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The author links to the somewhat dystopian blog where the email sender is quite proud of their work. Their words (or perhaps that of an LLM): > Could an AI age
by ossyrial 2y ago
The author links to the somewhat dystopian blog where the email sender is quite proud of their work. Their words (or perhaps that of an LLM):
> 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-personalized-email-for-outreach 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.
- londons_explore 2y ago> > Incredibly, not a single recipient seemed to detect that the emails were AI-generated. Of the people who replied. I bet plenty figured it out, but didn't bother to reply.
- Lio 2y agoExpect to see someone else write a blog post on How I Used AI to fool an AI Spammer ...of course they'd probably get an LLM to write the article too.
- otherme123 2y agoThe guy writes a post about how to send spam effectively, and then offers the subscription link in the end with "Promise we won't spam you". Yes, I totally trust you...
- CoastalCoder 2y agoIt sounds like extortion. "I'm sending spam that sneaks past your spam filter. Sign up to make it stop."
- cornholio 2y agoNews at 11, spammers use sophisticated techniques to increase the profitability of spam. This is absolutely shocking and never before seen, what is the world coming to. 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.
- CoastalCoder 2y agoI don't think this is unique to this specific technology. People can be both wonderful and despicable, regardless of era or mechanism.
- cornholio 2y agoSure, but I'm talking about the good:bad ratio of some creations. I really have strong hope for AI, and that we won't regard it in retrospect like the multi-stage thermonuclear device, the landmine or tetraethyl lead additives.
- CoastalCoder 2y agoI hope you're right. I'm less optimistic.
- squigz 2y agoNot to dismiss any of the negative aspects of "AI", but it seems utterly foolish to compare it to those 3 things.
- orbitmode 2y ago[dead]
- mns 2y agoI keep seeing these posts on HN and thinking, man, these are some smart people. Training LLMs, doing all this amazing AI stuff like this guy with the email agents and the other guy with the dropping of hats, and then I open the posts and it's just some guy making API requests to OpenAI or some similar disappointment.
- brabel 2y agoNowadays, an "AI Expert" is someone who knows how to download an AI client lib and prompt the AI to perform tasks. These are people who are not even technical and have no idea how all this works, but they can at least follow a Youtube Tutorial to get a basic website working.
- macocha 2y agoAlso in most cases they were a "crypto expert" just two months ago.
- ryandrake 2y agoAnd they were a leadgen/SEO expert a few years ago. These technogrifters just move from one hot topic to the next trying to make whatever buck they can smooth talk people into giving them.
- paulluuk 2y agoAs someone who actually has a university degree in Artificial Intelligence, I feel like this is always how it's been. Before, an "AI Expert" was someone who knew how to use Tensorflow, PyTorch or Keras. Before that, an "AI Expert" was someone who knew how to write a Monte Carlo simulation, etc etc. 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?
- PlusAddressing 2y agoFunny how they're self assured no one whiffed their AI bullshit. This is survivorship bias, he's looking only at all the planes that came back to port. The people who did - they just didn't reply. He can't prompt them.
- tsukikage 2y agoThis process should not require a human in the loop. 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.
- Bluestein 2y agoVery well could be. Seconded. After all, it could very well become one of the largest vehicles for "mass training", ever ... PS. Howerver, see comments downthread about "survivorship bias". Not everybody will reply, so biases will exist.-
- FeepingCreature 2y agoAt least one sci-fi novel iirc had an AI spam filter achieve sentience, because the task basically amounted to contrastive-learning a model of humanity.
- biztos 2y agoHaving worked in the field, I think you’re more likely to achieve AGI by intelligently watering tomatoes in a hothouse.
- russnewcomer 2y agoThat’s one of Peter Watt’s Rifters trilogy, I think maybe the second one? Been a few years since I read them. I think it’s a biological neural net, not an Ai per se. Lots of big ideas in those books, but not a lot of optimism and some rough stuff.
- mihaaly 2y agoIt is not only that too much is wasted on superficial nothing instead of choosing to make something with essence and benefitial for the society but it is sucking away those minds engaged in really useful things.
- highspeedbus 2y agoThings I wish become taboo: Admitting to use AI content. Everyone is so comfortable doing shit like this.
- rpgwaiter 2y agoI much prefer admission to hiding it. It lets you easily see who doesn’t deserve your time
- jacobgkau 2y agoWhile that might work great on the individual level for a little while, it's unfortunately not how normalized taboos seem to work long-term. You're just going to see more and more people who don't deserve your time until you're wanting for anyone who actually does.
- daemin 2y agoThis has been mentioned before, but I can see the benefit in having curated webrings and similar listings. Where people can verify the content is not LLM generated.
- ryandrake 2y agoAs soon as that becomes effective, you'll have dozens of SEO sites and experts giving seminars on "How to get your LLM-generated website into curated webrings." An entire cottage industry will spring up for the purposes of corrupting legitimate webrings and/or creating fake astroturf webrings that claim to be curated.
- pixl97 2y agoOh, what about the petty fights between different webrings accusing each other of using AI generated content.... Reminds me of the early days of the web.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
- taurath 2y agoThis is sort of why I feel somewhat pessimistic about AI - the inevitable most profitable usecases being so bad in aggregate for a society with almost no bounds or values other than profit. It will never be easier to waste peoples attention.
- yard2010 2y agoThis is not a problem with AI but with a system in which there are no other values other than "make the most money fast".
- throwaway7ahgb 2y ago"No other values"? When and how is such Doomer Hyperbole getting into HN articles? 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.
- fl0id 2y agoor maybe you need to touch some grass.
- runlaszlorun 2y agoI need some grass.
- thrance 2y agoI remember seeing a talk from Jonathan Blow where he made a comparison: in the 1960s top engineers worked for NASA and put a man on the moon in a decade, basically doing computations by hand. Today, we have super advanced computers and tech companies enjoy 100× times more of the top engineers than NASA ever had, and they are all working toward making you click on ads more.
- sandworm101 2y agoSomeone decided that marketing is now a tech problem. Artists have been replaced by software engineers. The net result is creepy AI emails. 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.
- pseudalopex 2y agoSales people were never artists. Cold calling is not art.
- johnnyanmac 2y agocold calling isn't an art, but smooth talking/networking is. There's no exact science to making people feel good and wanting to form a relationship with you (despite centuries of literature claiming that there is).
- pseudalopex 2y agoArt and an art have different meanings.
- 2y ago
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago> It's a shame the author's passions are directed to (...) Now do Google.
- Waterluvian 2y agoI’m unsurprised to see a lot of very shallow usage of AI. Most users don’t have a real use case for the tool.
- joelthelion 2y ago> 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. In defence of that guy, he's only doing it because he knows it's what pays the bills. If we want things to change, we need to fix the system so that genuine social advancement is what's rewarded, not spam and scams. Not an easy task, unfortunately.
- suoduandao3 2y agoI do believe that commodified attention is the most logical currency of a postascarce society, so best case... quite a lot. Note my 'best case' scenario for the near future is pretty upsetting.
- thih9 2y agoAlso from that blog post: > 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.
- nojvek 2y ago> How much of our societal progress and collective thought and innovation has gone to capturing attention and driving up engagement, I wonder. 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.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>How much of our societal progress and collective thought and innovation has gone to capturing attention and driving up engagement, I wonder. 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.
- smnrg 2y ago“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” — Jeff Hammerbacher
- smsm42 2y agoI know my recipient would hate getting an automated email, so as a start of our relationship, I'm going to send them an automated email designed to deceive them. I'm sure it's a beginning of a beautiful friendship.