17 ms·

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 perf

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.

jeauxlb 2y ago
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.
- ronsor 2y ago
  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.
  - crabmusket 2y ago
    OpenAI is getting paid to do it.
    - ronsor 2y ago
      Yes, but a lot less than if a person were getting paid to do it, so still less money is changing hands.
      - lucianbr 2y ago
        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.
      - maronato 2y ago
        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.
  - davedx 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Getting peed at a couple times a day isn't a problem if the pee-ees miss 99% od the time, right? Small acts of malice are still acts of malice. Not everyone wants to live in a caveat emptor, dog-eats-dog society.
      - davedx 2y ago
        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.
        eesmith 2y ago
        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.
        TeMPOraL 2y ago
        > 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.
- Joker_vD 2y ago
  Because maybe, just maybe — those people will find some other jobs, and those jobs will be more socially beneficial this time? One can dream.
  - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    They can maybe get jobs for Microsoft and call people up to tell them they've noticed something is wrong with their computer!!
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    “maybe, just maybe” “One can dream.” You’ve either used these sarcastically, or accurately. I think you’ve done the former, but the truth is the latter.
    - Joker_vD 2y ago
      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.
      - bowsamic 2y ago
        So I was right, you did use it sarcastically, since you are still naive
_nalply 2y ago
Some people will send their mass spam and phish anyway. No thanks.
- purple-leafy 2y ago
  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!”
  - Brajeshwar 2y ago
    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. Mark as SPAM or Block/Filter or Ignore.
    - purple-leafy 2y ago
      Okay new plan, I’ll have another email that responds to the email and says “fuck off”, meanwhile my honeypot email will block and mark as spam
      - Ekaros 2y ago
        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...
        purple-leafy 2y ago
        I think you just gave my life purpose. It will be my magnum opus. Actually that’s already been completed, and will be released to hackernews in the coming days
      - _nalply 2y ago
kazinator 2y ago
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.
- jstummbillig 2y ago
  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. Granted, that does not seem super fun either.
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    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
    - Wolfenstein98k 2y ago
      Yes you do. You're being over-literal. "Noise" in context doesn't mean random characters, it means garbage or spam or content not worth your while.
      - bowsamic 2y ago
        No, I'm not being over-literal. Here's why: 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)
elorant 2y ago
Someone will just pack this into a product and sell it to marketers.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  And use it to market the shit out of it. If marketing finally collapses under the weight of its own bullshit, I'll be celebrating.
tivert 2y ago
> 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.
- eru 2y ago
  > [...] while his boss sends even more spam and possibly makes even more money due to automation? Wouldn't the exact argument apply to that boss as well?
  - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    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.
    - eru 2y ago
      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.
- bloqs 2y ago
  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...
xarope 2y ago
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!
saturn8601 2y ago
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.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > 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!”
- stavros 2y ago
  Here you go: https://www.stavros.io/posts/spam-spammers-back/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/spam-spammers-back/
- masswerk 2y ago
  Isn't this pretty much one of the proposed new concepts for online dating? ;-)
cen4 2y ago
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.
simion314 2y ago
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 .
darby_nine 2y ago
I've found it's easier to simply ignore your inbox and hope the spam unsubscribes itself and disappears
- chillfox 2y ago
  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.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    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.
    - grugagag 2y ago
      What are pig butchering operations?
      - jabroni_salad 2y ago
        It's people that write you love letters until you western union them your entire retirement account.
        2y ago
safety1st 2y ago
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.
- pseudalopex 2y ago
  Wisp founder Raymond Yeh is a spammer and liar. Kurt was a victim of Raymond Yeh's fraud.
  - safety1st 2y ago
    Thank you I got the names confused!
hk__2 2y ago
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. [1]: https://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-personalized-email-for-outreach https://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-...

jeauxlb 2y ago

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.

ronsor 2y ago
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.
- crabmusket 2y ago
  OpenAI is getting paid to do it.
  - ronsor 2y ago
    Yes, but a lot less than if a person were getting paid to do it, so still less money is changing hands.
    - lucianbr 2y ago
      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.
    - maronato 2y ago
      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.
- davedx 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Getting peed at a couple times a day isn't a problem if the pee-ees miss 99% od the time, right? Small acts of malice are still acts of malice. Not everyone wants to live in a caveat emptor, dog-eats-dog society.
    - davedx 2y ago
      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.
      - eesmith 2y ago
        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.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        > 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.
Joker_vD 2y ago
Because maybe, just maybe — those people will find some other jobs, and those jobs will be more socially beneficial this time? One can dream.
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  They can maybe get jobs for Microsoft and call people up to tell them they've noticed something is wrong with their computer!!
- bowsamic 2y ago
  “maybe, just maybe” “One can dream.” You’ve either used these sarcastically, or accurately. I think you’ve done the former, but the truth is the latter.
  - Joker_vD 2y ago
    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.
    - bowsamic 2y ago
      So I was right, you did use it sarcastically, since you are still naive

_nalply 2y ago

Some people will send their mass spam and phish anyway. No thanks.

purple-leafy 2y ago
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!”
- Brajeshwar 2y ago
  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. Mark as SPAM or Block/Filter or Ignore.
  - purple-leafy 2y ago
    Okay new plan, I’ll have another email that responds to the email and says “fuck off”, meanwhile my honeypot email will block and mark as spam
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      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...
      - purple-leafy 2y ago
        I think you just gave my life purpose. It will be my magnum opus. Actually that’s already been completed, and will be released to hackernews in the coming days
    - _nalply 2y ago

kazinator 2y ago

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.

jstummbillig 2y ago
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. Granted, that does not seem super fun either.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  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
  - Wolfenstein98k 2y ago
    Yes you do. You're being over-literal. "Noise" in context doesn't mean random characters, it means garbage or spam or content not worth your while.
    - bowsamic 2y ago
      No, I'm not being over-literal. Here's why: 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)

elorant 2y ago

Someone will just pack this into a product and sell it to marketers.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
And use it to market the shit out of it. If marketing finally collapses under the weight of its own bullshit, I'll be celebrating.

tivert 2y ago

> 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.

eru 2y ago
> [...] while his boss sends even more spam and possibly makes even more money due to automation? Wouldn't the exact argument apply to that boss as well?
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  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.
  - eru 2y ago
    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.
bloqs 2y ago
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...

xarope 2y ago

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!

saturn8601 2y ago

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.

Terr_ 2y ago
> 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!”
stavros 2y ago
Here you go: https://www.stavros.io/posts/spam-spammers-back/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/spam-spammers-back/
masswerk 2y ago
Isn't this pretty much one of the proposed new concepts for online dating? ;-)

cen4 2y ago

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.

simion314 2y ago

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 .

darby_nine 2y ago

I've found it's easier to simply ignore your inbox and hope the spam unsubscribes itself and disappears

chillfox 2y ago
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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  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.
  - grugagag 2y ago
    What are pig butchering operations?
    - jabroni_salad 2y ago
      It's people that write you love letters until you western union them your entire retirement account.
      - 2y ago

safety1st 2y ago

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.

pseudalopex 2y ago
Wisp founder Raymond Yeh is a spammer and liar. Kurt was a victim of Raymond Yeh's fraud.
- safety1st 2y ago
  Thank you I got the names confused!

hk__2 2y ago

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