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I Received an AI Email

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Re: I Received an AI Email

#511

Post by wasteduniverse »

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.

[dead]

Re: I Received an AI Email

#512

Post by mostlysimilar »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #507
commodoreboxer wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If advertisements were opt-in, I expect a single digit percentage of people would ever elect to see them. I mean, you'd see the same thing if paying for your groceries were opt-in. Is that also a net bad for the world? Ads do enable the costless (or cost-reduced) provision of services that people would otherwise have to pay for.

> I mean, you'd see the same thing if paying for your groceries were opt-in.

Is that seriously the comparison you want to make here? Most of us think the world would be better if you didn't have to pay for food, yes.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#513

Post by swat535 »

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.

> enormous value added to all worlds citizens

This is quite a statement to make.

Please elaborate on what enormous value has spam ads and marketing emails added to _world_ citizens?

Unless of course by “world” you mean Silicon Valley venture capitalists..

Re: I Received an AI Email

#514

Post by mostlysimilar »

madamelic wrote: post #420
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…

> Enough of us will get pissed off that we will develop AI agents that sit between us and the internet. Until _that_ company gets overrun by MBAs who are profit-driven then they start injecting ads into the results. It will come in the vein of "we are personalizing the output and improving responses by linking you with vendors that will solve your problems".

> Until _that_ company gets overrun by MBAs who are profit-driven then they start injecting ads into the results.

Found companies with people that share your values. Hire people that share your values. Reject the vampires. Build things for people.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#515

Post by mrtranscendence »

commodoreboxer wrote: post #479
k8sagic wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is 100% realistic to read books and play board games. Both markets are massive, and board games in particular are having what I would consider a renaissance. Maybe it depends on your crowd, but everybody I know plays tabletop games and reads books.

You're missing the point. What's not realistic is to tell everyone that they should abstain from any type of entertainment that requires power (TV shows, movies, video games, etc) and should only read books and play board games instead. I don't care what kind of renaissance board games are undergoing, most people still only play the mass market classics, and then only rarely.

I don't know how much energy Netflix uses serving a movie, but playing a video game on my PC for two hours where I'm located might generate a kg of CO2. That's about as much as I'll breathe in a day. Relative to other sources of atmospheric CO2 I'm not that concerned.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#516

Post by spion »

fl0id wrote: post #459
spion wrote: post #362

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…

and this would be better how?

- Fewer people getting spammed

- The people who receive the cold email are (increasingly) more likely to be at least somewhat interested

- A human really wrote personalized emails, instead of trying to trick people into believing that

Re: I Received an AI Email

#518

Post by mlyle »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #509
thedevilslawyer wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think this is a rationalization of an enormous waste of work. The effects generating wealth are indirect. In that regard you could argue that betting is generating wealth too. Advertising is like a hamster wheel people have to jump onto if they want their place in the market. A similar amount of wealth would be generated if every advertised product would be represented by a text description, but we have a race to t…

> A similar amount of wealth would be generated if every advertised product would be represented by a text description, but we have a race to the bottom.

I fear statements like this go too far. I can't agree with the first part of this sentence.

I feel this about both marketing and finance:

They are valuable fields. There are huge amounts of activity in these fields that offer value to everyone. Removing friction on commerce and the activities that parties take in self-interest to produce a market or financial system are essential to the verdant world we live in.

And yet, they're arms races that can go seemingly-infinitely far. Beyond any generation of societal value. Beyond needless consumption of intellect and resources. All the way to actual negative impacts that clutter the financial world or the ability to communicate effectively in the market.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#519

Post by TeMPOraL »

richrichie wrote: post #265
TeMPOraL wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is literally turning greed into money, by means of wasting exponentially increasing amounts of electricity. It doesn't just not create value - to be able to allow exchanging value, it fundamentally requires ever increasing waste, as the waste is what gives its mathematical guarantees. LLMs deliver value. Right here today, to countless people across countless jobs. Sure, some of that is marketing, but that's n…

> It doesn't just not create value Value is a subjective concept. One could argue that its value is that arbitrary quantities of it cannot be created by dictat. > - to be able to allow exchanging value, it fundamentally requires ever increasing waste, as the waste is what gives its mathematical guarantees. One could argue that it takes a lot worse to maintain any currency such as USD as a currency. Full force of gove…

> There is a lot of "wastage" that goes to safeguard currency creation and storage and to prevent counterfeiting.

Yes. But the point I'm making is, none of that benefits from waste. The waste is something everyone want to reduce. With Bitcoin, the trend is uniquely opposite, because the crypto system is secured through aggregate waste being way larger than any actor or group can afford.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#520

Post by commodoreboxer »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #507
commodoreboxer wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If advertisements were opt-in, I expect a single digit percentage of people would ever elect to see them. I mean, you'd see the same thing if paying for your groceries were opt-in. Is that also a net bad for the world? Ads do enable the costless (or cost-reduced) provision of services that people would otherwise have to pay for.

Ads are not charity. There is clearly a cost, otherwise they would lose money. They do not generate money out of thin air. "Generate" and "extract" aren't synonyms.

They do not enable any costless anything at all. They obfuscate extraction of money to make it look costless, but actually end up extracting significant amounts of money from people. Ad folks whitewash it to make it sound good, but extracting money in roundabout ways is not creating value.

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