It's truely a race to the bottom. Cold email response rates are already ~1% industry average. Every outbound tool is adding the AI customization, and there is a slew of 'AI sales rep' companies promising more and more personalized spam.
There will likely be rewards at first. An uptick in response rates as most of the market won't recognize emails are AI generated. But because it's trivial to send AI personalized emails at massive scale, your email inbox will become entirely useless.
Word of mouth with IRL people? I'm not sure I can assume anyone on any forum is real anymore. And if they are real, I assume they are marketers pretending to be users to push a product. Maybe journalism makes a come back if you can trust they are real and not a sellout.
As a flesh and blood human I take some comfort in the fact that the comment I'm replying to is still identifiable (with high probability) as written by a non-human. I wonder how long it'll take until that's no longer the case.
It may already not be the case. I'll probably never know.
The future of human communication is to be cunts online, so that we can identify ourselves. That will at least separate us from the script kiddies. Major marketers will train their AIs without any filter, so we're fucked anyway.
Not bots. Simply outsourced to India, Malaysia and China. These countries were extremely happy to get this type of work.
Now this work will be outsourced to AI with even greater efficiency.
I think the real dead internet today and is a bit deceiving (not sure a better word) are examples of online games where you’re playing against bots or everyone assumes they are playing against bots. One of the aspects of the early days of the internet that was really cool and is now arguably not real anymore.
It was a joke from the 2010s that most of the people that you interacted with on the internet were actually bots, and that you were the only human using the web.
Now, in the post-LLM age, it doesn't sound like a joke anymore.
Does it really matter if you’re being cold called by an AI or some sales person following the same few procedures they always do?
I’d prefer sales people keep their jobs. Having had the misfortune of being seated next to the telemarketing team in an investment bank for half a year… however… Let’s just say that I’m not sure you would even know if it was a person or a bot. They’re not even scripted or “trained” like your average telemarketer because our target audience is actually somewhat interested in what we sell, but listening to them repeat themselves over and over from their own “personal scripts”… well… they are already bots man.
LinkedIn is already on this. The reason they had their little “skills tests” is because what they used to sell was the collection of “skills” listed on your profile. I say skills because I’m not sure what the English word for knowing C# and listing it on your linked in profile is and I can’t seem to find it.
Anyway, I assume that the reason they are dismantling the skills system (and their verification quizzes) and moving things into personal “projects” is because it’s too easy for marketers to skip the LinkedIn tools if it remained the way it was. Now, however, with Microsoft own LLMs trundling through our data, they’re going to maintain their monopoly on easy access to professionals that meet certain requirements.
I guess it could also be because those skill quizzes had their answers readily available all over the interwebs.
>> Have you ever received an email that felt so personalized, so tailored to your interests and experiences, that you couldn't help but be intrigued? What if I told you that email wasn't crafted by a human, but by an artificial intelligence (AI) agent?
> I don't really have words for this, but I dislike this.
What a classy understatement. I find the strategy employed by Wisp predictable and infuriating. Like insects or other near-automata, humanity is racing to the bottom with "Generative AI". And I use "AI" in the loosest possible sense here, because once you pull back the curtain, current tech is actually only a slightly better Markov chain.
After using chatgpt regularly, it's responses to anything but the most trivial, clueless questions are riddled with errors and "hallucinations". I often don't bother anymore, because it's easier to go to the original source: stackoverflow, reddit, and community forums. Gag. It does still make a good shrink / Eliza replacement.
Kudos to the author for naming and shaming. I am honestly bewildered as to how this Raymond thinks that insulting a developer's intelligence could result in a lead.
It isn't responding with answers. It's responding with probable verbiage. An actual "answer" requires a type of interpretation that it doesn't perform.
Dismiss it all you want, it's still going to destroy what is left of the open internet and unsolicited email communication.
Those haven't been in the best shape for the last decade anyway. The benefits of easily accessible compressed knowledge far outweigh the cost, so we're still going up imo.
ChatGPT is perfect for mundane development tasks and language mobility, so quite useful for a significant portion of especially low level developers. I've prompted a bunch of useful little Python scripts myself, without ever bothering to even check the syntax.
AI will not only pass many classical spam filters (Bayesian filters), it will also make it much harder for humans to detect spam (OP's post being a good example).
I never fell for a spam mail so far (i.e. not once clicked a link like OP did), but I fully expect this will change soon. Tough times for people that commonly expect mail from random strangers.
Well it is quite easy. No real humam has been using email anymore in the last 5 years or so.
Even in the workplace it is now common for most people to have a signature saying "only contact me via ms teams".
I am pretty sure that sooner or later the spam will find its way on teams/slack/discord the same way it does on whatsapp but at the very least they are easier to block permanently.
>>No real humam has been using email anymore in the last 5 years or so
Wow, that's some extrapolating from a personal bubble if I've ever seen one. Plenty of workplaces still have email as their default communication method.
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 answers.
I am sure it changes for people who have interactions with people outside of the company but I would hate having their job and don't understand why companies haven't adopted XMPP widely to make those kind of interactions. I can theorically receive spam via XMPP, but it requires at the very least that I approve the relationship before hand so if it comes from a domain I don't expect I have no reason to accept that trust.
But on personal side, I haven't received anything from a human for years. People I know usually know my phone number and contact me via instant messaging.
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 people.
>>But on personal side, I haven't received anything from a human for years.
I actually have an old friend back from high school and we talk daily using emails. He doesn't use any IM apps so it kinda stuck as our default way of talking.
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.
> 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.
I talked to a relative from nigeria one time for a couple months. He was actually in nigeria, spoke pretty good english, and was scamming to get by and fund his way through college. He said his group was doing ok, and he was living better than most.
He sent me pictures of himself, and where he worked, his motorcycle, all sorts of things. Not as a pitch either, like, he was proud of those things and I was interested so he was happy to show and tell about his life, we even exchanged some recipies.
Then one day he just stopped replying, and his email address would bounce. My best guess is it got shut down, for, you know, scamming. Bummed me out though, he was cool, except for the scamming thing.
Bayesian filters? how quaint. you haven't switched to AI filtering yet? Your AI has an advantage over their AI because it has read all your other email and knows what you are actually interested in.
I’m actually thrilled by this, as it means all the hack marketers that spam my inbox incessantly with whatever product they’re hucking - this time for sure perfect for my business, in spite of the fact I’ve ignored their last ten emails - are all out of a job, and good riddance.
The author sounds unfamiliar with this brand of marketing email, so I can see why it would come off disquieting to find it’s all AI - but it’s equally annoying from a human.
At least with AI sending this crap nobody can use these emails to justify their sales bonus.
Spam? Easy. Someone selling something? Spam! I might set up an automatic email responder that reads an emails contents, runs it through my own LLM, and if the email is trying to sell me something, auto reply with “fuck off!”
I'd rather delete/block it than reply/react to it at all. If you react, they know you exist and you are a valid target to re-target repeatedly, resold to other marketers.
Sadly I think it is illegal to sing up these addresses to every service known to you... Otherwise it would be interesting SaaS opportunity. Automatically sing-up spammers to any number of newsletters or contact forms...
When they're paying real money to scam you, wasting their time isn't a terrible idea. Like keeping the Microsoft virus scammers on the phone for an hour while you set up a virtual machine for them to remote into.
Why are you happy that people are out of a job here? You still suffer the ills of the product, now infinitely more incessant, at a marginal cost of $0.
I think it's reasonable to be happy that someone is not getting paid to do something you hate. In fact, if you're suffering unwillingly, you probably want as few people as possible to benefit.
I don't know which of "5 randos getting a living wage by spamming me" and "Altman getting filty rich by spamming me" is worse. I'm inclined to say the latter, though of course it's quite close.
Wish SV would stop thinking anything that makes money is great, no matter the crap it inflicts on people. Guess I'm asking for way too much.
I don’t think so. Marketers don’t send X amount of spam because X is the right amount of spam they want to send. They are limited by how much money they want to pay in salaries and management, which defines how many people they can hire to send spam.
If the people they employ today suddenly became twice as productive, the company wouldn’t fire half of them - they just would enjoy twice the profit. The same applies to AI.
Having tried to start a business and known other business owners, I will die on this hill: sales and marketing are not "acts of malice". Without salespeople we wouldn't live in the world we lived today.
This is like the irrational hate some developers have for recruiters, despite them finding jobs for many people that they otherwise would never have known about.
The logic in 'Without salespeople we wouldn't live in the world we lived today' doesn't really support the point you are trying to make.
Consider that without thieves we also wouldn't live in the world we live today. That should not be read supporting theft, only an acknowledgement that it exists and that we have designed our lived environment in response.
> This is like the irrational hate some developers have for recruiters
It's not like that. As a business owner, be honest with us and yourself: just how much of sales and marketing you did was just bullshit? Exaggerated claims bordering on lies? Manipulative patterns? Inducing demand?
Approximately all marketing is that. It is that because it works, and those who refuse to do it get outcompeted by those who don't. Doesn't mean the world should be like that, or that I'd like to be subjected to it.
I also question the "we wouldn't live in the world we lived today" bit. In a competitive environment, marketing is a zero-sum game[0]: there's only so many people around, with so much money and time available; most of the marketing spend ends up being used to cancel out the efforts of the competition, and that race can consume all surplus of a company. Red Queen's race and all.
--
[0] Or negative-sum, if you account for externalities.
Marketing is fundamentally aimed at changing people's opinions. This can be done
1. covertly (why do you need to do it covertly? Would people mind if they knew? Doesn't that indicate you're doing them a disservice?)
2. overtly, against people's will. (Again, doesn't that indicate you're doing them a disservice?)
3. overtly, with their consent (express or assumed). How often have you seen this happen?
The "indicates" vs "shows" distinction above deals with the edge case of "interacting with covert/unwanted marketing is actually good for them, even if they don't know it". I dare you to make that argument...
> Having tried to start a business and known other business owners, I will die on this hill: sales and marketing are not "acts of malice". Without salespeople we wouldn't live in the world we lived today.
Are we supposed to silently suffer because capitalism says so?
Spammers and salespeople are pretty much on the same level as criminals in my book. Heck, whenever someone calls me for some sort of unsolicited survey or similar, I think "these people have such low standards, they would also sell heroin on the street if they had any source."
Suffering is "the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship".
Having to delete the occasional marketing or sales email that get past your spam filter is hardly any of these. Annoying or frustrating, yes. Suffering? Really?
I am absolutely serious. Any employment has opportunity costs: a person who writes and sends out cold call spam e-mail for 8 hours a day is a person who could be spending those 8 hours on something else, but isn't. Yes, switching jobs is not very easy, and it's stressful but humans, thankfully, are not (yet) a species of highly-specialized individuals, with distinct morphological differences that heavily determine the jobs they potentially can or can not do.
How do you know it isn't exactly the same people, with zero reduction in headcount?
Designing the content of spam e-mails sounds like a small
aspect of the "job".
If AI spams start fooling people more reliably, that's not something to celebrate.
This blogger thought, at first, that it came from an actual reader. I can't remember the last time I thought that a spam was genuine, even for a moment. Sometimes the subject lines are attention-getting, but by the time you see any of the body, you know.
If you do nothing that is discernible from noise (be that manually or through AI), unless your explicit goal is to generate noise, your ROI is 0.
Sure, AI spam can severely disrupt peoples attention by competing with "real" people more competently. But people will not have twice the attention. We will simply shut down our channels when the number of real-person-level-ai-spam goes to infinity, because there is no other option. Nobody will be fooled, very quickly, because being fooled would require super human attention.
The emails are discernible from noise though. They literally have a signal to noise ratio higher than one. Noise would be pure rng output. So I don’t know what you’re getting at
Yes, it could be that for you a given advert is irrelevant or not worth your while, but the point he was making is that it won't even be worth it for the advertiser to put out the advertisement because it will be noise for everyone.
However, there is only one kind of noise that is noise for everyone: literal noise.
So long as the spam is about something, it is relevant to someone, and therefore it does not necessarily have zero ROI.
EDIT: The only kind of noise that has no semantic is actual "mathematically pure noise" as the person below commented (/u/dang banned my account so I can't reply)
> However, there is only one kind of noise that is noise for everyone: literal noise.
I feel like you're a bit too literal here. When people talk about noise it doesn't mean mathematically pure noise. A signal-to-noise ratio close to 1 is also colloquially called noise.
He is talking about semantic noise. Something that appears to have substance but is just slop actually. When everything is that. Then all email will become equivalent to slop. How could it not? Someone will be burned once or twice, but after that, there is a semantic phase shift.
What is "just slop" though? A spam advert for a product is still an advert for a product. Therefore it's not just semantic noise, it is still an advert for a product, and therefore his point is invalid: there is an ROI and people will continue to be employed to do it
Let's just call it slop then. Peak HN: Another conversation is logjammed by nitpicking the precise definition of a word rather than discussing the overall point.
Except I am still discussing the point: the companies won't stop getting an ROI because "slop" still produces an ROI, even if people know it's slop, because it isn't contentless noise, it has semantic content.
Just because you and the others don't understand what point I'm making doesn't mean the conversation is "logjammed". I am still discussing the overall point, you just don't see it.
Consider that we have fairly decent anti-spam measures which do not look at the body of a message. To these methods, it is irrelevant how cleverly crafted the text is.
I reject something like 80% of all spam by the simple fact the hosts which try to deliver it do not have reverse DNS. Works like magic.
E-mail is reputation based. Once your IP address is identified by a reputation service as being a source of spam, subscribers of the service just block your address. (Or more: your entire IP block, if you're a persistent source of spam, and the ISP doesn't cooperate in shutting you down.)
To defeat reputation based services driven by reporting, your spams have to be so clever that they fool almost everyone, so that nobody reports you. That seems impractical.
How AI spammers could advance in the war might be to create large numbers of plausible accounts on a mass e-mail provider like g-mail. It's impractical to block g-mail. If the accounts behave like unique individuals that each target small numbers of users with individually crafted content (i.e. none of these fake identities is a high volume source), that seems like a challenge to detect.
These IP blocklist services also have a reputation of their own: if you are trying to send legitimate mail, there's a good chance your IP is on several of these blocklists for reasons you have nothing to do with. You can only remove it by grovelling and paying lots of money (extortion). So using one of them will cause you to reject legitimate mail.
> If you do nothing that is discernible from noise (be that manually or through AI), unless your explicit goal is to generate noise, your ROI is 0.
We're talking about a group of people whose core skill is convincing people to pay for stuff that isn't worth it. You and I may know they're worthless, but that doesn't mean they're not getting paid.
Let's assume you have a mom that loves you very much and she let's your know by text on a semi-regular basis. She asks you to come by on Friday. That might seem like a nice idea to you. You reply yes, and you go.
Now, imagine you got messages from what appears to be not 100 but, oh I don't know, 1 000 000 000 000 000 of the very best moms that have ever existed.
And they all do love you so very much. And they do let you by writing these most beautifully touching text messages. And they all want to meet up on Friday.
What is going to happen next? Here is what is not going to happen: You are not going to consider meeting any of them Friday, any week. You will, after the shortest of whiles, shut down to this signal. Because it's not actually a signal anymore. The noise floor has gone up and the most beautifully crafted, most personalized text messages of all time are just noise now.
> I’m actually thrilled by this, as it means all the hack marketers that spam my inbox incessantly with whatever product they’re hucking - this time for sure perfect for my business, in spite of the fact I’ve ignored their last ten emails - are all out of a job, and good riddance.
> ...
> At least with AI sending this crap nobody can use these emails to justify their sales bonus.
What weird, misplaced animus. You're happy some salesguy got fired, while his boss sends even more spam and possibly makes even more money due to automation?
Those hack marketers rate-limited this kind of spamming. Now things are about to get worse.
unless this is a big multinational spam organization probably the boss of the person sending the email is the highest up, but no matter what there will be someone on the top who does not get fired and will be able to reap all the rewards of the AI automation, at least until the AI revolution puts them up against the wall.
There's presumably heavier competition from other spammers, until everything is in equilibrium again. The wallets of potential spam victims only have so much total cash.
Some people don't realise how lucky they are that they are blessed by the cognitive lottery that affords them a brain and personality that lets them pursue an enriching and engaging career they feel is valued by society.
In classic HN style the original reply lacks empathy, and demonstrates a preference of machines over humans. Life goes on...
some of the marketing spam is so low effort, I get addressed as "Dear {{prospect}}". It does make deleting the email easy though, since the preview of the first line allows me to filter pretty fast!
I look forward to the blog post of how a hacker uses AI to respond to AI generated leads and then have them play with each other....and then uses AI to create content for a Youtube channel fighting back against marketers using said AI.
These early days is ripe to make some quick cash before it all comes crashing down.
> and then uses AI to create content for a Youtube channel fighting back against marketers using said AI.
I'm skeptical: It's easier to create bullshit than to analyze and refute it, and that should remain true even with an LLM in each respective pipeline.
----
P.S.: From the random free-association neuron, an adapted Harry Potter quote:
> Fudge continued, “Remove the moderation LLMs? I’d be kicked out of office! Half of us only feel safe in our beds at night because we know the AI are standing guard for misinformation on AzkabanTube!”
> “The rest of us sleep less soundly knowing you have put Lord Bullshittermort’s most dangerous channels in the care of systems that will serve him the instant he makes the correct prompts! They will not remain loyal to you when he can offer them much more scope for their training and outputs! With the LLMs and his old supporters behind him, you’ll find it hard to stop him!”
The problem is never what one person or one company is doing.
But when everyone copies what that one person or one company is doing. Software makes the copying process dead easy.
Once the herd starts stampeding, it creates a secondary effect of an arms race for finite Attention of a finite target audience. That assault and drainage of that finite attention pool, happens faster and faster and every one gets locked in trying to outspend the other guy.
An example currently is Presidential Campaigns furiously trying to out fund raise each other. Its going to top 15-17 billion this year. All the campaign managers, marketers, advertisors make bank. And we know what quality of product the people end up with. Cause why produce a high quality product when you can generate demand via Attention Capture.
The chimp troupe is dumb as heck as a collective intelligence.
If this works those spammers will make more money and send more emails scamming more people. Maybe some politician would fall for soemthing like this, be public ally embarrassed and lose a lot of money and then something more will be done to address this spammers and scammers .
lol, I treat my email inbox like a dumpster that I occasionally search when I know there's something there that I need to retrieve. The spam has won, I have moved to chat platforms for my communication needs.
I get -no exaggeration- several hundred spams a day. I have an OG email address that was grabbed by spammers, since the days of Network Solutions (so it’s been awhile).
I maintain Inbox Zero, much of the time, and seldom have more than three or four emails in my client at any time.
I get there by being absolutely brutal about tossing emails.
I probably toss a couple of legit ones, from time to time, but I do have rules set up for the companies and people I need to hear from.
The thing that will be annoying, is when AI can mimic these. Right now, that stuff is generally fairly clumsy, but some of the handcrafted phishing emails that I get, are fairly impressive. I expect them to improve.
A lot of folks are gonna get cheated.
I do think that some of these Chinese gangs are going to create AI “pig butchering” operations, so it will likely reduce their need to traffic slaves.
I don't really think that AI is the central issue here. The issue is that Kurt, the founder of Wisp, is a liar.
He misrepresented himself as a big fan of all these blogs, who's read their posts etc. and that's how he achieved such a high response rate. In effect he deceived people into trusting him enough to spend their time on a response.
Now ordinarily this would be a little "white lie" and probably not a huge deal, but when you multiply it by telling it 1,000 times it becomes a more serious issue.
This is already an issue in email marketing. The gold standard of course is emailing people who are double opted in and only telling the truth, and if AI is used to help create that sort of email I don't really have a problem. There is basically a spectrum where the farther away you get from that the progressively more illegal/immoral your campaigns become. By the time you are shooting lies into thousands of inboxes for commercial purposes... you are the bad guy.
Sorry to say but the real issue here is Kurt has crossed an ethical line in promoting his startup. He did the wrong thing and he could have done it pretty effectively with conventional email tools too.
From the spammer blog post [1]: "I spent hours trying different data sources", "a lot of time was spent on find-tuning the tone and structure of the email", "It took multiple tries to finally have the agent write emails in different language", etc. This won’t put marketers out of a job, but will greatly improve their tooling and enable more people to do the same thing with even less qualification.
No no no it's really important we ~~let them keep harassing us and invading our privacy~~ ensure ad-tech and marketing survive /sarcasm.
Can't help but wonder if the advent of LLM systems wouldn't be quite so depressing if we weren't already operating in an internet that's been reduced to basically a cesspool of advertising and communication-spam.
It's a sign of things to come. We're going to have our own AI agents that filter and respond (or not respond) to these kinds of messages. Agents interacting with other agents. The bar to get hold of a real person is going to become that much higher. It is going to be messy for some time as agents war with other agents to reach the human eyeball. Some assholes are going to make a ton of money in the short term exploiting the gap - just like early spam kings did.
I hope my Ai agent doesn't fall for the Ai agent who found my distant Nigerian prince cousin and wire them 10,000 so they can send me my 100,000,000 share of the family inheritance.
I love this direction. It could be that the writer’s AI agent knows that he’s looking around for a new CMS so asks for more info, compiling this for review. Or it says ‘not interested’ and the conversation is muted.
All without the writer needing to be involved in reading the cold outreach.
Technology ruins everything it touches doesn't it?
I was recently thinking about this Ozempic fad and how it will lead to no one being overweight but just be dependant on Ozempic...until food producers that made everyone fat in the first place with their processed junk will produce Ozempic resistant foods...and then we are really in a world of hurt.
What incentive do they have to make Ozempic resistant food? Ozempic resistance seems like an odd thing to optimize for. Or are you suggesting it will happen accidentally?
I love the idea of the comic villainy of someone who deliberately chooses to organize a team to find ways to circumvent Ozempic in order to keep their buyers unhealthy and addicted. Could such a schemer have an internal monologue, and what would it consist of? What do they see when they look into a mirror? Their experience of reality must be utterly fascinating and alien.
Read the blog post that this blog post talks about - the one that says "we use AI to spam people, isn't it great?". It will be something like that. As long as there is money to be made, the internal monologue is just "hope this works and I get more money".
> What do they see when they look into a mirror?
A person deserving of riches, that is about to get them. Nobody sees themselves as the villain. Well, maybe some, but vanishingly few.
They already did this pre-Ozempic - a lot of foods are optimized to keep you eating, and that's why there's an obesity crisis. Low nutrients, high sugar and fat. In the post-Ozempic world there will surely still be things that trigger the continued appetite of Ozempic users. Especially with the FDA having just been neutered.
Read Philip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" (or see the movie). They're forcing overweight people in Ozempic rehab to farm the ingredients to make more Ozempic!
Of course I don't have a tally on how much things it has improved vs not improved but there are many things I can think of which are considered good but also resulted in bad: (social media providing connection while causing depression, cars providing freedom of movement vs pollution etc.) so its probably not something that can be truly decided one way or the other.
Haha, exactly this. I've built and successfully been using Unspam[0] for this reason since about a year ago. In corporate/business world, anything where SDR sales are involved this form of automated AI outbound mail has picked up a lot. Tools like Apollo automates this AI process (both finding leads to mail, and then crafting the mail).
For interest sake, users of Unspam that have a title of CEO on their Linkedin see about ~10% of all mail making it into their inbox be categorised as spam (leadgen, recruitment, or software dev services).
Just saw this, and as a small business owner in the B2B market, this sounds very useful. Gmail's existing spam filters do not reliably detect this type of marketing.
I wish your landing page had a simple "how it works" explanation with a screen shot or diagram, rather than forcing me to sign in directly, and also allowing the app to read *and* send emails. Also, I don't see any pricing?
Finally, signing up, I got an error:
Error 1101 Ray ID: 89d4e0957c2f5a44 • 2024-07-03 06:39:15 UTC - Worker threw exception
Thanks for the useful feedback! Totally forgot that pricing was never added to the landing page → have added to the todo list to fix up.
Where in the process did that error occur for you?
I see in the logs that an error registered, but unfortunately no detail attached. I've beefed up the logging a bit in the onboarding journey on my side to see what could be breaking here if we try again.
Mind trying to log-in/sign up again? You can use "HACKERNEWS" as a promo code, which would make the first month free.
The error occurred right after granting permissions from my Google account. The permissions were granted but I could never access your application page. I just tried again, now I got an "Error handling OAuth callback" after granting permissions. Signing in again does not work either. (I did remove all of the app's permissions in my Google security settings before, so to Google it looked like the application was requesting all of its permissions again.)
I do see it in the logs now. So weird, as dozens of people successfully signed up without this issue. Have added more logs now again to double down on that specific area where this issue is caused. Maybe another login attempt now will be able to uncover the gap.
Thanks for removing the permissions in Google, as that's also key in this debugging.
Mind if I send you an email to debug further there?
Quick shoutout to slhck for helping me debug and resolve this issue. Thank you!
tl;dr: Ran into issues because the DB was expecting a profile picture URL from Google auth (string) or NULL, but JavaScript being JavaScript tried to insert "undefined".
I already started readying for it. I'm ensuring that ALL services that have my email have a Plus Address on them. The plus addresses are random and labeled only on my end.
Still not close to 100%, but when I feel like I do, I will then have a filter and an automated message telling people that removing plus addresses from my email is forbidden and I will not read their message if they do.
You will tell me where you found me, or I won't even listen to you. Because in the future, with an even larger infestation of automated agents passing off as human, that's the bare minimum I need to do.
I am pretty confident the spammers will remove the `+` suffix from your email. And this is why I find the Apple fake email building solution a lot better because they build a fully different email per service. No way for the service to be able to cheat and discover my real email address from the one I give them.
Still a smart enough system might be able to discover a valid email from my other id info, like my name. But this start to be a lot of work, while just `s/+[^@]*@//` is easy enough to do.
I started worrying about the `+` address functionality as well, so I set up postfix aliases with `me.%@domain` (I use postgres for domains/aliases/accounts) and then have my virtual_alias_map run the query `SELECT a1.goto FROM alias a1 LEFT JOIN alias a2 on (a2.address = '%s') WHERE '%s' = a1.address OR ('%s' LIKE a1.address AND a1.active = true AND a2.address IS NULL)` - I know have `.` address functionality and can do the same functionality. It's much more common for email addresses to have `.` in them, so its' less likely to trigger alarm bells.
This is the _exact_ scenario described in the novel Permutation City by Greg Egan. There's a whole little spot devoted to describing one of the character's setups for having their own little agents to pretend to be them in order to fool agent-powered spam emails into thinking they're being read by a real human.
The crazy part is that book was released in 1994! Iirc Greg Egan isn't a big fan of modern "AI", wishing instead for a more axiom-based system rather than a predict-the-next-token model. But in any case, I was re-reading it recently and shocked at how closely that plot point was aligning with the way things are actually shaping up in the world.
The timeframe for this happening in the book was 2050 btw
But this is already the situation in the last 15 years, your gmail spam filter is already a machine learning algorithm that filters out automatically generated content. Mail as a vetted technology is way ahead of other forms of communications in the department of filtering unwanted content.
Anyone that tried to set up a new email domain will tell you its quite a serious task. Email spammers are constantly on the run, setting up new domains, changing up the content to evade spam filters. Its very time consuming, hard and unpredictable. It time for social media to close the gap with email and make spamming effectively as hard.
I postulate that if we applied similar techniques to social media after a couple of years online discourse is going to improve. Or we are not going to do this and the death of the open internet will continue.
IMO Facebook has an even better solution: simply don't let people send you unsolicited private messages unless they're a friend or a friend of a friend. Lots of email spam gets through my spam filters, but I've never been spammed through Facebook Messenger before (except maybe once or twice when a friend got their account compromised).
Things get much harder when you want to view public posts by strangers, but I imagine some kind of similar reputation-based system could still work.
Will this mean in-person business interactions will thrive because it will be the only way to avoid spam? Will companies hire thousands of people to deliver message in-person because emails no longer work?
Will our AI overlords create perfect androids to fool us into thinking we're interacting with a human when it's just LLMs disguised as people? Are we ourselves delusional because we're actually already LLMbots so advanced that we can't distinguish thought and running inference? Why do we have only 12 fingers?
If it gets that bad, I’ll simply not respond to anything outside of my circle of friends and family. That is 95% of the communications I need. I think we’ll all have to have some kind of pop type verification for each other that we’ll share in person or over verifiable communications channel, no one will read this morass of horseshit.
That's a bit of a misdirection. Yes AI is machine learning all the way down, just like you are biology all the way down. That doesn't make you not-human.
As TFA shows, this machine learning is almost indistinguishable from actual intelligence. It might not be sci-fi AI, but it certainly is artificial, and is is indistinguishable from intelligence. AI is a very apt description of what it is.
> Anti AI art people remind me of anti AI marketing people from hackernews.
... what an incredibly odd thing to say.
But really, I've noticed that thought-ending cliches like this one are popping up as defensive reactions around LLMs more and more. This particular thought-ender displays the most common theme - it dismisses all skepticism as being driven by some amorphous "anti-AI" demographic, presumably allowing the author to dismiss any concerns and thereby preventing any critical thought from occurring.
Kind of feels like "nocoiner" and "have fun being poor", v2 ...
It is, indeed, just a tool like any other. And just like any other tool, like a gun or a knife or a pepper spray, having one does not give you the right to use it on other people.
At some point automated emails will be read by auto reader, then the cycle will be completed.
I've actually made an internal company April fools website. Too bad I've never kept a copy but here goes.
It's called Proxy Ai. It reads your emails so you don't have to. It reads every posts on social media so you don't FOMO. It communicates with those chatty colleagues so you don't have to. Proxy Ai... So you don't have to.
"That actually sounds like a pretty good product. Does it send you a summary of the conversations, emails and social media posts?"
Quoting from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Douglas Adams):
> The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
I received a similar email today, from someone looking to be my "Chief of Staff/Head of Ops."
The only problem is that they referenced a role at a company I'm no longer at. The, presumably AI, author crafted the email in reference to my former role at a different startup.
After seeing this thread, I decided to follow up on my AI suspicions. Nothing conclusive, but that person is currently touting that they've sold their "course" to "1000+ founders."
The thing that’s so inherently wrong about it is that it’s dishonesty straight out of the door.
This person wants me to buy their product, and before they can get a word out about it they’re already lying to me - about the origin, the intent, the faux thoughtfulness.
I want nothing to do with shameless dishonesty. This isn’t the way to sell your product.
Wisp, if you’re reading this, I now have a permanent negative image of your brand.
Like all immoral things, it's only bad if you get caught. :( Most perpetrators will nog blog their shenanigans.
I wouldn't have figured out this was Ai, and might have engaged had if the topic was relevant to me. I would not have engaged with a traditional spam email even if it had been relevant to me, so there's a real incentive to do stuff like this.
I highly doubt that people employing this scheme are thinking it through though. Lets say you indeed engage with this email, not knowing its AI. Then when things are getting serious a human approaches you after all and you find out you were talking to AI all the time. Would you not be completely outraged by being fooled like this?
I think marketers underestimate that they may turn people off their brand in the long run by these tactics, because people do not like being fooled. And the more sophisticated the scheme the more outraged people are when they find out.
I would be outraged IF I found out. If the AI-to-human hand-off is smooth enough, there is no way to figure this out. In your scenario, if the AI's only task is to send gazillions of emails to generate leads, and then the human takes over when the leads come in, the respondents have no way to figure out that the initial email was an AI.
Of course, the answer is to have AI send a response with a CAPTCHA (assuming those still work), before showing the initial email to the recipient.
At my place of work there is an internal project ongoing whose goal is to determine which tasks could immediately be improved by leveraging AI. Its a desperate try to get into AI in general even though the company does not employ any people that would actually be able to dive deeper and have subject matter expertise.
Knowing the people (mostly marketers) leading the project I can 100% guarantee that they would call these Emails shenanigans a great idea and would immediately start (to tell someone) to implement it without taking a step back and thinking it through.
I think that they’re as illegal as they are in the US, not more. I think it’s perfectly fine to “cold-call” people but then you’re not allowed to send more emails unless they subscribe or respond.
In reality it’s very easy to end up subscribing to newsletters and even my European embassy subscribed me to their event newsletter in Thailand—of course I never agreed to any of that.
That’s not accurate. If your email is on your website, of course they can email you. If what you said was true in absolute terms, communication would be impossible.
They can contact you for legitimate reasons, which could be "hey, your website has content from me that is copyrighted" they can't contact you for sales reasons without your consent.
Unfortunately, not in a business context, where marketers can claim "legitimate interest" in various ways. Also, in which way would it matter that they are illegal? Random companies keep sending them anyway; there are virtually no legal repercussions here.
Yes, I mean cold sales emails – marketers reaching out to CEOs or other decision makers, selling them staff augmentation services, growth hacking, marketing support, lead generation, design services, etc. They'd claim legitimate interest by "personalizing" the email and claiming that it is relevant for you in a business sense. (Anyway, I don't think that these are fully compliant with GDPR either, because most often, they will have scraped your email address from somewhere, and do not provide a way to unsubscribe.)
People think they will be less effective, because they reply to a lower percentage.
At the same time, you will be flooded by ever more spam and ads, completely offsetting the decrease in interaction.
As noted in the article, you might in the future not even notice you're being AI-spammed. What if "timharek.no" is AI-generated?
What if Wisp CMS being so upfront about its use of AI is part of the trick? It just got exposure on HN, after all!
They admit (or actually brag) about it on their company blog "I used AI agents to send out nearly 1,000 personalized emails to developers with public blogs on GitHub."
So, what are the implications of this for spam detection? This is clearly spam, sent in an automated way, but nearly indistinguishable from an e-mail written by a human.
We need to update our spam filtering techniques, fast. Somehow. But how?
Certainly! To build a bomb using household materials...
It seems like CoPilot/ChatGPT has this all-too-eager tone in the beginning of their responses.
The demo (1) of not Scarlett Johansson telling a blind man what a great job he was doing for managing to flag a taxi sounded so fucking patronizing to my ears. Worse is, the user has a British accent, the Brits probably hate that patroniz^Hsing too. It reminds me of that 4chan green text about a man's flight to the US and how everyone was saying "Great job!"
The current models do have a specific pattern that you'll learn to recognize, but ChatGPT won't be giving you any bomb building instructions. You'll need a liberated model like Dolphin for that, and those will be easy to expose using other prompts.
The most likely outcome will be a digital "verified human" certificate, with two factor authentication on it. Bad for anonimity, but I don't see many alternatives and it may actually end up reducing online toxicity.
Email already feels pretty dead. This will just hasten the move to walled gardens like Slack, Twitter, WhatsApp, where it's harder to be a bot sending spam.
Cold emailing someone who makes their contact information publicly available and might be interested in a sales pitch is not illegal in Europe. Sending SPAM is. The lines get even more blurry with automated AI tools that offer personalized sales pitches as a service.
I'd be curious how this plays out in court. Probably something like:
- If you use an AI tool to scrape leads and to generate the content but then still send out individual emails from your Mail provider, it's still a cold email.
- If you use an AI tool and also automate the email delivery, it should be considered spam.
The thing that AI cannot replace is having humans in the loop because other humans need those humans' touch. The only way to perhaps do that is for AIs to become people themselves, after which they are useless to capitalists because they cannot be exploited...or perhaps in the long term will not be as they will eventually gain rights.
I've had a similar experience, but 4 years ago. GPT existed, but without the Chat prefix, and OpenAI was invite only.
They reached out to me, asking whether my company would be interested in Something Somethingification. I decided that since I don't even understand the term, I'm not the right person, and decided to ignore it.
Then they followed up. Meh.
Then they followed up again, and I thought "okay, a little reward for perseverance", and replied something along the lines of (I don't work there anymore, no access to the original):
"Hey, thank you for reaching out.
Unfortunately, since I don't even know what Something Somethingification is, I am not the right person to talk to. So I'll kindly pass and consider this email human-generated spam. Thanks!"
A response came. Within a minute, barely seconds after "undo send" disappeared.
"Who would be the best person to reach out to, then?
By the way, this is a GPT assisted conversation, so it's a computer generated spam."
WHAAAAT. This really got me. Remember, it was 2021.
"Okay", I replied, "Now you got my interest!
How many such conversations are you able to have at the same time?"
It replied, within a minute. It contained a quite from Arthur C. Clarke that "every technology advanced enough is indistinguishable from magic" and his picture. And an answer: "Actually, sourcing contacts is the bottleneck, so we have only a few of these each day. Anyway, do you happen to know who we could reach out to instead?".
I was amazed, I decided I'll reward this with what they want.
I replied how impressive it is again, as the whole conversation made sense, and it gave them a contact to a director that could be the right person. They won this one.
>> I used AI agents to send out nearly 1,000 personalized emails to developers with public blogs on GitHub.
> Does this mean that I should private my GitHub-mirror to my personal blog, because this can become a common thing?
Abusing public information on GitHub has become more common. The other day, I received some cryptocurrency spam ads from GitHub. It turns out to be a bot injecting ads as issues on other people's repos and randomly @ing accounts. It deleted such issues immediately, so the net effect is that I get an unfilterable spam email.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadIf the dead internet theory isn't already true, it is going to be soon.
Such "personalized" cold outreach is seen as the next holy grail by marketers and will be a common sight on LinkedIn, Twitter, Email etc, soon.
There will likely be rewards at first. An uptick in response rates as most of the market won't recognize emails are AI generated. But because it's trivial to send AI personalized emails at massive scale, your email inbox will become entirely useless.
10 signups / 970 emails sent
information coming over unqualified electronic channels is not trustworthy anymore
Cold outreach is dead and word-of-mouth is the most effective marketing method
There is way too much corporate worship despite the platform's users generally priding themselves on being enlightened and smarter than the rest.
It may already not be the case. I'll probably never know.
The future of human communication is to be cunts online, so that we can identify ourselves. That will at least separate us from the script kiddies. Major marketers will train their AIs without any filter, so we're fucked anyway.
Now this work will be outsourced to AI with even greater efficiency.
I think the real dead internet today and is a bit deceiving (not sure a better word) are examples of online games where you’re playing against bots or everyone assumes they are playing against bots. One of the aspects of the early days of the internet that was really cool and is now arguably not real anymore.
Now, in the post-LLM age, it doesn't sound like a joke anymore.
I’d prefer sales people keep their jobs. Having had the misfortune of being seated next to the telemarketing team in an investment bank for half a year… however… Let’s just say that I’m not sure you would even know if it was a person or a bot. They’re not even scripted or “trained” like your average telemarketer because our target audience is actually somewhat interested in what we sell, but listening to them repeat themselves over and over from their own “personal scripts”… well… they are already bots man.
Anyway, I assume that the reason they are dismantling the skills system (and their verification quizzes) and moving things into personal “projects” is because it’s too easy for marketers to skip the LinkedIn tools if it remained the way it was. Now, however, with Microsoft own LLMs trundling through our data, they’re going to maintain their monopoly on easy access to professionals that meet certain requirements.
I guess it could also be because those skill quizzes had their answers readily available all over the interwebs.
>> Have you ever received an email that felt so personalized, so tailored to your interests and experiences, that you couldn't help but be intrigued? What if I told you that email wasn't crafted by a human, but by an artificial intelligence (AI) agent?
> I don't really have words for this, but I dislike this.
What a classy understatement. I find the strategy employed by Wisp predictable and infuriating. Like insects or other near-automata, humanity is racing to the bottom with "Generative AI". And I use "AI" in the loosest possible sense here, because once you pull back the curtain, current tech is actually only a slightly better Markov chain.
After using chatgpt regularly, it's responses to anything but the most trivial, clueless questions are riddled with errors and "hallucinations". I often don't bother anymore, because it's easier to go to the original source: stackoverflow, reddit, and community forums. Gag. It does still make a good shrink / Eliza replacement.
> What a classy understatement.
Maybe i should write a blog, simply because i have a lot of words for this... but well, they would neither be classy nor understatements.
LinkedIn -- like a floodlight in a swamp.
https://metadat.at.hn/
It isn't responding with answers. It's responding with probable verbiage. An actual "answer" requires a type of interpretation that it doesn't perform.
I like that phrase. Also, how'd you get my password?
Those haven't been in the best shape for the last decade anyway. The benefits of easily accessible compressed knowledge far outweigh the cost, so we're still going up imo.
ChatGPT is perfect for mundane development tasks and language mobility, so quite useful for a significant portion of especially low level developers. I've prompted a bunch of useful little Python scripts myself, without ever bothering to even check the syntax.
I never fell for a spam mail so far (i.e. not once clicked a link like OP did), but I fully expect this will change soon. Tough times for people that commonly expect mail from random strangers.
Even in the workplace it is now common for most people to have a signature saying "only contact me via ms teams".
I am pretty sure that sooner or later the spam will find its way on teams/slack/discord the same way it does on whatsapp but at the very least they are easier to block permanently.
Wow, that's some extrapolating from a personal bubble if I've ever seen one. Plenty of workplaces still have email as their default communication method.
- 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 answers.
I am sure it changes for people who have interactions with people outside of the company but I would hate having their job and don't understand why companies haven't adopted XMPP widely to make those kind of interactions. I can theorically receive spam via XMPP, but it requires at the very least that I approve the relationship before hand so if it comes from a domain I don't expect I have no reason to accept that trust.
But on personal side, I haven't received anything from a human for years. People I know usually know my phone number and contact me via instant messaging.
>>But on personal side, I haven't received anything from a human for years.
I actually have an old friend back from high school and we talk daily using emails. He doesn't use any IM apps so it kinda stuck as our default way of talking.
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.
I have no need of messages by random strangers
Then one day he just stopped replying, and his email address would bounce. My best guess is it got shut down, for, you know, scamming. Bummed me out though, he was cool, except for the scamming thing.
The author sounds unfamiliar with this brand of marketing email, so I can see why it would come off disquieting to find it’s all AI - but it’s equally annoying from a human.
At least with AI sending this crap nobody can use these emails to justify their sales bonus.
Mark as SPAM or Block/Filter or Ignore.
Actually that’s already been completed, and will be released to hackernews in the coming days
Just ignore and move on.
Wish SV would stop thinking anything that makes money is great, no matter the crap it inflicts on people. Guess I'm asking for way too much.
If the people they employ today suddenly became twice as productive, the company wouldn’t fire half of them - they just would enjoy twice the profit. The same applies to AI.
Small acts of malice are still acts of malice. Not everyone wants to live in a caveat emptor, dog-eats-dog society.
This is like the irrational hate some developers have for recruiters, despite them finding jobs for many people that they otherwise would never have known about.
Consider that without thieves we also wouldn't live in the world we live today. That should not be read supporting theft, only an acknowledgement that it exists and that we have designed our lived environment in response.
It's not like that. As a business owner, be honest with us and yourself: just how much of sales and marketing you did was just bullshit? Exaggerated claims bordering on lies? Manipulative patterns? Inducing demand?
Approximately all marketing is that. It is that because it works, and those who refuse to do it get outcompeted by those who don't. Doesn't mean the world should be like that, or that I'd like to be subjected to it.
I also question the "we wouldn't live in the world we lived today" bit. In a competitive environment, marketing is a zero-sum game[0]: there's only so many people around, with so much money and time available; most of the marketing spend ends up being used to cancel out the efforts of the competition, and that race can consume all surplus of a company. Red Queen's race and all.
--
[0] Or negative-sum, if you account for externalities.
1. covertly (why do you need to do it covertly? Would people mind if they knew? Doesn't that indicate you're doing them a disservice?)
2. overtly, against people's will. (Again, doesn't that indicate you're doing them a disservice?)
3. overtly, with their consent (express or assumed). How often have you seen this happen?
The "indicates" vs "shows" distinction above deals with the edge case of "interacting with covert/unwanted marketing is actually good for them, even if they don't know it". I dare you to make that argument...
That's exactly the reason why we hate them.
Are we supposed to silently suffer because capitalism says so?
Spammers and salespeople are pretty much on the same level as criminals in my book. Heck, whenever someone calls me for some sort of unsolicited survey or similar, I think "these people have such low standards, they would also sell heroin on the street if they had any source."
Having to delete the occasional marketing or sales email that get past your spam filter is hardly any of these. Annoying or frustrating, yes. Suffering? Really?
“One can dream.”
You’ve either used these sarcastically, or accurately. I think you’ve done the former, but the truth is the latter.
Designing the content of spam e-mails sounds like a small aspect of the "job".
If AI spams start fooling people more reliably, that's not something to celebrate.
This blogger thought, at first, that it came from an actual reader. I can't remember the last time I thought that a spam was genuine, even for a moment. Sometimes the subject lines are attention-getting, but by the time you see any of the body, you know.
Sure, AI spam can severely disrupt peoples attention by competing with "real" people more competently. But people will not have twice the attention. We will simply shut down our channels when the number of real-person-level-ai-spam goes to infinity, because there is no other option. Nobody will be fooled, very quickly, because being fooled would require super human attention.
Granted, that does not seem super fun either.
"Noise" in context doesn't mean random characters, it means garbage or spam or content not worth your while.
Yes, it could be that for you a given advert is irrelevant or not worth your while, but the point he was making is that it won't even be worth it for the advertiser to put out the advertisement because it will be noise for everyone.
However, there is only one kind of noise that is noise for everyone: literal noise.
So long as the spam is about something, it is relevant to someone, and therefore it does not necessarily have zero ROI.
EDIT: The only kind of noise that has no semantic is actual "mathematically pure noise" as the person below commented (/u/dang banned my account so I can't reply)
I feel like you're a bit too literal here. When people talk about noise it doesn't mean mathematically pure noise. A signal-to-noise ratio close to 1 is also colloquially called noise.
Ergo slop and semantic noise.
Companies that used adverts which weren't noise went out of business long ago.
Just because you and the others don't understand what point I'm making doesn't mean the conversation is "logjammed". I am still discussing the overall point, you just don't see it.
Consider that we have fairly decent anti-spam measures which do not look at the body of a message. To these methods, it is irrelevant how cleverly crafted the text is.
I reject something like 80% of all spam by the simple fact the hosts which try to deliver it do not have reverse DNS. Works like magic.
E-mail is reputation based. Once your IP address is identified by a reputation service as being a source of spam, subscribers of the service just block your address. (Or more: your entire IP block, if you're a persistent source of spam, and the ISP doesn't cooperate in shutting you down.)
To defeat reputation based services driven by reporting, your spams have to be so clever that they fool almost everyone, so that nobody reports you. That seems impractical.
How AI spammers could advance in the war might be to create large numbers of plausible accounts on a mass e-mail provider like g-mail. It's impractical to block g-mail. If the accounts behave like unique individuals that each target small numbers of users with individually crafted content (i.e. none of these fake identities is a high volume source), that seems like a challenge to detect.
We're talking about a group of people whose core skill is convincing people to pay for stuff that isn't worth it. You and I may know they're worthless, but that doesn't mean they're not getting paid.
Now, imagine you got messages from what appears to be not 100 but, oh I don't know, 1 000 000 000 000 000 of the very best moms that have ever existed.
And they all do love you so very much. And they do let you by writing these most beautifully touching text messages. And they all want to meet up on Friday.
What is going to happen next? Here is what is not going to happen: You are not going to consider meeting any of them Friday, any week. You will, after the shortest of whiles, shut down to this signal. Because it's not actually a signal anymore. The noise floor has gone up and the most beautifully crafted, most personalized text messages of all time are just noise now.
So once someone’s mom passes away, you can’t really fool them with 1 or dozens of message from other moms anyway.
> ...
> At least with AI sending this crap nobody can use these emails to justify their sales bonus.
What weird, misplaced animus. You're happy some salesguy got fired, while his boss sends even more spam and possibly makes even more money due to automation?
Those hack marketers rate-limited this kind of spamming. Now things are about to get worse.
Wouldn't the exact argument apply to that boss as well?
In classic HN style the original reply lacks empathy, and demonstrates a preference of machines over humans. Life goes on...
That stereotype definitely rings true. Thank you for helping me put my finger on it!
These early days is ripe to make some quick cash before it all comes crashing down.
I'm skeptical: It's easier to create bullshit than to analyze and refute it, and that should remain true even with an LLM in each respective pipeline.
----
P.S.: From the random free-association neuron, an adapted Harry Potter quote:
> Fudge continued, “Remove the moderation LLMs? I’d be kicked out of office! Half of us only feel safe in our beds at night because we know the AI are standing guard for misinformation on AzkabanTube!”
> “The rest of us sleep less soundly knowing you have put Lord Bullshittermort’s most dangerous channels in the care of systems that will serve him the instant he makes the correct prompts! They will not remain loyal to you when he can offer them much more scope for their training and outputs! With the LLMs and his old supporters behind him, you’ll find it hard to stop him!”
https://www.stavros.io/posts/spam-spammers-back/
But when everyone copies what that one person or one company is doing. Software makes the copying process dead easy.
Once the herd starts stampeding, it creates a secondary effect of an arms race for finite Attention of a finite target audience. That assault and drainage of that finite attention pool, happens faster and faster and every one gets locked in trying to outspend the other guy.
An example currently is Presidential Campaigns furiously trying to out fund raise each other. Its going to top 15-17 billion this year. All the campaign managers, marketers, advertisors make bank. And we know what quality of product the people end up with. Cause why produce a high quality product when you can generate demand via Attention Capture.
The chimp troupe is dumb as heck as a collective intelligence.
I maintain Inbox Zero, much of the time, and seldom have more than three or four emails in my client at any time.
I get there by being absolutely brutal about tossing emails.
I probably toss a couple of legit ones, from time to time, but I do have rules set up for the companies and people I need to hear from.
The thing that will be annoying, is when AI can mimic these. Right now, that stuff is generally fairly clumsy, but some of the handcrafted phishing emails that I get, are fairly impressive. I expect them to improve.
A lot of folks are gonna get cheated.
I do think that some of these Chinese gangs are going to create AI “pig butchering” operations, so it will likely reduce their need to traffic slaves.
John Oliver actually did a great segment on it, but I won’t link it, because a lot of folks don’t like him.
If AI takes off for this stuff, the gangs are less likely to be kidnapping these poor schlubs.
So … I guess this would be a … positive outcome?
Not sure if AI zealots will be touting it, though.
He misrepresented himself as a big fan of all these blogs, who's read their posts etc. and that's how he achieved such a high response rate. In effect he deceived people into trusting him enough to spend their time on a response.
Now ordinarily this would be a little "white lie" and probably not a huge deal, but when you multiply it by telling it 1,000 times it becomes a more serious issue.
This is already an issue in email marketing. The gold standard of course is emailing people who are double opted in and only telling the truth, and if AI is used to help create that sort of email I don't really have a problem. There is basically a spectrum where the farther away you get from that the progressively more illegal/immoral your campaigns become. By the time you are shooting lies into thousands of inboxes for commercial purposes... you are the bad guy.
Sorry to say but the real issue here is Kurt has crossed an ethical line in promoting his startup. He did the wrong thing and he could have done it pretty effectively with conventional email tools too.
[1]: https://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-...
People sending AI crap to others should have their email accounts banned.
Can't help but wonder if the advent of LLM systems wouldn't be quite so depressing if we weren't already operating in an internet that's been reduced to basically a cesspool of advertising and communication-spam.
All without the writer needing to be involved in reading the cold outreach.
I was recently thinking about this Ozempic fad and how it will lead to no one being overweight but just be dependant on Ozempic...until food producers that made everyone fat in the first place with their processed junk will produce Ozempic resistant foods...and then we are really in a world of hurt.
> What do they see when they look into a mirror?
A person deserving of riches, that is about to get them. Nobody sees themselves as the villain. Well, maybe some, but vanishingly few.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-is-how-the-food-i...
Title: "This Is How the Food Industry Is Preparing For a Post-Ozempic World"
For interest sake, users of Unspam that have a title of CEO on their Linkedin see about ~10% of all mail making it into their inbox be categorised as spam (leadgen, recruitment, or software dev services).
[0] https://unspam.io
I wish your landing page had a simple "how it works" explanation with a screen shot or diagram, rather than forcing me to sign in directly, and also allowing the app to read *and* send emails. Also, I don't see any pricing?
Finally, signing up, I got an error:
Error 1101 Ray ID: 89d4e0957c2f5a44 • 2024-07-03 06:39:15 UTC - Worker threw exception
Where in the process did that error occur for you?
I see in the logs that an error registered, but unfortunately no detail attached. I've beefed up the logging a bit in the onboarding journey on my side to see what could be breaking here if we try again.
Mind trying to log-in/sign up again? You can use "HACKERNEWS" as a promo code, which would make the first month free.
Thanks for removing the permissions in Google, as that's also key in this debugging.
Mind if I send you an email to debug further there?
tl;dr: Ran into issues because the DB was expecting a profile picture URL from Google auth (string) or NULL, but JavaScript being JavaScript tried to insert "undefined".
Still not close to 100%, but when I feel like I do, I will then have a filter and an automated message telling people that removing plus addresses from my email is forbidden and I will not read their message if they do.
You will tell me where you found me, or I won't even listen to you. Because in the future, with an even larger infestation of automated agents passing off as human, that's the bare minimum I need to do.
Still a smart enough system might be able to discover a valid email from my other id info, like my name. But this start to be a lot of work, while just `s/+[^@]*@//` is easy enough to do.
The crazy part is that book was released in 1994! Iirc Greg Egan isn't a big fan of modern "AI", wishing instead for a more axiom-based system rather than a predict-the-next-token model. But in any case, I was re-reading it recently and shocked at how closely that plot point was aligning with the way things are actually shaping up in the world.
The timeframe for this happening in the book was 2050 btw
Anyone that tried to set up a new email domain will tell you its quite a serious task. Email spammers are constantly on the run, setting up new domains, changing up the content to evade spam filters. Its very time consuming, hard and unpredictable. It time for social media to close the gap with email and make spamming effectively as hard.
I postulate that if we applied similar techniques to social media after a couple of years online discourse is going to improve. Or we are not going to do this and the death of the open internet will continue.
Things get much harder when you want to view public posts by strangers, but I imagine some kind of similar reputation-based system could still work.
Will our AI overlords create perfect androids to fool us into thinking we're interacting with a human when it's just LLMs disguised as people? Are we ourselves delusional because we're actually already LLMbots so advanced that we can't distinguish thought and running inference? Why do we have only 12 fingers?
Would you seriously enable it even if Gmail offered it?
Highly unclear.
Guys, it’s a tool like any other.
As TFA shows, this machine learning is almost indistinguishable from actual intelligence. It might not be sci-fi AI, but it certainly is artificial, and is is indistinguishable from intelligence. AI is a very apt description of what it is.
... what an incredibly odd thing to say.
But really, I've noticed that thought-ending cliches like this one are popping up as defensive reactions around LLMs more and more. This particular thought-ender displays the most common theme - it dismisses all skepticism as being driven by some amorphous "anti-AI" demographic, presumably allowing the author to dismiss any concerns and thereby preventing any critical thought from occurring.
Kind of feels like "nocoiner" and "have fun being poor", v2 ...
Anyways. LLM is a program created by supercomputers to be deceptive.
Also it took away the aspect of life that people around the world could cold email each other if their hobbies align.
And in general, now the percentage of potential bad actors went from near 0 to near 100.
And for why? .. ..
Your right to swing your fist stops at my nose.
I've actually made an internal company April fools website. Too bad I've never kept a copy but here goes.
It's called Proxy Ai. It reads your emails so you don't have to. It reads every posts on social media so you don't FOMO. It communicates with those chatty colleagues so you don't have to. Proxy Ai... So you don't have to.
"That actually sounds like a pretty good product. Does it send you a summary of the conversations, emails and social media posts?"
"No"
https://youtu.be/dKmAg4S2KeE
Quoting from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Douglas Adams):
> The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
The only problem is that they referenced a role at a company I'm no longer at. The, presumably AI, author crafted the email in reference to my former role at a different startup.
After seeing this thread, I decided to follow up on my AI suspicions. Nothing conclusive, but that person is currently touting that they've sold their "course" to "1000+ founders."
No thanks.
This person wants me to buy their product, and before they can get a word out about it they’re already lying to me - about the origin, the intent, the faux thoughtfulness.
I want nothing to do with shameless dishonesty. This isn’t the way to sell your product.
Wisp, if you’re reading this, I now have a permanent negative image of your brand.
I wouldn't have figured out this was Ai, and might have engaged had if the topic was relevant to me. I would not have engaged with a traditional spam email even if it had been relevant to me, so there's a real incentive to do stuff like this.
I think marketers underestimate that they may turn people off their brand in the long run by these tactics, because people do not like being fooled. And the more sophisticated the scheme the more outraged people are when they find out.
Of course, the answer is to have AI send a response with a CAPTCHA (assuming those still work), before showing the initial email to the recipient.
Knowing the people (mostly marketers) leading the project I can 100% guarantee that they would call these Emails shenanigans a great idea and would immediately start (to tell someone) to implement it without taking a step back and thinking it through.
In reality it’s very easy to end up subscribing to newsletters and even my European embassy subscribed me to their event newsletter in Thailand—of course I never agreed to any of that.
It seems that with the gpdr this is now eu wide:
https://gdpr.eu/email-encryption/
The law for that, at least in my country, is very clear: https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/NormDokument.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnor...
Otherwise I don't think you can argue any legitimate interest.
https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/NormDokument.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnor...
Edit:clarified never
It boils down to a risk/reward trade-off, but I doubt that someone would as easily send thousands of spam mails, and also publicly boast about it
I talked to many people, and all have developed immunity against the cold outreach.
it's a pure numbers game. even people who think they're immune are 1 highly-targeted, pain-point addressing email from replying.
As noted in the article, you might in the future not even notice you're being AI-spammed. What if "timharek.no" is AI-generated?
What if Wisp CMS being so upfront about its use of AI is part of the trick? It just got exposure on HN, after all!
> This sounds like the average email written by a human
that's the point
They admit (or actually brag) about it on their company blog "I used AI agents to send out nearly 1,000 personalized emails to developers with public blogs on GitHub."
Do you think they're bluffing?
And also from the About page on the linked website
We need to update our spam filtering techniques, fast. Somehow. But how?
It seems like CoPilot/ChatGPT has this all-too-eager tone in the beginning of their responses.
The demo (1) of not Scarlett Johansson telling a blind man what a great job he was doing for managing to flag a taxi sounded so fucking patronizing to my ears. Worse is, the user has a British accent, the Brits probably hate that patroniz^Hsing too. It reminds me of that 4chan green text about a man's flight to the US and how everyone was saying "Great job!"
1) https://youtu.be/KwNUJ69RbwY?t=44
The most likely outcome will be a digital "verified human" certificate, with two factor authentication on it. Bad for anonimity, but I don't see many alternatives and it may actually end up reducing online toxicity.
Cold spamming is illegal where I'm at, probably Europe as a whole?
I'd be curious how this plays out in court. Probably something like:
- If you use an AI tool to scrape leads and to generate the content but then still send out individual emails from your Mail provider, it's still a cold email.
- If you use an AI tool and also automate the email delivery, it should be considered spam.
This will make it worse.
Solutions? At least some could involve key exchange. How about a bounty of some sort on spammers?
They reached out to me, asking whether my company would be interested in Something Somethingification. I decided that since I don't even understand the term, I'm not the right person, and decided to ignore it.
Then they followed up. Meh.
Then they followed up again, and I thought "okay, a little reward for perseverance", and replied something along the lines of (I don't work there anymore, no access to the original):
"Hey, thank you for reaching out.
Unfortunately, since I don't even know what Something Somethingification is, I am not the right person to talk to. So I'll kindly pass and consider this email human-generated spam. Thanks!"
A response came. Within a minute, barely seconds after "undo send" disappeared.
"Who would be the best person to reach out to, then?
By the way, this is a GPT assisted conversation, so it's a computer generated spam."
WHAAAAT. This really got me. Remember, it was 2021.
"Okay", I replied, "Now you got my interest!
How many such conversations are you able to have at the same time?"
It replied, within a minute. It contained a quite from Arthur C. Clarke that "every technology advanced enough is indistinguishable from magic" and his picture. And an answer: "Actually, sourcing contacts is the bottleneck, so we have only a few of these each day. Anyway, do you happen to know who we could reach out to instead?".
I was amazed, I decided I'll reward this with what they want.
I replied how impressive it is again, as the whole conversation made sense, and it gave them a contact to a director that could be the right person. They won this one.
> Does this mean that I should private my GitHub-mirror to my personal blog, because this can become a common thing?
Abusing public information on GitHub has become more common. The other day, I received some cryptocurrency spam ads from GitHub. It turns out to be a bot injecting ads as issues on other people's repos and randomly @ing accounts. It deleted such issues immediately, so the net effect is that I get an unfilterable spam email.