Ask HN: Is there a point in obfuscating emails in our bio with GPT?

2 points by eddmakesio 2y ago ↗ HN

A lot of people put their email in their bio with a sentence like "my email is my HN username at a popular email service starting with g". I guess the idea is to avoid scraping emails. However, GPT4 is able to solve these. For example:

""" Based on your description, it sounds like you are referring to an email address that starts with your Hacker News (HN) handle "REMOVED_FOR_THIS_POST" and ends with a domain from a popular email service that begins with the letter "g". A common email service that starts with the letter "g" is Gmail. Therefore, the string you're referring to could be "EMAIL_WAS_CORRECT". However, without confirmation, this is just a speculative interpretation based on the provided information. """

Is it time to move on from obfuscation?

3 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 34.7 ms ] thread

sharemywin 2y ago ↗

a crawler based on ChatGPT would be seriously scary.

eddmakesio 2y ago ↗

They do try to stop you doing it - you can't just ask for an email, but you can ask for a string to get around that

al2o3cr 2y ago ↗

The point isn't to make the email unreadable - after all, LLMs or not a sufficiently-determined spammer could just pay humans to read the emails - but to make it more complicated and expensive to extract.