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How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

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Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#21

Post by otherdave »

anigbrowl wrote: post #11

If you need to send out 200 personalized letters to sales leads but haven’t got the time to handwrite them yourself — or if your handwriting is, like mine, grotesque — then Maillift will generate them for you, using teams of genuinely carbon-based people. That's horrible! I don't mind getting a printed letter but if I got a handwritten letter that I later found out was faked I would never, ever do business with that…

What about when you get an email from a website you just signed up for that opens with "Hi, Anigbrowl! I saw that you signed up for my site..." and is "signed" by the CEO. If you found out that was an automated email and that the CEO didn't really type it up personally, would you be equally upset?

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#22

Post by Brian-Puccio »

philbarr wrote: post #15
vdaniuk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Marketing people" is one of the most egregious generalization errors on HN. It's certainly in vogue to hate on marketers but it is not an identity, marketer is a hat that people wear. Just stop.

Hating on "marketing people" isn't just an HN thing, I think. I'm fairly sure most people hate marketers, particularly because it's their job to try and part you from your money. In fact, on HN we are probably more lenient because we are some of the people that are interested in separating people from their cash.

Tons of people can't stand "marketing people", it's why so many people laugh at things like Bill Hicks' monologue on the topic [0] funny.

I like shiny new things as much as the next person. But I don't like marketing and I don't like being sold to. If someone's sole job is to convince me I need something and my life is worse off without whatever they're selling, why would I like them?

http://www.fluffylinks.com/bill-hicks-on-marketing

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#25

Post by zyx321 »

vdaniuk wrote: post #13
anigbrowl wrote: post #11

If you need to send out 200 personalized letters to sales leads but haven’t got the time to handwrite them yourself — or if your handwriting is, like mine, grotesque — then Maillift will generate them for you, using teams of genuinely carbon-based people. That's horrible! I don't mind getting a printed letter but if I got a handwritten letter that I later found out was faked I would never, ever do business with that…

"Marketing people" is one of the most egregious generalization errors on HN. It's certainly in vogue to hate on marketers but it is not an identity, marketer is a hat that people wear. Just stop.

The problem is that marketers exist to make you buy a product that you otherwise wouldn't. The hat of a marketer is not always that of a professional liar, but frequently enough that you do well to be wary of them. Much like police have no obligation or incentive to serve and/or protect anyone but themselves, marketers don't exist to solve any problem except selling the product. Any benefit you receive from interacting with them is just a side effect, which is why the conventional wisdom is to avoid them if at all possible.

What I'm trying to say is: Never Talk To The Marketers.

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#26

Post by Htsthbjig »

Well, you can't.

You can buy a wacom tablet with tilt sensors and make the robot replicate the same stroke. You could add randomness to it too.

To apply different amount of force with the robot you use a spring and you control the force with the distance to the paper, it is very simple to do.

We did exactly that with ABB robots in the University a long time ago.

We used wacom drivers for linux and the wacoms were over 200 dollars or so.

A robot that uses only 3 axis is not "five figures", it is basically a plotter and thanks to reprap you could make your own for over 300 dollars.

Those are probably the ones used by this people, but you can use a robot with more degree axis and you won't be able to differentiate it.

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#27

Post by jimiwen »

_mulder_ wrote: post #17

Judging from the Robot letter in the article, the easiest way to spot a robot-penned letter would be that specific words are all the same. Look at the word 'the' in the picture, or even the 'th' in 'this'. They're all identical. The robot seems to be working from just a small pool of characters. Some sort of randomisation algorithm would work well here, varying the size, weight and slant or jitter of each letter woul…

the amount of mechanical engineering, signal processing etc, involved, they could be working on a bigger, valuable in-need problem? even more artistic would be cool...

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#28

Post by bhouston »

Htsthbjig wrote: post #26

Well, you can't. You can buy a wacom tablet with tilt sensors and make the robot replicate the same stroke. You could add randomness to it too. To apply different amount of force with the robot you use a spring and you control the force with the distance to the paper, it is very simple to do. We did exactly that with ABB robots in the University a long time ago. We used wacom drivers for linux and the wacoms were ove…

Yeah, fully replicating human hand writing with varying force and slight randomization of letters sounds fairly easy to do. Sounds like a project an intern can handle.

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#29

Post by KiwiCoder »

When a volunteer signs up at Social Coder I send them a welcome message.

Here's my confession: I will probably have sent that exact same message to someone else in the past.

At the moment I personally click on the "new message" button, fill out the name, paste in the message, double-check I'm sending it from a socialcoder email address, and then I send it.

This "welcome" process would be trivial to automate and yet I hesitate to do so.

Robots (and scripts) also have a way of blundering into situations that humans would avoid but this isn't why I'm reluctant to automate.

When it comes down to it I don't want to take the human (me) out of the loop. It would feel like I'm duping the recipient who might naturally expect a human connection rather than a recorded message.

If the volume was very much higher I might - apologetically - automate the welcome message. It might not make any difference to the volunteers signing up, but it would make a difference to me.

Re: How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

#30

Post by gk1 »

_mulder_ wrote: post #17

Judging from the Robot letter in the article, the easiest way to spot a robot-penned letter would be that specific words are all the same. Look at the word 'the' in the picture, or even the 'th' in 'this'. They're all identical. The robot seems to be working from just a small pool of characters. Some sort of randomisation algorithm would work well here, varying the size, weight and slant or jitter of each letter woul…

> Having said that, if you are someone who works on this sort of invention, please take a long, hard look at what you're doing with your life and consider just how this invention is contributing to the advancement of mankind.

This is a silly point that gets repeated far too often. You can make that statement to almost every developer and designer here.

Some people are quite satisfied advancing their own lives and that of those who are close to them.

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