbles. It's not having a choice or control over your own destiny. These decisions need to be first class and conscious.

Also, a sure fire way to rile up the "other team" is to say you're going to soften, limit, or block their world view. The brain has so many defenses against this. It's not the way to change minds.

If you want to win people over, you have to do the hard, almost individual work, of respecting them and sharing how you feel. That's a hard, uphill battle because you're attempting to create a new slope in a steep gradient to get them to see your perspective. Angering, making fun, or disrespecting is just flying headfirst into that mountain. It might make you feel good, but it undoes any progress anyone else has made.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#485

Post by commodoreboxer »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #477
Jgrubb wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last line kind of makes the point. Is any of that actually inspiring to a young child?

It sure as heck is inspiring to a critical thinking adult. There's been enormous value added to all world's citizens.

Interesting. In my experience, advertisement and the incentives around it have led to the most devastatingly widespread removal of value in human culture and social connections that we've seen in this generation. Huge amounts of effort wasted on harvesting attention, manipulating money away from people, isolating and fostering extremism, building a massive political divide. And centralizing wealth more and more. The amount of human effort wasted on advertisement is staggering and shocking.

I don't think your average adult is inspired by the idea of AI generated advertisements. Probably a small bubble of people including timeshare salesmen. If advertisements were opt-in, I expect a single digit percentage of people would ever elect to see them. I don't understand how anybody can consider something like that a net good for the world.

How does non-consensually harassing people into spending money on things that don't need add value to all the world's citizens?

Re: I Received an AI Email

#486

Post by tamimio »

I do receive phishing emails; some of them are so well-crafted that I'm sure they've fooled some people out there. To the point where I've created a folder called "nice_try_phishing" where I collect them for further investigation. For example, one email was sent before I renewed a domain as a reminder to renew, with legitimate links to the domain registrar except for the action link. They had the registrar's domain name too, but with a different, very similar TLD. Another one is a "failed email delivery," and they did the research about which service I'm using to mimic such an automated message, with loaded links.

Whether they are AI or not, I have no idea, but sometimes, and recently in emails, I purposely make a typo or grammar mistake to add some "human" touch to it, knowing that an AI will always type a perfect one.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#487

Post by asddubs »

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...

having a website with a contact form will make you change your tune pretty quickly in regards to that

Re: I Received an AI Email

#488

Post by zandert »

slhck wrote: post #110
zandert wrote: post #37

Really makes me appreciate that unsolicited emails are illegal in some European countries like Germany

Unfortunately, not in a business context, where marketers can claim "legitimate interest" in various ways. Also, in which way would it matter that they are illegal? Random companies keep sending them anyway; there are virtually no legal repercussions here.

Some countries provide some official places to complain about cold calls/emails, so at least it puts the sender at risk.

It boils down to a risk/reward trade-off, but I doubt that someone would as easily send thousands of spam mails, and also publicly boast about it

Re: I Received an AI Email

#489

Post by happyraul »

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…

This is a very limited perspective. There are many parts of the world not beholden to automobiles for transportation. Where I live, I can walk to the bank, and walk or ride a bike to entertainment. The alternative to data centers does not have to be driving an automobile somewhere.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#490

Post by aerotwelve »

> Have you ever received an email that felt so personalized, so tailored to your interests and experiences, that you couldn't help but be intrigued?

Did he use an LLM to write the blog post too?

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