> 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 spammy. I knew that if recipients detected even a whiff of a generic, mass-produced message, they'd tune out immediately.

> Incredibly, not a single recipient seemed to detect that the emails were AI-generated.

https://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-...

The technical part surprised me: they string together multiple LLMs which do all the work. It's a shame the author's passions are directed towards AI slop-email spam, all for capturing attention and driving engagement.

How much of our societal progress and collective thought and innovation has gone to capturing attention and driving up engagement, I wonder.

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.

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".

Found companies with people that share your values. Hire people that share your values. Reject the vampires. Build things for people.

Competing with bad actors is very, very hard. They will be fat with investor money, they will give their services away, and commonly they are not afraid to do things like DDOS to raise your costs of operations.

Growing up as a southern evangelical before the internet, I can promise you that there has never been a modern world without filter bubbles.

The concept of "fake news" is not new, either. There has been general distrust of opposing ideas and institutions for as long as I've been alive.

And there's an entire publishing and media ecosystem for every single ideology you can imagine: 700 Club, Abeka, etc. Again, this all predates the internet. It's not going anywhere.

The danger isn't strictly censorship or filter bubbles. It's not having a choice or control over your own destiny. These decisions need to be first class and conscious.

Also, a sure fire way to rile up the "other team" is to say you're going to soften, limit, or block their world view. The brain has so many defenses against this. It's not the way to change minds.

If you want to win people over, you have to do the hard, almost individual work, of respecting them and sharing how you feel. That's a hard, uphill battle because you're attempting to create a new slope in a steep gradient to get them to see your perspective. Angering, making fun, or disrespecting is just flying headfirst into that mountain. It might make you feel good, but it undoes any progress anyone else has made.

SpaceX is launching multiple rocket ships into orbit every week. Google is.. releasing webpage CSS tweaks like “New Google Sign In Page” and a couple second rate AI products no one asked for when they get caught with their pants down.

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 situation and identified me as a very likely customer with a need for service (the building has a relationship with the ISP). I would never have responded to an email or any wiff of AI chatbot. They only made the sale because of expensive human effort.

I'd say the art industry is somewhere in-between because of

1. Being a traditionally disrespected but non-trivial skill to acquire 2. A skill valuable for advertisement (good art -> pretty ads -> more money 3. A valuable skill, but not one many industries need full time work from 4. Due to #1, a "vulnerable" industry. There won't be too many millionaire artists to fight back against the AI Overlords compared to, say, Politicians or businessesmen.

But it's not like I have any say on who or what gets affected.

The "smart people are all working in advertising" trope is idiotic. Just an excuse for people to justify their own laziness. There is an infinite number of opportunities out there to make the world better. If you are ignoring them, that's on you.

Which is true. But clearly far fewer people work doing that than in advertising or some other seemingly meaningless grunt work. And I’m including the technological plumbling work with many on this site, myself included, have depended upon to support themselves and/or a family.

Which at best is effectively doing minor lubrication of a large and hard to comprehend system that doesn’t seem to have put society as a whole in a particularly great place.

Clicking on ads helped with our goal to AI today. Showing you the right ad and beating those trying to game it is machine learning heavy. When was the first time we started seeing spelling correction and next word suggestions? It was in google search bar. To serve the correct ads and deal with spam? heavy NLP algorithms. If you stop and think of it, we can drop a think line from the current state of LLMs to these ads click you are talking about.

It made me realize that I think many computing people need more of a fundamental education in "hard" physics (statics, mechanics, thermodynamics, materials science) in order to better understand the staggering paradigm shift that occurred in our understanding of the world in the early 20th century. Maybe then they would appreciate how much of the world's resources have now been directed by the major capital players towards sucking the collective attention span of humanity into a small rectangular screen, and the potential impact of doing so.

The comparison here is between moonlanding and advertisement. So I choose the moon obviously.

Ecommerce can work just the same without LLM augmented personalized ads, or no advertisement at all. If a law would ban all commercial advertisement - people still need to buy things. But who would miss the ads?

I think the answer is pretty clear in the fact that so many of them, bluntly speaking, just don’t give a shit any more. I absolutely don’t blame them.

I don't think your average adult is inspired by the idea of AI generated advertisements. Probably a small bubble of people including timeshare salesmen. If advertisements were opt-in, I expect a single digit percentage of people would ever elect to see them. I don't understand how anybody can consider something like that a net good for the world.

How does non-consensually harassing people into spending money on things that don't need add value to all the world's citizens?

I wish some of these people would think about how they'd explain to their 5 year old in an inspiring way what they do for a living: And not just "I take JSON data from one layer in the API and convert it to protobufs in another layer of the API" but the economic output of their jobs: "Millions of wealthy companies give us money because we can divert 1 billion people's attention from their families and loved ones for about 500 milliseconds, 500 times a day. We take that money and give some of it to other wealthy companies and pocket the rest."

I mean, you'd see the same thing if paying for your groceries were opt-in. Is that also a net bad for the world? Ads do enable the costless (or cost-reduced) provision of services that people would otherwise have to pay for.

Is that seriously the comparison you want to make here? Most of us think the world would be better if you didn't have to pay for food, yes.

Groceries are opt-in. Until you realize you don't want to hunt and cook your own food, then you opt back in for survival.

UBlock origin + some subscriptions show I'd definitely would love to opt out of IRL ads.

>Is that also a net bad for the world?

World, yes. We have to tech to end food scarcity, but poor countries struggle while rich countries throw out enough food each day to feed said poor countries.

They do not enable any costless anything at all. They obfuscate extraction of money to make it look costless, but actually end up extracting significant amounts of money from people. Ad folks whitewash it to make it sound good, but extracting money in roundabout ways is not creating value.

A similar amount of wealth would be generated if every advertised product would be represented by a text description, but we have a race to the bottom.

There is advertising and advertising of course but most of advertising is incredibly toxic and I would argue that by capturing attention, it is a huge economic drain as well.

Of course an AI would also be quite apt at removing unwanted ads, which I believe will become a reality quite soon.

I fear statements like this go too far. I can't agree with the first part of this sentence.

I feel this about both marketing and finance:

They are valuable fields. There are huge amounts of activity in these fields that offer value to everyone. Removing friction on commerce and the activities that parties take in self-interest to produce a market or financial system are essential to the verdant world we live in.

And yet, they're arms races that can go seemingly-infinitely far. Beyond any generation of societal value. Beyond needless consumption of intellect and resources. All the way to actual negative impacts that clutter the financial world or the ability to communicate effectively in the market.

This is quite a statement to make.

Please elaborate on what enormous value has spam ads and marketing emails added to _world_ citizens?

Unless of course by “world” you mean Silicon Valley venture capitalists..

Is the idea that any and all movement of money is virtuous? That all economic activity is good, and therefore anything that leads to more economic activity is also good? Or is it what it sounds like, and it just means "making some specific people very wealthy"? Wouldn't the more accurate wording be that it "concentrates wealth"? I don't see a huge difference in the economic output of advertisement from most other scams. A ponzi scheme also uses psychological tricks to move money from a large amount of people to a small amount of people. Something getting people to spend money isn't inherently a good thing.

Maybe this was your point, but this is built in to one of the definitions of GDP, isn’t it? Money supply times velocity of money?

I’m no economist though I’m sure there are folks on here who are. But this seems like an unfortunate fact that’s built into our system- that as laypeople we tend to assume that ‘economic growth’ means an increase in the material aspects of our life. Which in itself is a debatable goal, but our GDP perspective means even this is questionable.

For example, take a family of five living out in a relatively rural area. In scenario one, both parents work good paying remote tech jobs and meals, childcare, maintenance of land and housing, etc. are all outsourced. This scenario contrubutes a lot according to our economic definitions of GDP. And provides many opportunities for government to tax and companies to earn a share of these money flows.

Then take scenario 2, you take the same family but they’re living off of the grid as much as possible, raising or growing nearly all their own food, parents are providing whatever education there is, etc. In this scenario, the measurable economic activity is close to zero- even if the material situation could be quite similar. Not to mention quality of life might be rated far higher by many.

What rating an economy by the flow of its money does do is, and I’m not sure if this is at all intentional, is it does paint a picture of what money flows are potentially capturable either by government taxation or by companies trying to grab some percentage as revenue. It’s a lot harder to get a share of money that isn’t there and/or not moving around.

Perhaps my take on economics is off base but, for me, seeing this made me realize just how far off our system is from what it could and should be.

I concede that GDP is a good indicator, but I think you can have things that help GDP while simultaneously hurting the economy. Otherwise any scam or con would be considered beneficial, and it would make sense to mandate minimum individual spending to ensure economic activity. A low GDP inherently shows poor economic health, but a high GDP does not guarantee good health.

In my mind (noting, again, that I'm no economist), economic health is defined by the effectiveness of allocating resources to things that are beneficial to the members of that economy. Any amount of GDP can be "waste", resources flowing to places where they do not benefit the public. As Robert Kennedy famously pointed out, GDP includes money spent on addictive and harmful drugs, polluting industries, and many other ventures that are actively harmful.[0]

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3FAmr1la6w0

When I realized it was just dudes copy-pasting a “smart contract” and then doing super shady marketing, it was already illegal in my jurisdiction.

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?

Nowadays, that would be laughed at. But AI is more comparable to cars from 1900 than modern vehicles.

And in reality, most software work is 1) API calls and 2) applied math. If you're not in cutting edge private tech or acedemia, your work probably falls into 1 or both categories. Modern "Software engineers" is more a matter of what scale of APIs you're wrangling, not how deep of domain knowledge you have.

It's a calculated move on their part.

If your audience likes your brand and doesn’t distinguish between your services and services done by more competent providers, then you’ve found your niche. So: snake oil is not fine; but Supreme branded brick sounds ok to me, even if I wouldn’t buy it myself.

I guess the author will find followers who enjoy that approach to software and product growth. If spamming wasn’t part of it, I’d be ok.

...of course they'd probably get an LLM to write the article too.

Consider:

* spammers have access to large amounts of compute via their botnets

* the effectiveness of any particular spam message can easily be measured - it is simply the quantity of funds arriving at the cryptocurrency wallet tied to that message within some time window

So, just complete the cycle: LLM to generate prompts, another to generate messages, send out a large batch, wait some hours, kick off a round of training based on the feedback signals received; rinse, lather, repeat, entirely unattended.

This is how we /really/ get AI foom: not in a FAANG lab but in a spammer's basement.

PS. Howerver, see comments downthread about "survivorship bias". Not everybody will reply, so biases will exist.-

This is half of major reddit subs now and I fear the same low quality comments will take over HN.

People need to go out and touch some grass.

I can see it, perhaps positively, investing far less importance and effort into online things. With admittedly a lot of optimism, I could see it leading to a resurgent arts and crafts movement, or a renewed importance put on hand-made things. People say "touch grass"; maybe AI will make people "touch crafts" (bad joke, I know).

Definitely interesting to see the different culture in tech and programming since programmers are so used to sharing code with things like open source. I think programmers should be more skeptical about this bullshit, but one could make the argument that having a more flexible view of intellectual property is more computer native since computers are really just copying machines. Imo, we need to have a conversation about skills development because while art and writing accept that doing the work is how you get better, duplicating knowledge by hand in programming can be seen as a waste of time. We should really push back on that attitude though or we'll end up with a glut of people in the industry who don't understand what's under all the abstractions.

In all seriousness, manipulation and bullshit generation emerges as the single major real world use of AI. It's not good enough yet to solve the big problems of the world: medical diagnostic, auto accidents, hunger. Maybe just a somewhat better search tool, maybe a better converational e-learning tool, barely a better Intellisense.

But, by God, is it fantastic at creating Reddit and X bots that amplify the current line of Chinese and Russian propaganda, upvote and argue among themselves on absurd topics to shittify any real discussion and so on.

trillions, easily. People wanna sell you stuff, and they will pay to get your eyeballs. doesn't matter if it's to sell you a candy bar or to enlist you into the military. Even non-profit/charities need awareness. They all need attention and engagement.

> As founder, I'm always exploring innovative ways to scale my business operations.

While this is similar to what other founders are doing, the automation, scale and the email focus puts it closer to spam in my book.

Note my 'best case' scenario for the near future is pretty upsetting.

Facebook + Instagram is $100B+ business, So is Youtube and Ads.

An average human now spends about ~3h per day on their screens, most of it on social media.

We are dopamine driven beings. Capturing attention and driving up engagement is one of the biggest part of our economy.

As for the humans, we went fishing instead.

Everyone is playing lip service to global warming, energy efficiency, reducing emissions.

At the same time data centers are being filled with power hungry graphic cards and hardware to predict if showing a customer an ad will get a clock, generating spam that “engages” users aka clicks.

It’s like living in a episode of black mirror.

Whether there's enough for calling it irony is probably a different question.

Till then, I will probably avoid more and more communicating with strangers on the internet. It will get even more exhausting, when 99% of them are fake.

What's more likely, watching a movie online, drive to watch a movie in a cinema?

You know what creates a lot less CO2? Staying at home reading a book vor playing a board game.

>Datacenters save a lot more energy than they make

I think you mean CO2. And I doubt that they actually save anything because datacenters are convenient so we use them more as alternatives with less convenience.

Like the movie example, we watch more and even bad movies if it's just a click on Netflix than we do if we have to drive somewhere to watch.

MS recently announced they fail der CO2 target but instead produce 40% more because of cloud services like AI

We need to be realistic here. We know what modern entertainment looks like and its not realistic at all to just 'read books' and play board games.

I don't know how much energy Netflix uses serving a movie, but playing a video game on my PC for two hours where I'm located might generate a kg of CO2. That's about as much as I'll breathe in a day. Relative to other sources of atmospheric CO2 I'm not that concerned.

Driving too the cinema to watch a movie produces more CO2 than watch one movie online but online makes it more convenient so you watch more. That sums up to more CO2 emission.

The point is that higher efficency is wortless in terms of CO2 emissions if it leads to higher usage that compensates for the savings.

If a programmer can program faster with AI it's good if he only needs 1 hour instead of 8 but if he still programs 8 hours a day AI's energy consumption comes just on top of his previos consumption.

Climate change doesn't care how efficient you produce more CO2, more is simply more.

I agree with your second paragraph, and selling the "make better choices to save the world" argument is an industry playbook favorite. Environmental damage needs to be put on the shoulders of those who cause it, which is overwhelmingly industrial actors. AI is not useful enough to continue the slide into burning more fossil fuels than ever. If it spurs more green energy, good. If it's the old "well this is the way things are now", that's really not good enough.

How many battery breaktroughs did we have before AI? They rarely lead to new batteries.

>AI/ML big datacenters are crucial for all the illneses we have which no one cares enough to solve.

Too bad that companies like OpenAI and MS buy most of the hardware for their data centers to write summaries of articles and emails and to create pictures.

And even if they find a cure, doesn't mean it will be available for people in need, not without a hefty fee.

Just look at the profit margin of insulin.

The normal miner doesn't go to those bitcoin conferences, they buy asics, put them in some warehouses around the world and make money.

And if the online bank wasn't sending a bunch of requests to a bunch of third party ad networks on every click, it would save even more.

But this is a complex calculus and - frankly - feels like a distraction from the issue. I don't want to get into the weeds of calculating micro-emissions of daily activities, I want climate responsibility and reduction in energy consumption across the board.

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.

That's why I created EtherGPT, an LLM Chat agent that runs decentralized in the Ether blockchain, on smart contracts only, to make sure that value is created and rewards directly the people and not big companies.

By providing it just a fraction of just a bit north of 10% of the current fusion reactions occuring in our sun, and giving it a decade or two on processing time and sync, you can ask it simple questions like "what do dogs do when you're not around" and it will come up with helpful answers like "they go to work in an office" or funny ones like "you should park your car in direct sunlight so that your dog can recharge its phone using solar panels".

I've seen things that are wildly hobbled, and wildly inaccurate. I've seen endless companies running around, trying to improve on things. I've seen people looking in wonder at LLMs making mistakes 2 year olds don't.

Most LLM usage seems to be in two categories. Replace people's jobs with wildly inaccurate and massively broken output, or trick people into doing things.

I'd have to say Bitcoin is far more useful than LLMs. You have to add the pluses, and subtract the minuses, and in that view, LLMs are -1 billion, and bitcoin is maybe a 1 or 2.

bitcoin is only negative. It consumes terrawatts of energy for nothing.

That field has made a leap forward with LLMs.

Positive impact on society includes automated extraction in healthcare pipelines.

And why is this better than employing a human. Or reducing complexity. It's not as if human wages are what causes hyper expensive US healthcare costs.

This seems like a negative.

What I mean by structured is: invoices, documents containing tables, etc.

Extracting useful data from fully unstructured content is very hard IMO and potentially above the capacity of LLMs (depending on your definition of "useful" and "unstructured")

Why are firms sending around invoices, tables instead of parseable data. Oh I know the argument, because "so hard to cooperate" on standards, etc.

Madness.

What?! Whole industries have been changed already due to products based on them. I don't think there's a single developer who is not using AI to get help while coding, and if you aren't, sorry but you're just missing out, it's not perfect but it doesn't need to be. It just needs to be better than StackOverflow and googling around for the docs or how to do things and ending up in dubious sites, and it absolutely is.

My wife is a researcher and has to read LOTS of papers. Letting AI summarize it has made her enormously more efficient at filtering out what she needs to go into more detail.

Generating relevant images for blog posts is now so easy to do (you may not like it, but as an author who used to use irrelevant photos before instead, I love it when you use it tastefully).

Seriously, I can't even believe someone in 2024 can say there has not been useful applications of LLMs (almost all AI now is based on LLMs as far as I know) with a straight face.

You are in a bubble.

> It just needs to be better than StackOverflow and googling around for the docs or how to do things and ending up in dubious sites, and it absolutely is.

Subjectively. Not absolutely.

It's banned at my company due to copyright concerns. Company policy at the moment considers it a copyright landmine. It does need to be "perfect" at not being a legal liability at the very least.

And the blog post image thing is not a great point. AI images for blog posts, on the whole, are still quite terrible and immediately recognizable as AI generated slop. I usually click out of articles immediately when I see an AI image at the top, because I expect the rest of the article to be in line: low value, high fluff.

There are useful LLM applications, but for things that play to its strengths. It's effectively a search engine. Using it for search and summarization is useful. Using it to generate code based on code it has read would be useful if it weren't for the copyright liability, and I would argue that if you have that much boilerplate, the answer is better abstractions, libraries, and frameworks, rather than just generating that code stochastically. Imagine if the answer to assembly language being verbose was to just generate all of it rather than creating compiled programming languages.

Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a country and has basically done nothing besides moving money from one group of people to a random other group of people.

And bitcoin is also motivated to find the cheapest energy independent of any ethical reasoning (taking energy from cheap chinese hydro and disrupting local energy networks) while AI will have energy from the richest companies in the world (ms, google, etc.) which already working on co2 neutral 24/7.

It's continuing to widen the wealth gap as it is.

We house, heat and give access to knowledge to a lot more people than ever before.

Cheap medical procedures through AI will help us all. The AI which will be able to analyse the x-ray picture from some 3th world country? It only needs a basic x-ray machine and some internet. The AI will be able to tell you what you have.

I'm also convinced that if AGI is happening in the next 10 years, it will affect that many people that our society has to discuss capitalisms future.

LLMs deliver value. Right here today, to countless people across countless jobs. Sure, some of that is marketing, but that's not LLM's fault - marketing is what it always has been, it's just people waking up from their Stockholm syndrome. 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, except maybe that some of the jobs in this space will go away, which for once I say - good riddance. There are more honest forms of gainful employment.

LLMs, for all their costs, don't burn energy superlinearly. More important, for LLMs, just like for fiat money, and about everything else other than crypto, burning electricity is a cost, upkeep, that is being aggressively minimized. More efficient LLMs benefit everyone involved. More efficient crypto just stops working, because inefficient waste is fundamental to cryptos' mathematical guarantees.

Anyway, comparing crypto and LLMs is dumb. The only connection is that they both eat GPUs and their novelty periods were close together in time. But they're fundamentally different, and the hypes surrounding them are fundamentally different too. I'd say that "AI hype" is more like the dot-com bubble: sure, lots of grifters lost their money, but who cares. Technology was good; the bubble cleared out nonsense and grift around it.

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."

Value is a subjective concept. One could argue that its value is that arbitrary quantities of it cannot be created by dictat.

> - to be able to allow exchanging value, it fundamentally requires ever increasing waste, as the waste is what gives its mathematical guarantees.

One could argue that it takes a lot worse to maintain any currency such as USD as a currency. Full force of government law enforcement will be unleashed on you if you decide to have your own currency. There is a lot of "wastage" that goes to safeguard currency creation and storage and to prevent counterfeiting.

I do not hold BTC. Nor do I trade it. But to discuss as if other currencies have no cost is not rational.

Yes. But the point I'm making is, none of that benefits from waste. The waste is something everyone want to reduce. With Bitcoin, the trend is uniquely opposite, because the crypto system is secured through aggregate waste being way larger than any actor or group can afford.

Bitcoin doesn't solve any problem yet which is fundamental to our society and a fiat system like the trust issue:

If i exchange 1 bitcoin with you for any service or thing outside of the blockchain, i need the whole proof of stack system protection of our normal existing money infrastructure like lawyers, contracts etc.

And no smart contracts do not solve this issue.

What is left? Small amount of transactions per day with high fees 'but' decentralized infrastructure run by someone we all don't know aggregated probably in data centers owned by big companies.

Compare energy spent on global hash rate to all energy spent by mining metals, physical banking, financial services middle persons, etc. if you want to talk about energy usage and make any kind of sense.

you're ending up with the entire rest of civilisation on the other side of that

* Bitcoin, 0.5% of all energy use: 7 transactions per second total worldwide

* THE ENTIRE REST OF CIVILISATION AND EVERYONE IN IT AND EVERYTHING THEY DO, 199x the energy use, really quite a lot more than 1,393 transactions per second worldwide, and all the other stuff civilisation does too

What an amazing comparison for you to suggest.

* the VCs are often literally the same guys pivoting

* the promoters are often literally the same guys pivoting

* AI's excuses for the ghastly electricity consumption are often literally bitcoin excuses

I think that's an excellent start on the comparison being valid.

Like, I've covered crypto skeptically for years and I was struck by just how similar the things to be said about the AI grifters were, and my readers have concurred.

if models handle my day to day minutia so I have more time, why the hell not...

(I know this is very optimistic POV and not realistic but still)

You're trying to take the time and attention of as many people as possible, without regard for whether or not they'll benefit.

One safeguard people have is knowing that it costs something to send in some way to contact them. I'm this case, the sender's time and attention. LLM spam aims to foil that safeguard,. intentionally.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[1]: https://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-...

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.

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.

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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!”

> ...

> 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?

That stereotype definitely rings true. Thank you for helping me put my finger on it!

Mark as SPAM or Block/Filter or Ignore.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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[0] Or negative-sum, if you account for externalities.

That's exactly the reason why we hate them.

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.

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."