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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

#31

Post by mrfusion »

otherdave wrote: post #21
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?

I got one of those and at the bottom it said "do not reply to this email." I thought that was pretty funny.

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

#33

Post by runarberg »

andreasvc wrote: post #18
runarberg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how advertisements work. You're not "persuaded" by a single ad. Rather you are primed into believing it. A few days (or even hours) after you've seen an ad, you forget the source, but the content remains in your memory. The next time you see similar content, it will be more likely to stick. This goes on a few iterations, and pretty soon, out of a given population, the average individual is more likely to…

I know that theory, but I suspect it doesn't apply to these faux personal messages. For example you might get a coupon from some company because of your birthday, and the goal is clearly to get you to use that coupon within, say, two weeks. The handwriting is thus intended as a nudge towards immediate action as opposed to mass media advertisements which prime you for brand recognition.

Well you are more likely to read a seemingly handwritten letter then a printed one. That alone will expose a greater proportion to the content, where they'll be primed to certain keywords more likely to be picked up at a later through a mass broadcasted medium. And by that time, perhaps they'll relate that keyword to some personalized source, hence, a greater effect. You know, just like coupons relate a sense of favor to keywords/logos and therefor have a greater effect on persuasive power of a given proportion of the population.

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

#34

Post by sp332 »

bhouston wrote: post #28
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.

https://xkcd.com/793/ Just model it as a , and then add some secondary terms to account for . Easy, right?

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

#35

Post by ef4 »

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…

Would you be offended if you found out that a hand-written note you received was actually written by someone's secretary? Because that's pretty standard stuff most people wouldn't consider an ethical breach.

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

#36

Post by TeMPOraL »

mnw21cam wrote: post #7
andreasvc wrote: post #3

This is so pointless. People have positive associations with handwritten letters because of the content that goes with it. If marketeers start using handwritten letters they will just ruin that association.

But in the few years before the association is ruined, those marketers that successfully fool people into reading their junk mail will make money.

Exactly. Moloch in action.

"A basic principle unites all of the multipolar traps above. In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse."

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

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

#37

Post by TeMPOraL »

andreasvc wrote: post #16
ben0x539 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? Marketeers didn't pay for that association and aren't really invested in not exhausting it.

Sure, and it wouldn't be the first advertisement strategy predicated on fooling people. I just think that any goodwill associated with handwriting will quickly evaporate and on top of that it will make their marketing copy less legible (handwriting takes more effort to scan/skim). I'd say it's a lose-lose situation.

> I'd say it's a lose-lose situation.

Like many others that marketing/sales do to earn a quick buck while deteriorating the human condition even more. This is systemized abuse of human trust, and it makes society worse off.

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

#39

Post by MereInterest »

gk1 wrote: post #30
_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 tha…

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

That is quite true, and that is the problem. It is an inherently different philosophy, whether one's work should advance humanity as a whole, the local subset of humanity, or the local subset of humanity at the expense of the whole.

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