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Proton spam and the AI consent problem

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Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#291

Post by xigoi »

boringg wrote: post #223
ivan_gammel wrote: post #19

I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. It is a very common problem with modern marketing teams, that have zero empathy for customers (even if they have one, they will never push back on whatever insane demands come from senior management). This is why any email subscription management interface now is as bloated as a dead whale. If too many…

The idea that the marketing team has the ability to really push back against senior management doesn't align with the reality I have seen. The best they can do is say that this will do brand damage -- but they don't have the ability to really call the shots. Most organizations marketing is not in a real seat of power - more like an advisory position. I'm not trying to unfair to marketing - they do have an important r…

“I was just following orders” is not an excuse. If your job requires you to do immoral things, it is your responsibility to quit.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#292

Post by xigoi »

lawtalkinghuman wrote: post #239
marginalia_nu wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud is probably the better comparison, since crypto never had the sort of mainstream management buy-in that the other two got. Microsoft's handling of OneDrive in particular foreshadows how AI is being pushed out.

The difference is OneDrive is moderately useful.

LLMs are also moderately useful.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#293

Post by mark_l_watson »

dschuetz wrote: post #80

Every company seems to scramble trying to sell AI based products they have invested in so heavily, disregarding whether anyone needed them at all in the first place. This AI thing is going to implode so hard.

I subscribed to Lumo for two months. Mistral models were good and I like the idea of a private version of GPT. However, if you only use it a few times a week, it’s not worth the money.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#294

Post by parliament32 »

homebrewer wrote: post #290
SCdF wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With AI, if well done, it would be useful nearly everywhere. I fundamentally disagree with this. I never, now or in the future, want to use AI to generate or alter communication or expression primarily between me and other humans. I do not want emails or articles summarised, I do not emails or documents written for me, I do not want my photos altered yassified. Not now, not ever.

How about machine translation and fixing grammar in languages you're not very familiar with? That's the only use of "AI" I've found so far. I'd rather read (and write) broken English in informal contexts like this forum, but there are enough more formal situations.

If you're not familiar, how could you possibly know if what you're conveying is accurate to your intention? And if you don't, why bother at all?

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#295

Post by janalsncm »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #19

I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. It is a very common problem with modern marketing teams, that have zero empathy for customers (even if they have one, they will never push back on whatever insane demands come from senior management). This is why any email subscription management interface now is as bloated as a dead whale. If too many…

This was my first reaction too. It is a bit ironic that the issue of “overlapping labels” can be applied to the OP as well.

My instinct is to classify this as an email consent issue not because AI needs defending, but because the solution need not be specific to AI. The Next Big Thing will also probably have this problem because marketing is at odds making your customers happy with a great product.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#296

Post by chrisjj »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #283
chrisjj wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dangerous, since this invites genuine service emails to be junked.

I think that's fine. If 20% of the emails from some company (let's say Paypal) are spam, then all email providers (especially Gmail, the largest provider) should mark ALL of their emails as spam by default until they stop spending spam. If they want to keep spamming, they can at least humiliate themselves by telling people to check their spam folders for their emails.

It proved not fine for me on an occasion of missing a service email and losing an account as a result.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#297

Post by janalsncm »

everyday7732 wrote: post #132
SCdF wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this *far* more with AI than any other advancement / fad (depending on your opinion) than anything else before. This also tracks with every app and website injecting AI into every one of your interactions, with no way to disable it. I think the article's point about non-consent is a very apt one, and expresses why I dislike this trend so much. I left Google Workspace, as a pay…

To add to this, it's the same attitude that they used to create the AI in the first place by using content which they don't own, without permission. Regardless of how useful it may be, the companies creating it and including it have demonstrated time and again that they do not care about consent.

I’d argue that a lot of the scrape-and-train is just the newest and most blatant exploitation of the relationship that always existed, not a renegotiation of it. Stack overflow monetized millions of hours of people’s work. Same thing with Reddit and Twitter and plenty of other websites.

Legally it is different with books (as Anthropic found out) but I would argue morally it is more similar: forum users and most authors write not for money, but because they enjoy it.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#298

Post by janalsncm »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #289
arrozconcosas wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you get a machine to have values? Humans have values because of social dynamics and education (or lack of exposure to other types of education). Computers do not have social dynamics, and it is much harder to control what they are being educated on if the answer is "everything".

> How can you get a machine to have values? The short answer is a reward function. The long answer is the alignment problem. Of course, everything in the middle is what matters. Explicitly defined reward functions are complete, but not consistent. Data defined rewards are potentially consistent but incomplete. It's not a solvable problem form machines but equally likewise for humans. Still we practice, improve and mi…

Well, it’s pretty clear to me that the current reward function of profit maximization has a lot of down sides that aren’t sufficiently taken into account.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#299

Post by autoexec »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #19

I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. It is a very common problem with modern marketing teams, that have zero empathy for customers (even if they have one, they will never push back on whatever insane demands come from senior management). This is why any email subscription management interface now is as bloated as a dead whale. If too many…

The spam was advertising AI, the point of the article was how aggressively AI is being shoved down our throats, and it seems very likely that when he went to complain about the AI spam it was an an AI chatbot which gave him the useless answers until it finally "checked with the team" (presumably a human) who lied to him about what counted as AI spam.

It seems like this is very much about AI even though it's ultimately humans pushing AI and disregarding people's spam preferences. Right now, everything "AI" is ultimately humans (like the way humans are using/abusing the AI tools, or the human intellect behind all of the data that was used to train them and all of the knowledge they output, or the humans deciding what they'll allow their AI to be used for, or the humans failing to safeguard the users of their AI products, etc) so this is as much about AI as anything is.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#300

Post by SCdF »

homebrewer wrote: post #290
SCdF wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With AI, if well done, it would be useful nearly everywhere. I fundamentally disagree with this. I never, now or in the future, want to use AI to generate or alter communication or expression primarily between me and other humans. I do not want emails or articles summarised, I do not emails or documents written for me, I do not want my photos altered yassified. Not now, not ever.

How about machine translation and fixing grammar in languages you're not very familiar with? That's the only use of "AI" I've found so far. I'd rather read (and write) broken English in informal contexts like this forum, but there are enough more formal situations.

Remember, I am responding to this:

> With AI, if well done, it would be *useful nearly everywhere.*

I'm not saying it doesn't have uses.

Having said that, there are two things I never want AI to do: a) degrade or remove the need for me to express myself as a human being, b) do work I'd have to redo to prove it did it correctly.

On translation, sycophancy is a problem. I can't find it now, but there was an article I read about an LLM mistranslating papers to exclude data it thought the user wasn't interested in. So no, I wouldn't trust it for anything I cared about.

I do use AI: I'm literally reviewing some Claude generated code at the moment. But I can read that and know that it's done it right (or not, as the case often is). This is different from translation or summarisation, where I'd have to do the whole task again to prove correctness.

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