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I Received an AI Email

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Re: I Received an AI Email

#411

Post by sph »

stavros wrote: post #196
sph wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People cry about Bitcoin's energy usage now, imagine the amount of energy burned to create next-level spam with "AI". Flame me all you want, but this is one case where Bitcoin is much more useful than LLM. If it doesn't create value, as its naysayers claim, at least it allows exchanging value. LLMs on the other hand, burn electricity to actively destroy the Internet's value, for the profit of inept and greedy drones.

This is what spam always did, why is it different now?

You didn't need a GPU to generate Cialis spam.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#412

Post by unraveller »

lobochrome wrote: post #261

I get 2 of those per day now due to my LinkedIn profile. One issue I see is that it’s much harder to employ an LLM defensively (for filtering) than offensively. Welp.

It's easy outside of gated platforms. The whole 'too hard to filter' hypothesis can be tested instantly by throwing OP's email body into an LLM

Subject: Your Passion For Homelabbing is Contagious (Spam: 6/10)

Report: Flattery to establish a connection. Quick shift to product promotion. friendly but lacks personalization. Specific reference promotes their solution. Calls for a response.

So even if buddy buddy spam becomes pervasive you really only have to decide how accepting your are of obvious sales tactics in normal comms. It may end up that everyone having more nuanced spam filters forces humans to use those same tactics less in normal comms.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#413

Post by sph »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #233
sph wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People cry about Bitcoin's energy usage now, imagine the amount of energy burned to create next-level spam with "AI". Flame me all you want, but this is one case where Bitcoin is much more useful than LLM. If it doesn't create value, as its naysayers claim, at least it allows exchanging value. LLMs on the other hand, burn electricity to actively destroy the Internet's value, for the profit of inept and greedy drones.

Bitcoin is literally turning greed into money, by means of wasting exponentially increasing amounts of electricity. It doesn't just not create value - to be able to allow exchanging value, it fundamentally requires ever increasing waste, as the waste is what gives its mathematical guarantees. LLMs deliver value. Right here today, to countless people across countless jobs. Sure, some of that is marketing, but that's n…

> You've always been screwed over by marketers, and Internet has already been destroyed by adtech. Adding AI into the mix doesn't change anything

This is pure, complacent nonsense. "We have always been surrounded with spam, 10x more won't change anything."

Yeah, why improve the status quo? Why improve the world? Why recycle when there's a big patch of plastic in the ocean.

It's an argument based on a nonsensical, cynical if not greedy position. "Everyone pollutes, so a little more pollution won't be noticed."

Re: I Received an AI Email

#414

Post by Waterluvian »

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’m unsurprised to see a lot of very shallow usage of AI. Most users don’t have a real use case for the tool.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#415

Post by echelon »

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.

Just wait. Enough of us will get pissed off that we will develop AI agents that sit between us and the internet.

A sufficiently advanced personal assistant AI would use multimodal capabilities to classify spam in all of its forms:

- Marketing emails

- YouTube sponsorship clips

- Banner ads

- Google search ads

- Actual human salespeople

- ...

It would identify and remove all instances of this from our daily lives.

Furthermore, we could probably use it to remove most of the worst parts of the internet too:

- Clickbait

- Trolling

- Rage content

I'm actually really looking forward to this. As long as we can get this agent into all of the panes of glass (Google will fight to prevent this), we will win. We just need it to sit between us and everything else.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#416

Post by paulluuk »

brabel wrote: post #358
mns wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nowadays, an "AI Expert" is someone who knows how to download an AI client lib and prompt the AI to perform tasks. These are people who are not even technical and have no idea how all this works, but they can at least follow a Youtube Tutorial to get a basic website working.

As someone who actually has a university degree in Artificial Intelligence, I feel like this is always how it's been. Before, an "AI Expert" was someone who knew how to use Tensorflow, PyTorch or Keras. Before that, an "AI Expert" was someone who knew how to write a Monte Carlo simulation, etc etc.

You could of course say the same for frontend engineer or backend engineers. How many frontend engineers are simply importing Tailwind, React, etc? How many backend engineers are simply importing apache packages?

Where do you draw the line? Can you only be an AI expert if you stick to non-LLM solutions? Or are AI experts the people who have access to hundreds of millions of USD to train their own LLMs? Who are the real AI experts?

Re: I Received an AI Email

#417

Post by BoxOfRain »

highspeedbus wrote: post #345
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…

Things I wish become taboo: Admitting to use AI content. Everyone is so comfortable doing shit like this.

I think it depends on the context. I think there's artistic cases for it, for example I've played around with using AI tools to extract speech from its background music for use in further (non AI-based) music which I don't think is an unethical thing to do.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#418

Post by pseudalopex »

sandworm101 wrote: post #391
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.

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.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#419

Post by prmoustache »

gambiting wrote: post #315
prmoustache wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is obviously a little bit of exaggeration but when I open my email at the workplace the bulk of the mails are: - semi automated reminders (you haven't filled your timesheets!), usually sent by humans but that do not expect answers - internal newsletters - general HR news - special news: electrical issues at the office, stay at home! - spam Bottom line: none is addressed to you as a particular human, nor require…

Right, but that's an anecdote - and if we're sharing those my last company that I left very recently everything was an email. If you needed to speak to a lead or a developer from another team you'd email them, even though we had MS teams. You'd maybe ping the person on Teams for a quick thought, but if it was anything more complicated than couple messages you'd send an email. And that was a a big corporation of 40k p…

> And of course I exchange emails whenever there's some kind of customer service thing that needs to be dealt with - it's always best to have things in writing.

I have the feeling contact forms are disappearing everywhere nowadays. Everything is either a chatbot or a chatcall these days.

Re: I Received an AI Email

#420

Post by madamelic »

echelon wrote: post #415
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.

Just wait. Enough of us will get pissed off that we will develop AI agents that sit between us and the internet. A sufficiently advanced personal assistant AI would use multimodal capabilities to classify spam in all of its forms: - Marketing emails - YouTube sponsorship clips - Banner ads - Google search ads - Actual human salespeople - ... It would identify and remove all instances of this from our daily lives. Fur…

> Enough of us will get pissed off that we will develop AI agents that sit between us and the internet.

Until _that_ company gets overrun by MBAs who are profit-driven then they start injecting ads into the results.

It will come in the vein of "we are personalizing the output and improving responses by linking you with vendors that will solve your problems".

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