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I'd pay for a service that responds to every spam email with a GPT-generated conversation, with the goal of wasting more of their resources than yours. Maybe y

I'd pay for a service that responds to every spam email with a GPT-generated conversation, with the goal of wasting more of their resources than yours. Maybe you could train it on a central database that keeps track of which conversations get the most consecutive replies from scammers. You might not even need GPT. Maybe just the act of responding with a reasonable amount of text would create a large filtering burden for scammers. I have to believe someone has tried this.

rocky_raccoon 5y ago
Sort of! I used to play around with Spamnesty [1] some 5 years ago. It looks like it's still around. [1] https://spa.mnesty.com/ https://spa.mnesty.com/
RF_Savage 5y ago
Does not even need to be that smart . "Lenny" and others are existing anti-telemarketer scripts and recordings. Reportedly 10-15 different answers from a "confused old man" are enough to waste their time. So something similar with a bit of variation thrown in should turn that spammer advantage on it's head with the 65million spam emails getting 1million replies instead of 100.
MattGaiser 5y ago
I built it for a hackathon project. https://devpost.com/software/test-7gzse1 https://devpost.com/software/test-7gzse1 It hooked into your email client, identified scams in a very mediocre way, and then sent back a autogenerated (not GPT-3 response). The big problem is privacy. I am not sure how to effectively solve that one. Why I did not win, lol.
aeternum 5y ago
I see something similar as as a risk for the general internet. We are already seeing GPT-based content farms masquerading as product review sites. It's easy to monetize traffic via affiliate links. It will get harder and harder to separate genuine (human-generated) content from AI-generated. Eventually I think we will have browser extensions designed to detect AI-generated content and it will result in another arms race.
- anderspitman 5y ago
  I think this might be a good thing in the long run. It may force us back to smaller social communities, where we get recommendations by asking our friends and their friends, rather than trusting search engines to curate the internet for us. There are risks. You don't want people to get into echo chambers. But that's happening anyway.
_aavaa_ 5y ago
I don't think it'll waste much time, they'd just run their own conversation generating bot for the first few emails before passing to a human. It'll just be two NN models talking to each other.

rocky_raccoon 5y ago

Sort of! I used to play around with Spamnesty [1] some 5 years ago. It looks like it's still around. [1] https://spa.mnesty.com/ https://spa.mnesty.com/

RF_Savage 5y ago

Does not even need to be that smart . "Lenny" and others are existing anti-telemarketer scripts and recordings. Reportedly 10-15 different answers from a "confused old man" are enough to waste their time. So something similar with a bit of variation thrown in should turn that spammer advantage on it's head with the 65million spam emails getting 1million replies instead of 100.

MattGaiser 5y ago

I built it for a hackathon project. https://devpost.com/software/test-7gzse1 https://devpost.com/software/test-7gzse1 It hooked into your email client, identified scams in a very mediocre way, and then sent back a autogenerated (not GPT-3 response). The big problem is privacy. I am not sure how to effectively solve that one. Why I did not win, lol.

aeternum 5y ago

I see something similar as as a risk for the general internet. We are already seeing GPT-based content farms masquerading as product review sites. It's easy to monetize traffic via affiliate links. It will get harder and harder to separate genuine (human-generated) content from AI-generated. Eventually I think we will have browser extensions designed to detect AI-generated content and it will result in another arms race.

anderspitman 5y ago
I think this might be a good thing in the long run. It may force us back to smaller social communities, where we get recommendations by asking our friends and their friends, rather than trusting search engines to curate the internet for us. There are risks. You don't want people to get into echo chambers. But that's happening anyway.

_aavaa_ 5y ago

I don't think it'll waste much time, they'd just run their own conversation generating bot for the first few emails before passing to a human. It'll just be two NN models talking to each other.