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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

#71

Post by isaacremuant »

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 don't get offended like above poster but I do think that if something is "signed" by a person in a position of power then that person should be aware what is being said in his name and be fully responsible to deal with whatever consequence it entails.

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

#72

Post by notahacker »

bambax wrote: post #47

Shouldn't marketers try the exact opposite approach? In this paper about "Nigerian" mail fraud http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf researchers argue that it's very efficient for attackers to appear fraudulent, because this helps select the most gullible victims (true positives) while weeding out "false positives": people who respond at first, but are not scammed in the end. From the abstract:…

That site was posted on here before, to which someone quite reasonably offered the alternate hypothesis "what if the scammers sending those particular emails are on average really stupid, as attested by anyone who has ever attempted to interact with them"

If you're sending out direct mail marketing and yet have an ordering process so cumbersome (or service of such dubious legality) that regular folks contemplating buying your product are a problem, your company isn't going to be around for very long.

Very explicitly junky mail works because the target demographic actually do get excited by the additional free services worth $100!!!! and nobody else would care to respond to the mail anyway

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

#73

Post by Florin_Andrei »

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…

> Every time I feel like I have come to terms with marketing people as economic actors they manage to plumb some new nadir.

Well, yes, but they do what works. They wouldn't do it if it didn't work. Which means they manage to connect with something deep inside our minds. So, when you make statements about what marketers do, you're really commenting on how the human mind works - a jumbled, impromptu, cobbled-up-in-a-hurry mess (that somehow still manages to put rockets on Mars, by some incomprehensible miracle).

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

#74

Post by CanSpice »

atjoslin wrote: post #70
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DirecTV and credit card companies do this to me all the time. I'll receive a letter that looks like some kind of greeting card or invite with no identifier but an address. The font used on the outside mimicks human handwriting, so it looks authentic if you're not really paying attention. I kinda get excited I'm getting invited to something, I open it up, and its a fucking ad. I don't understand how people do business…

You can always tell by comparing two of the same letters. For example, if two lowercase 'e's are exact clones of each other, you know it's a computer font.

You didn't read the story, did you?

> The best handwriting machines already vary some letters to avoid seeming too repetitive. Check out "offer" in the third line of that letter above: The "f"s are different from each other. The bot has been programmed to pen that letter a few different ways, the better to fool readers.

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

#75

Post by anigbrowl »

ef4 wrote: post #35
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.

Traditionally if you wrote a letter on someone's behalf (eg they instruct you by phone on what to say and to get it in the mail as fast as possible), you sign is 'PP J. Smith'. PP is short for 'per procurationem' meaning 'by the agency of'. You don't need to know Latin, just that 'PP [name]' means it was sent on someone's behalf.

If I got a letter with no indicator and it turned out to be someone's secretary I wouldn't be offended exactly but it would make me a little wary until I was more familiar with the person and their working habits, eg maybe they have total trust in their secretary, but the secretary isn't familiar with this convention.

Obviously I'm a bit old-fashioned about these things, bt these conventions came into being for good reason.

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

#76

Post by anigbrowl »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #73
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…

> Every time I feel like I have come to terms with marketing people as economic actors they manage to plumb some new nadir. Well, yes, but they do what works. They wouldn't do it if it didn't work. Which means they manage to connect with something deep inside our minds. So, when you make statements about what marketers do, you're really commenting on how the human mind works - a jumbled, impromptu, cobbled-up-in-a-hu…

Beating people to make them do what you want usually works too, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing. I'm well aware that marketing is matter of doing what works, but I don't consider it ethically neutral - there are good and bad ways to go about it.

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

#77

Post by DoggettCK »

Realtors have been using these lately. Had to let my old house go back to the bank in a deed-in-lieu earlier this year, but within days of the MLS listing expiring with our realtor, we started getting mail forwarded to our new house that looked handwritten.

All of them were offers from realtors wanting to re-list our house and try to sell it, and it wasn't until I got two identical letters, in identical handwriting, from two separate realtors, that I realized they were computer-generated.

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

#78

Post by Retric »

chc wrote: post #67
DanBC wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to buy a tv. You set aside an amount of money to buy that tv. From that point you're trying to get rid of that bit of money in return for a TV.

I don't think that's an accurate description. If you got to the store and they told you that, I dunno, you're the millionth customer and your TV is free, I doubt you'd feel like you failed to get rid of the money. Because you weren't trying to get rid of it — you were giving it up as a concession to get something else you want more.

I think that's a good point, but for many people going shopping they are more or less trying to spend money. They have a minimum budget and will just buy more stuff or come back the next day if what they want is on sale or something. Suppose, you got everyone on your list a nice Christmas gift for 20$ total, would you really stop shopping at that point?

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

chc wrote: post #67
DanBC wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to buy a tv. You set aside an amount of money to buy that tv. From that point you're trying to get rid of that bit of money in return for a TV.

I don't think that's an accurate description. If you got to the store and they told you that, I dunno, you're the millionth customer and your TV is free, I doubt you'd feel like you failed to get rid of the money. Because you weren't trying to get rid of it — you were giving it up as a concession to get something else you want more.

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by geon »

atjoslin wrote: post #70
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DirecTV and credit card companies do this to me all the time. I'll receive a letter that looks like some kind of greeting card or invite with no identifier but an address. The font used on the outside mimicks human handwriting, so it looks authentic if you're not really paying attention. I kinda get excited I'm getting invited to something, I open it up, and its a fucking ad. I don't understand how people do business…

You can always tell by comparing two of the same letters. For example, if two lowercase 'e's are exact clones of each other, you know it's a computer font.

Even high end handwriting fonts for print has multiple variations of each letter.
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