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I Received an AI Email

timharek.no

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Re: I Received an AI Email

#531

Post by tim333 »

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.

>they are all working toward making you click on ads more.

Not all. Also men on Mars, AGI, Fusion etc.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#532

Post by remram »

stavros wrote: post #195

I made a service to reply to marketing emails using GPT: https://github.com/skorokithakis/spamgpt It was a bit of fun, until I realized that most of the replied from the spammers were AI as well. We were just automatically spamming each other while OpenAI made money. I stopped using it then.

Nice! This reminds me of Lenny, the bot for spammy phone calls, that sounds like an old person mumbling and not understanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_(bot)

Serves them right. Unless they're a bot too of course, then you can't waste their time.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#533

Post by [deleted] »

siscia wrote: post #209

I have been building [GabrielAI]( https://getgabrielai.com ) also for address the too much spam in Gmail use case. Specifically smart filter to remove SPAM in a smarter way. Most people get a lot of spam from sales agents, SEO services, start-up accelerator, etc... With GabrielAI you can say stuff like: "If the email is from a SEO agency or it is trying to sell me SEO service" Then move it to SPAM. Similarly for all…

[deleted]

Re: I Received an AI Email

#534

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

>How much of our societal progress and collective thought and innovation has gone to capturing attention and driving up engagement, I wonder.

trillions, easily. People wanna sell you stuff, and they will pay to get your eyeballs. doesn't matter if it's to sell you a candy bar or to enlist you into the military. Even non-profit/charities need awareness. They all need attention and engagement.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#535

Post by johnnyanmac »

tim333 wrote: post #531
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.

>they are all working toward making you click on ads more. Not all. Also men on Mars, AGI, Fusion etc.

well the biggest tech companies with 100x's the computing power are. I'm sure if the collective FAANG all focused their funds and hardware on getting to Mars we'd see the seeds of terraforming in our lifetime.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#536

Post by edmundsauto »

aswegs8 wrote: post #452
internet101010 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you think back to when cars were introduced, knowledge of how to drive a car was actually a rare skill! People weren't born with that inherent knowledge, so someone who could operate a vehicle (and do some basic maintenance) was an expert.

Nowadays, that would be laughed at. But AI is more comparable to cars from 1900 than modern vehicles.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#537

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.

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

Groceries are opt-in. Until you realize you don't want to hunt and cook your own food, then you opt back in for survival.

UBlock origin + some subscriptions show I'd definitely would love to opt out of IRL ads.

>Is that also a net bad for the world?

World, yes. We have to tech to end food scarcity, but poor countries struggle while rich countries throw out enough food each day to feed said poor countries.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#538

Post by johnnyanmac »

pseudalopex wrote: post #418
sandworm101 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sales people were never artists. Cold calling is not art.

cold calling isn't an art, but smooth talking/networking is. There's no exact science to making people feel good and wanting to form a relationship with you (despite centuries of literature claiming that there is).

Re: I Received an AI Email

#539

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.

well, no one's going to be talking about the secrets behind LLM while the market is paying billions to own their slice of the pie.

And in reality, most software work is 1) API calls and 2) applied math. If you're not in cutting edge private tech or acedemia, your work probably falls into 1 or both categories. Modern "Software engineers" is more a matter of what scale of APIs you're wrangling, not how deep of domain knowledge you have.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#540

Post by wongarsu »

tim333 wrote: post #531
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.

>they are all working toward making you click on ads more. Not all. Also men on Mars, AGI, Fusion etc.

Google has 5 times as many employees as NASA, SpaceX, ULA, Rocket Lab and Aerojet Rocketdyne have combined. Which is actually a lot closer than I would have expected. But still, just Alphabet is a lot bigger than the entire US space industry. Adding Fusion probably doesn't change the numbers much.
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