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I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. It is a very common problem with modern mar

I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. It is a very common problem with modern marketing teams, that have zero empathy for customers (even if they have one, they will never push back on whatever insane demands come from senior management). This is why any email subscription management interface now is as bloated as a dead whale. If too many users unsubscribe, they just add one more category and “accidentally” opt-in everyone. It’s a shame that Proton marketing team is just like every other one. Maybe it’s a curse of growing organization and middle management creep. The least we can do is push back as customers.

bayindirh 9mo ago
I believe this is combined with something I call "asymmetry blindness". They may say "but we send an single e-mail per month, this can't be bad". We the users get a barrage of e-mails everyday because every marketing team is thinking we only get their mail, and it makes our lonely and cold mailbox merrier. No, users are in constant "Tsunami warning!" mode and these teams are not helping.
- pseudalopex 9mo ago
  Our subscription product costs less than expensive coffee. Unused RAM is wasted.
  - setopt 9mo ago
    I guess the people you quote also missed that not all of us work in Silicon Valley and can afford those expensive coffees every day. I’d like an estimate of how many Nescafé powder coffee cups I’d have to skip per month to use their subscription.
  - pjc50 9mo ago
    Again, no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood: if you buy enough coffee-priced subscriptions, that's unaffordable. Usually people already have their coffee-priced budget allocated to something. Like coffee. (Incidentally, this is why mobile gaming uses so many anti-patterns, to make people keep making "just one more" tiny purchase)
    - pseudalopex 9mo ago
      > if you buy enough coffee-priced subscriptions, that's unaffordable Yes. This was the point.
- robinsonb5 9mo ago
  If they were sending just one per month I might actually read them occasionally. It's the three a day from the likes of aliexpress that get deleted without a second glance. But yes, you're absolutely right - "no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood".
  - malfist 9mo ago
    That marketing team only sends 1 email a month, but the 25 other marketing teams at the same company also only send 1 email a month.
- setopt 9mo ago
  Indeed. I received 28 unwanted emails of this kind in January so far (just counted), which is a bit more than once per day, despite quite avidly unsubscribing from this kind of emails. This month I had to unsubscribe from ChatGPT and GitHub emails of this kind too, although I don’t recall opting in to them in the first place and neither of them spammed me until recently.
  - chrisjj 9mo ago
    > although I don’t recall opting in to them in the first place and neither of them spammed me until recently Dark pattern. They know you'd spot immediate abuse , so they delay until you are likely to have forgotten whether you opted in.
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    >unsubscribe from ChatGPT emails Really? I've never got a spam from them. Hell, I just searched and I'm not really seeing anything from them after the point where I signed up.
    - setopt 9mo ago
      On Jan 11th I received "Easy self-care you can start today" advertising how ChatGPT can be used for meal planning or finding a local gym (ending with "Ask ChatGPT for more wellness tips"), and on Jan 19th I received "Use ChatGPT to make life easier" advertising how ChatGPT can for example improve my coffee brewing skills (ending with "Ask ChatGPT for more ways to get it all done"). I certainly consider these "spam", and until recently didn’t receive such emails from them.
  - ldng 9mo ago
    Did you by any chance report them to something like spamcop.net ? Aggressive spamming => Aggressive reporting.
- vintermann 9mo ago
  I'm pretty sure some people have performance metrics attached to their "newsletter".
specproc 9mo ago
The problem with tech is that there's absolutely zero accountability. Marketing is, to some extent at least, regulated. There's so little consumer protection in the tech industry, it's a joke. We've got GDPR (in Europe) and I'm really struggling to think what else. Imagine if other forms of engineering had the same level of control. There's this absolutely fallacious notion that in a free market, customers can just vote with their feet. From big players with vendor lock-in and network effects, to specialists (I know of few decent competitors to Proton), the average consumer is not sufficiently protected from malpractice. We may say, "oh, it's just a marketing email", but TFA perfectly encapsulates the relationship we have with our suppliers.
- chrisjj 9mo ago
  Enforcement in UK is pathetic e.g. HelloFresh's recent spam campaign cost it <0.2p per message in fines. A bargain.
- amarcheschi 9mo ago
  Now that we're at it, let's talk about Google ads. I reported a Google ad because I deem it political, and in Europe you must make it clear that a political ad is a political ad and not just an ad (and it failed to do so, it should be corrected or eliminated). Google refused to comply and act in any way, because they "don't moderate 3rd party content". Except that EU says you _must_ comply if you're publishing a political ad. I'm bringing this forward with an appeal and then I'm going to escalate to the national authority if they still refuse to act. The laws are there. It's just that big tech think they can ignore them freely and even if down the road there's a fine it's going to be much less than what they gained by spreading ads.
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    >then I'm going to escalate to the national authority if they still refuse to act. You are actually doing this wrong... Report to the national authority first... Then report to Google. Fuck them, it is not in your interest to report to them first, make them react for their bullshit. Over here in the states this is how I ended up dealing with telecom in the ISP industry. "Hello, I have put in an FTC/FCC complaint on $issue, and would like to see about getting it resolved". It didn't matter that's not the order you're supposed to go in, at the telecom side they send it off to a team that actually gets shit solved before it becomes a regulatory problem.
contubernio 9mo ago
The problem is not just empathy. It is also ethics. The fine distinction between opting out of A and opting out of B described in the post served to justify ignoring the opt out request. That's lazy ethically. The entire US business sector's customer relations are completely compromised ethically. It's taken to extremes in tech contexts.
- Tarq0n 9mo ago
  In large organizations motivated reasoning trumps ethics. Behavior starts working along incentive gradients like an ant heap. Spend enough time in an environment like that and you learn to frame every selfish decision as good for the customer. I think maintaining ethics in large organizations is one of the main challenges of our time, now that mega corps dominate our time and attention.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    > Spend enough time in an environment like that and you learn to frame every selfish decision as good for the customer. This reminds me of "in order to save the environment, we are going to delete all of your recordings older than 2 years, in 2 weeks. You can't download them."
  - tanseydavid 9mo ago
    "Corporation are people, folks" said Mitt Romney (as a result of the Citizen United case). The whole thing is so cringe on so many levels. What Romney did not say is that these particular "people" tend strongly towards sociopathic behavior.
SCdF 9mo ago
I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this *far* more with AI than any other advancement / fad (depending on your opinion) than anything else before. This also tracks with every app and website injecting AI into every one of your interactions, with no way to disable it. I think the article's point about non-consent is a very apt one, and expresses why I dislike this trend so much. I left Google Workspace, as a paying customer for years, because they injected gemini into gmail etc and I couldn't turn it off (only those on the most expensive enterprise plans could at the time I left). To be clear I am someone that uses AI basically every day, but the non-consent is still frustrating and dehumanising. Users–even paying users–are "considered" in design these days as much as a cow is "considered" in the design of a dairy farm. I am moving all of the software that I pay for to competitors who either do not integrate AI, or allow me to disable it if I wish.
- dwedge 9mo ago
  Even WhatsApp has it in the search bar
  - ljm 9mo ago
    For me it’s just a multi-coloured ring like a gamer’s mood light, but it’s literally just slapped in the corner of the UI the same way a shitty Intercom widget would be. Totally a thing a growth hacking team would do, injecting an interface on top of a design.
- jasode 9mo ago
  >I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this far more with AI than any other advancement / fad I agree with gp that new spam emails that override customers' email marketing preferences is not an "AI" issue. The problem is that once companies have your email address, their irresistible compulsion to spam you is so great that they will deliberately not honor their own "Communication Preferences" that supposedly lets customers opt out of all marketing emails. Even companies that are mostly good citizens about obeying customers' email marketing preferences still end up making exceptions. Examples: Amazon has a profile page to opt out of all email marketing and it works... except ... it doesn't work to stop the new Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon Health marketing emails. Those emails do not have an "Unsubscribe" link and there is no extra setting in the customer profile to prevent them. Apple doesn't send out marketing messages and obeys their customers' marketing email preferences ... except .. when you buy a new iPhone and then they send emails about "Your new iPhone lets you try Apple TV for 3 months free!" and then more emails about "You have Apple Music for 3 months free!" Neither of those aggressive emails have anything to do with AI. Companies just like to make exceptions to their rules to spam you. The customer's email inbox is just too valuable a target for companies to ignore. That said, I have 3 gmail.com addresses and none of them have marketing spam emails from Google about Gemini AI showing up in the Primary inbox. Maybe it's commendable that Google is showing incredible restraint so far. (Or promoting Gemini in Chrome and web apps is enough exposure for them.)
lynx97 9mo ago
It is an error to believe this is only happening in/with marketing. In general, "empathy" and "capitalism" are mutually exclusive. If profit is your goal, you don't care about individuals.
lawtalkinghuman 9mo ago
> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all There are clear AI-specific reasons why it's being crammed down everybody's necks. Namely: someone in management has bet the entire strategy on it. The strategy is not working and they need to juice the numbers desperately.
- philipwhiuk 9mo ago
  It's not really AI itself though, it's just whatever the current hype cycle is - it was crypto and cloud before this.
  - account42 9mo ago
    There is at least a magnitude difference in the spread.
  - marginalia_nu 9mo ago
    Cloud is probably the better comparison, since crypto never had the sort of mainstream management buy-in that the other two got. Microsoft's handling of OneDrive in particular foreshadows how AI is being pushed out.
    - lawtalkinghuman 9mo ago
      The difference is OneDrive is moderately useful.
      - rolph 9mo ago
        i dont like onedrive very much. i get it its useful as a pigeonhole, what i really dont like is how it is used. its the thing that moves files to onedrive and destroys local copies, that i hate, and onedrive is something that enables that. so i dont hate onedrive, i just dont like it.
      - xigoi 9mo ago
        LLMs are also moderately useful.
littlestymaar 9mo ago
> It’s a shame that Proton marketing team is just like every other one. Having gone through the Proton hiring process was an eye opener for me: despite its stated mission, the company isn't special when it comes to its management, it's as bad as any other.
- mark_l_watson 9mo ago
  To be fair, they are working to stay in business. None of my business, but did they treat you unfairly? I am developing a severe anti huge corporation bias, and I try to do business with smaller companies.
vintermann 9mo ago
To name and shame two: LinkedIn and MyHeritage. If you ever made an account with either of them, they will never stop spamming you. They have configuration options to select which mail to receive, but they appear to consider them temporary suggestions. A special dishonourable mention goes to Wal-mart. I never interacted with them in any way whatsoever, as well I wouldn't since they don't exist on my continent as far as I know, yet they still send me spam. DKIM signed and all!
- alibarber 9mo ago
  LinkedIn once seemed to somehow go through my (GMail?) contacts and ask if I should invite my, late, grandfather to the platform in the subject of a marketing message. Left a bitter taste.
- devnullbrain 9mo ago
  I guess you also received the Linkedin Gaming spam a couple of weeks ago? I opted out of almost every category and I never opted in to a category like that. So why is there now a new category which I have to opt out of? It seems to me blatant, unpunished disregard of GDPR - but their whole business was founded on abuse of emails and there's no reason to expect a Microsoft acquisition to make a company act more in line with the law.
  - christoph 9mo ago
    That gaming email took me mentally straight back to Facebook circa 2009, and not in a good way. LinkedIn always serves as a fantastic example of exactly how not to treat your users.
Bombthecat 9mo ago
I feel more and more like. That email should be like DMs. Do you want to accept emails from xxx? Yes No On client side...
- chrisjj 9mo ago
  Very dangerous, when the same From address may be used for "Log in inside 14 days or your dormant account will be deleted".
- chihuahua 9mo ago
  I think that would lead to this: Do you want to accept emails from "For a limited time, save up to 35% on orders from Fluppsi! Click Yes for this amazing opportunity!"
chrisjj 9mo ago
> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. It is not specific to "AI" but it is very much related to it. > If too many users unsubscribe, they just add one more category and “accidentally” opt-in everyone ... and "forget" to add its opt-out to the list.
shantnutiwari 9mo ago
> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all Yeah, many companies do that. I unsusbcribed from newline, they still keep spamming me. Funny thing is, they realised they had made a mistake and promised to remove unsubs. One week later, the spam started. The correct solution is the spam button. Always
- chrisjj 9mo ago
  The spam button risks false positives.
  - saghm 9mo ago
    It's not a false positive to classify a company as a bad actor and move their emails to the spam folder if they refuse to respect user choices. If anything, I wish it would happen more often and at a massive scale, because then maybe companies would have an incentive to stop being so hostile around this.
    - chrisjj 9mo ago
      Agreed, but the false positive I am referring to is the cathching of the non-spam message from the source of the previous spam message.
      - solid_fuel 9mo ago
        They shouldn't send marketing mail from an address they want to be read. I think that's been the standard for a while, in practice - most actual transactions come from orders@<blank> or something similar while marketing mail comes from a dozen other addresses.
        chrisjj 9mo ago
        Agreed, but many do. They want all mail to be read. Worst offender here is a bank.
    - deleted 9mo ago
hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
There’s probably a bigger association with it. I don’t like ai and see it everywhere, in every app I use, every service I purchase, my goddamn start bar. So, when they start emailing unwanted emails, it feels like a spam problem, when really it’s insidious on multiple fronts. I can’t wait for the enshittification phase. When the products royally fuck their fan base.
hojiron 9mo ago
Still happy that Tuta Mail is anti AI, and does not push ads on you via email. I wonder who told Proton that it’s a good idea to copy big tech tactics.
- chrisjj 9mo ago
  Does?? > I wonder who told Proton that it’s a good idea to copy big tech tactics. The lure of big tech profits.
  - hojiron 9mo ago
    Not :)
  - ToucanLoucan 9mo ago
    Genuinely: What profits!?! The only company profiting from AI has been nVidia. Every indicator we've received for this entire alleged industry is companies buying hundreds of millions of dollars in graphics cards that then either sit in warehouses depreciating in value or, worse, are plugged in and immediately start losing money. The tech industry has coasted on it's hypergrowth story for decades, a story laden with as many bubbles as actual industries that sprang up. All the good ideas are done now. All the products anyone actually needs exist, are enshittified, and are selling user data to anyone who will pay, including products that exist solely to remove your data from everyone who bought it and probably then sell it to some other people. This shit is stupid at this point. All Silicon Valley has to do is to grow up into a mature industry with sensible business practices and sustainable models of generating revenue that in most other industries would be fantastic, and they're absolutely apoplectic about this. They are so addicted to the easy, cheap services that upended entire other industries and made them rich beyond imagining that they will literally say, out loud, with their human mouths, that it is a bad, undesirable thing to simply have a business that makes some money. The people at the top of this industry are literally fucking deranged and should be interred at a psychiatric facility for awhile for their and everyone else's good.
    - chrisjj 9mo ago
skywhopper 9mo ago
It is entirely related, because AI marketing is an amped up version of traditional dark-pattern marketing. And since every tech company is on the AI hype train, then they all fall into the same willingness to justify the worst behavior because of their desperate need to get on the forefront of what they’ve convinced themselves is the only path to growth. But as consumers, since we are confronted with all tech companies all following the same dark patterns, we feel the impact suddenly much stronger than with past one-at-a-time panicky company over-marketing efforts.
- ivan_gammel 9mo ago
  AI marketing is not different at all from performance marketing of other solutions. This is really just ordinary consent management and privacy problem. I have participated in large scale email marketing implementations too, and know how it looks from the inside. As a tech partner you may even have a good peer on the business side who cares about customers and compliance, but institutional resistance is still hard to overcome. Sometimes it is just as dumb as an old spreadsheet with contacts being uploaded again and again into your mass mail system, without any consent tracking and ignoring any opt-outs that came after the spreadsheet was created.
boringg 9mo ago
The idea that the marketing team has the ability to really push back against senior management doesn't align with the reality I have seen. The best they can do is say that this will do brand damage -- but they don't have the ability to really call the shots. Most organizations marketing is not in a real seat of power - more like an advisory position. I'm not trying to unfair to marketing - they do have an important role - I have hardly seen a company give marketing real power at an org. So the idea that this is because marketing don't push back on senior management -- is because they know they don't have the power to do this.
- xigoi 9mo ago
  “I was just following orders” is not an excuse. If your job requires you to do immoral things, it is your responsibility to quit.
- ivan_gammel 9mo ago
  They may not have power to push back on KPIs, but even just sticking to regulatory compliance would be good enough. Nobody in management will say in writing that marketing should ignore GDPR, for example. And that means that if you, say, introduce a new category, everyone is supposed to be unsubscribed by default. So non-compliance is always a choice.
xnx 9mo ago
> If too many users unsubscribe, they just add one more category and “accidentally” opt-in everyone. I always "report spam" ("!" key in GMail) before unsubscribing.
janalsncm 9mo ago
This was my first reaction too. It is a bit ironic that the issue of “overlapping labels” can be applied to the OP as well. My instinct is to classify this as an email consent issue not because AI needs defending, but because the solution need not be specific to AI. The Next Big Thing will also probably have this problem because marketing is at odds making your customers happy with a great product.
autoexec 9mo ago
The spam was advertising AI, the point of the article was how aggressively AI is being shoved down our throats, and it seems very likely that when he went to complain about the AI spam it was an an AI chatbot which gave him the useless answers until it finally "checked with the team" (presumably a human) who lied to him about what counted as AI spam. It seems like this is very much about AI even though it's ultimately humans pushing AI and disregarding people's spam preferences. Right now, everything "AI" is ultimately humans (like the way humans are using/abusing the AI tools, or the human intellect behind all of the data that was used to train them and all of the knowledge they output, or the humans deciding what they'll allow their AI to be used for, or the humans failing to safeguard the users of their AI products, etc) so this is as much about AI as anything is.
- jasode 9mo ago
  >The spam was advertising AI, the point of the article was how aggressively AI [...] It seems like this is very much about AI Yes, the gp you responded to already said the same thing that the particular email was about AI (Lumos) when he wrote : >", even if the product in question is AI-related." To go beyond that, the gp highlighted that the bad behavior is rooted in companies ignoring customers' email preferences instead of the AI. The article is misdiagnosing the unwanted email issue as "AI Consent Problem" when it's actually fundamentally about "Email Consent Problem". The author deliberately opted out of email marketing and Proton ignored it (by "mistake") and this is a common misbehavior companies did before AI. It's worth separating those 2 factors out. We get unwanted spam about "Amazon Pharmacy" and "Apple TV" that overrides our profile settings to opt-out of those emails but that doesn't mean we misdiagnose it as "Pharmacy Consent Problem" and "Video Streaming Consent Problem". Instead, the generalization is still fundamentally an "email consent" problem. Always has been. The repeated abuse of the customer's email address (with or without AI in the picture) is what the gp was emphasizing. Likewise, if a future hot technology household such as residential robots causes email marketing campaigns that blasts unwanted spam about Tesla house robots... the issue of that unwanted spam "Tesla robots 10% off!" ... is still about ignoring customers' email preferences. The unwanted robots themselves would be a separate issue. Companies will continue to make "mistakes" to send out new marketing email spam with <HotNewThing> in the subject field that will infuriate customers. And the future root cause of that problem still won't be <HotNewThing> but instead about companies ignoring customers email preferences because the incentives and greed are too great.
KingOfCoders 9mo ago
Last to months several of my connections on Linkedin used private messaging for mass marketing "emails" - "normal" proper companies, not recruiters/outsourcing/... that have been spamming us for years. There is not limit to the things they will try. On Proton: I don't get the love they get here. There ethics I find questionable and their product (e.g. search) I find unusable.
nottorp 9mo ago
> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. Did they ever send Rust related unsolicited emails?

bayindirh 9mo ago

I believe this is combined with something I call "asymmetry blindness". They may say "but we send an single e-mail per month, this can't be bad". We the users get a barrage of e-mails everyday because every marketing team is thinking we only get their mail, and it makes our lonely and cold mailbox merrier. No, users are in constant "Tsunami warning!" mode and these teams are not helping.

pseudalopex 9mo ago
Our subscription product costs less than expensive coffee. Unused RAM is wasted.
- setopt 9mo ago
  I guess the people you quote also missed that not all of us work in Silicon Valley and can afford those expensive coffees every day. I’d like an estimate of how many Nescafé powder coffee cups I’d have to skip per month to use their subscription.
- pjc50 9mo ago
  Again, no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood: if you buy enough coffee-priced subscriptions, that's unaffordable. Usually people already have their coffee-priced budget allocated to something. Like coffee. (Incidentally, this is why mobile gaming uses so many anti-patterns, to make people keep making "just one more" tiny purchase)
  - pseudalopex 9mo ago
    > if you buy enough coffee-priced subscriptions, that's unaffordable Yes. This was the point.
robinsonb5 9mo ago
If they were sending just one per month I might actually read them occasionally. It's the three a day from the likes of aliexpress that get deleted without a second glance. But yes, you're absolutely right - "no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood".
- malfist 9mo ago
  That marketing team only sends 1 email a month, but the 25 other marketing teams at the same company also only send 1 email a month.
setopt 9mo ago
Indeed. I received 28 unwanted emails of this kind in January so far (just counted), which is a bit more than once per day, despite quite avidly unsubscribing from this kind of emails. This month I had to unsubscribe from ChatGPT and GitHub emails of this kind too, although I don’t recall opting in to them in the first place and neither of them spammed me until recently.
- chrisjj 9mo ago
  > although I don’t recall opting in to them in the first place and neither of them spammed me until recently Dark pattern. They know you'd spot immediate abuse , so they delay until you are likely to have forgotten whether you opted in.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  >unsubscribe from ChatGPT emails Really? I've never got a spam from them. Hell, I just searched and I'm not really seeing anything from them after the point where I signed up.
  - setopt 9mo ago
    On Jan 11th I received "Easy self-care you can start today" advertising how ChatGPT can be used for meal planning or finding a local gym (ending with "Ask ChatGPT for more wellness tips"), and on Jan 19th I received "Use ChatGPT to make life easier" advertising how ChatGPT can for example improve my coffee brewing skills (ending with "Ask ChatGPT for more ways to get it all done"). I certainly consider these "spam", and until recently didn’t receive such emails from them.
- ldng 9mo ago
  Did you by any chance report them to something like spamcop.net ? Aggressive spamming => Aggressive reporting.
vintermann 9mo ago
I'm pretty sure some people have performance metrics attached to their "newsletter".

specproc 9mo ago

The problem with tech is that there's absolutely zero accountability. Marketing is, to some extent at least, regulated. There's so little consumer protection in the tech industry, it's a joke. We've got GDPR (in Europe) and I'm really struggling to think what else. Imagine if other forms of engineering had the same level of control. There's this absolutely fallacious notion that in a free market, customers can just vote with their feet. From big players with vendor lock-in and network effects, to specialists (I know of few decent competitors to Proton), the average consumer is not sufficiently protected from malpractice. We may say, "oh, it's just a marketing email", but TFA perfectly encapsulates the relationship we have with our suppliers.

chrisjj 9mo ago
Enforcement in UK is pathetic e.g. HelloFresh's recent spam campaign cost it <0.2p per message in fines. A bargain.
amarcheschi 9mo ago
Now that we're at it, let's talk about Google ads. I reported a Google ad because I deem it political, and in Europe you must make it clear that a political ad is a political ad and not just an ad (and it failed to do so, it should be corrected or eliminated). Google refused to comply and act in any way, because they "don't moderate 3rd party content". Except that EU says you _must_ comply if you're publishing a political ad. I'm bringing this forward with an appeal and then I'm going to escalate to the national authority if they still refuse to act. The laws are there. It's just that big tech think they can ignore them freely and even if down the road there's a fine it's going to be much less than what they gained by spreading ads.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  >then I'm going to escalate to the national authority if they still refuse to act. You are actually doing this wrong... Report to the national authority first... Then report to Google. Fuck them, it is not in your interest to report to them first, make them react for their bullshit. Over here in the states this is how I ended up dealing with telecom in the ISP industry. "Hello, I have put in an FTC/FCC complaint on $issue, and would like to see about getting it resolved". It didn't matter that's not the order you're supposed to go in, at the telecom side they send it off to a team that actually gets shit solved before it becomes a regulatory problem.

contubernio 9mo ago

The problem is not just empathy. It is also ethics. The fine distinction between opting out of A and opting out of B described in the post served to justify ignoring the opt out request. That's lazy ethically. The entire US business sector's customer relations are completely compromised ethically. It's taken to extremes in tech contexts.

Tarq0n 9mo ago
In large organizations motivated reasoning trumps ethics. Behavior starts working along incentive gradients like an ant heap. Spend enough time in an environment like that and you learn to frame every selfish decision as good for the customer. I think maintaining ethics in large organizations is one of the main challenges of our time, now that mega corps dominate our time and attention.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  > Spend enough time in an environment like that and you learn to frame every selfish decision as good for the customer. This reminds me of "in order to save the environment, we are going to delete all of your recordings older than 2 years, in 2 weeks. You can't download them."
- tanseydavid 9mo ago
  "Corporation are people, folks" said Mitt Romney (as a result of the Citizen United case). The whole thing is so cringe on so many levels. What Romney did not say is that these particular "people" tend strongly towards sociopathic behavior.

SCdF 9mo ago

I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this *far* more with AI than any other advancement / fad (depending on your opinion) than anything else before. This also tracks with every app and website injecting AI into every one of your interactions, with no way to disable it. I think the article's point about non-consent is a very apt one, and expresses why I dislike this trend so much. I left Google Workspace, as a paying customer for years, because they injected gemini into gmail etc and I couldn't turn it off (only those on the most expensive enterprise plans could at the time I left). To be clear I am someone that uses AI basically every day, but the non-consent is still frustrating and dehumanising. Users–even paying users–are "considered" in design these days as much as a cow is "considered" in the design of a dairy farm. I am moving all of the software that I pay for to competitors who either do not integrate AI, or allow me to disable it if I wish.

dwedge 9mo ago
Even WhatsApp has it in the search bar
- ljm 9mo ago
  For me it’s just a multi-coloured ring like a gamer’s mood light, but it’s literally just slapped in the corner of the UI the same way a shitty Intercom widget would be. Totally a thing a growth hacking team would do, injecting an interface on top of a design.
jasode 9mo ago
>I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this far more with AI than any other advancement / fad I agree with gp that new spam emails that override customers' email marketing preferences is not an "AI" issue. The problem is that once companies have your email address, their irresistible compulsion to spam you is so great that they will deliberately not honor their own "Communication Preferences" that supposedly lets customers opt out of all marketing emails. Even companies that are mostly good citizens about obeying customers' email marketing preferences still end up making exceptions. Examples: Amazon has a profile page to opt out of all email marketing and it works... except ... it doesn't work to stop the new Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon Health marketing emails. Those emails do not have an "Unsubscribe" link and there is no extra setting in the customer profile to prevent them. Apple doesn't send out marketing messages and obeys their customers' marketing email preferences ... except .. when you buy a new iPhone and then they send emails about "Your new iPhone lets you try Apple TV for 3 months free!" and then more emails about "You have Apple Music for 3 months free!" Neither of those aggressive emails have anything to do with AI. Companies just like to make exceptions to their rules to spam you. The customer's email inbox is just too valuable a target for companies to ignore. That said, I have 3 gmail.com addresses and none of them have marketing spam emails from Google about Gemini AI showing up in the Primary inbox. Maybe it's commendable that Google is showing incredible restraint so far. (Or promoting Gemini in Chrome and web apps is enough exposure for them.)

lynx97 9mo ago

It is an error to believe this is only happening in/with marketing. In general, "empathy" and "capitalism" are mutually exclusive. If profit is your goal, you don't care about individuals.

lawtalkinghuman 9mo ago

> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all There are clear AI-specific reasons why it's being crammed down everybody's necks. Namely: someone in management has bet the entire strategy on it. The strategy is not working and they need to juice the numbers desperately.

philipwhiuk 9mo ago
It's not really AI itself though, it's just whatever the current hype cycle is - it was crypto and cloud before this.
- account42 9mo ago
  There is at least a magnitude difference in the spread.
- marginalia_nu 9mo ago
  Cloud is probably the better comparison, since crypto never had the sort of mainstream management buy-in that the other two got. Microsoft's handling of OneDrive in particular foreshadows how AI is being pushed out.
  - lawtalkinghuman 9mo ago
    The difference is OneDrive is moderately useful.
    - rolph 9mo ago
      i dont like onedrive very much. i get it its useful as a pigeonhole, what i really dont like is how it is used. its the thing that moves files to onedrive and destroys local copies, that i hate, and onedrive is something that enables that. so i dont hate onedrive, i just dont like it.
    - xigoi 9mo ago
      LLMs are also moderately useful.

littlestymaar 9mo ago

> It’s a shame that Proton marketing team is just like every other one. Having gone through the Proton hiring process was an eye opener for me: despite its stated mission, the company isn't special when it comes to its management, it's as bad as any other.

mark_l_watson 9mo ago
To be fair, they are working to stay in business. None of my business, but did they treat you unfairly? I am developing a severe anti huge corporation bias, and I try to do business with smaller companies.

vintermann 9mo ago

To name and shame two: LinkedIn and MyHeritage. If you ever made an account with either of them, they will never stop spamming you. They have configuration options to select which mail to receive, but they appear to consider them temporary suggestions. A special dishonourable mention goes to Wal-mart. I never interacted with them in any way whatsoever, as well I wouldn't since they don't exist on my continent as far as I know, yet they still send me spam. DKIM signed and all!

alibarber 9mo ago
LinkedIn once seemed to somehow go through my (GMail?) contacts and ask if I should invite my, late, grandfather to the platform in the subject of a marketing message. Left a bitter taste.
devnullbrain 9mo ago
I guess you also received the Linkedin Gaming spam a couple of weeks ago? I opted out of almost every category and I never opted in to a category like that. So why is there now a new category which I have to opt out of? It seems to me blatant, unpunished disregard of GDPR - but their whole business was founded on abuse of emails and there's no reason to expect a Microsoft acquisition to make a company act more in line with the law.
- christoph 9mo ago
  That gaming email took me mentally straight back to Facebook circa 2009, and not in a good way. LinkedIn always serves as a fantastic example of exactly how not to treat your users.

Bombthecat 9mo ago

I feel more and more like. That email should be like DMs. Do you want to accept emails from xxx? Yes No On client side...

chrisjj 9mo ago
Very dangerous, when the same From address may be used for "Log in inside 14 days or your dormant account will be deleted".
chihuahua 9mo ago
I think that would lead to this: Do you want to accept emails from "For a limited time, save up to 35% on orders from Fluppsi! Click Yes for this amazing opportunity!"

chrisjj 9mo ago

> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. It is not specific to "AI" but it is very much related to it. > If too many users unsubscribe, they just add one more category and “accidentally” opt-in everyone ... and "forget" to add its opt-out to the list.

shantnutiwari 9mo ago

> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all Yeah, many companies do that. I unsusbcribed from newline, they still keep spamming me. Funny thing is, they realised they had made a mistake and promised to remove unsubs. One week later, the spam started. The correct solution is the spam button. Always

chrisjj 9mo ago
The spam button risks false positives.
- saghm 9mo ago
  It's not a false positive to classify a company as a bad actor and move their emails to the spam folder if they refuse to respect user choices. If anything, I wish it would happen more often and at a massive scale, because then maybe companies would have an incentive to stop being so hostile around this.
  - chrisjj 9mo ago
    Agreed, but the false positive I am referring to is the cathching of the non-spam message from the source of the previous spam message.
    - solid_fuel 9mo ago
      They shouldn't send marketing mail from an address they want to be read. I think that's been the standard for a while, in practice - most actual transactions come from orders@<blank> or something similar while marketing mail comes from a dozen other addresses.
      - chrisjj 9mo ago
        Agreed, but many do. They want all mail to be read. Worst offender here is a bank.
  - deleted 9mo ago

hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago

There’s probably a bigger association with it. I don’t like ai and see it everywhere, in every app I use, every service I purchase, my goddamn start bar. So, when they start emailing unwanted emails, it feels like a spam problem, when really it’s insidious on multiple fronts. I can’t wait for the enshittification phase. When the products royally fuck their fan base.

hojiron 9mo ago

Still happy that Tuta Mail is anti AI, and does not push ads on you via email. I wonder who told Proton that it’s a good idea to copy big tech tactics.

chrisjj 9mo ago
Does?? > I wonder who told Proton that it’s a good idea to copy big tech tactics. The lure of big tech profits.
- hojiron 9mo ago
  Not :)
- ToucanLoucan 9mo ago
  Genuinely: What profits!?! The only company profiting from AI has been nVidia. Every indicator we've received for this entire alleged industry is companies buying hundreds of millions of dollars in graphics cards that then either sit in warehouses depreciating in value or, worse, are plugged in and immediately start losing money. The tech industry has coasted on it's hypergrowth story for decades, a story laden with as many bubbles as actual industries that sprang up. All the good ideas are done now. All the products anyone actually needs exist, are enshittified, and are selling user data to anyone who will pay, including products that exist solely to remove your data from everyone who bought it and probably then sell it to some other people. This shit is stupid at this point. All Silicon Valley has to do is to grow up into a mature industry with sensible business practices and sustainable models of generating revenue that in most other industries would be fantastic, and they're absolutely apoplectic about this. They are so addicted to the easy, cheap services that upended entire other industries and made them rich beyond imagining that they will literally say, out loud, with their human mouths, that it is a bad, undesirable thing to simply have a business that makes some money. The people at the top of this industry are literally fucking deranged and should be interred at a psychiatric facility for awhile for their and everyone else's good.
  - chrisjj 9mo ago

skywhopper 9mo ago

It is entirely related, because AI marketing is an amped up version of traditional dark-pattern marketing. And since every tech company is on the AI hype train, then they all fall into the same willingness to justify the worst behavior because of their desperate need to get on the forefront of what they’ve convinced themselves is the only path to growth. But as consumers, since we are confronted with all tech companies all following the same dark patterns, we feel the impact suddenly much stronger than with past one-at-a-time panicky company over-marketing efforts.

ivan_gammel 9mo ago
AI marketing is not different at all from performance marketing of other solutions. This is really just ordinary consent management and privacy problem. I have participated in large scale email marketing implementations too, and know how it looks from the inside. As a tech partner you may even have a good peer on the business side who cares about customers and compliance, but institutional resistance is still hard to overcome. Sometimes it is just as dumb as an old spreadsheet with contacts being uploaded again and again into your mass mail system, without any consent tracking and ignoring any opt-outs that came after the spreadsheet was created.

boringg 9mo ago

The idea that the marketing team has the ability to really push back against senior management doesn't align with the reality I have seen. The best they can do is say that this will do brand damage -- but they don't have the ability to really call the shots. Most organizations marketing is not in a real seat of power - more like an advisory position. I'm not trying to unfair to marketing - they do have an important role - I have hardly seen a company give marketing real power at an org. So the idea that this is because marketing don't push back on senior management -- is because they know they don't have the power to do this.

xigoi 9mo ago
“I was just following orders” is not an excuse. If your job requires you to do immoral things, it is your responsibility to quit.
ivan_gammel 9mo ago
They may not have power to push back on KPIs, but even just sticking to regulatory compliance would be good enough. Nobody in management will say in writing that marketing should ignore GDPR, for example. And that means that if you, say, introduce a new category, everyone is supposed to be unsubscribed by default. So non-compliance is always a choice.

xnx 9mo ago

> If too many users unsubscribe, they just add one more category and “accidentally” opt-in everyone. I always "report spam" ("!" key in GMail) before unsubscribing.

janalsncm 9mo ago

This was my first reaction too. It is a bit ironic that the issue of “overlapping labels” can be applied to the OP as well. My instinct is to classify this as an email consent issue not because AI needs defending, but because the solution need not be specific to AI. The Next Big Thing will also probably have this problem because marketing is at odds making your customers happy with a great product.

autoexec 9mo ago

The spam was advertising AI, the point of the article was how aggressively AI is being shoved down our throats, and it seems very likely that when he went to complain about the AI spam it was an an AI chatbot which gave him the useless answers until it finally "checked with the team" (presumably a human) who lied to him about what counted as AI spam. It seems like this is very much about AI even though it's ultimately humans pushing AI and disregarding people's spam preferences. Right now, everything "AI" is ultimately humans (like the way humans are using/abusing the AI tools, or the human intellect behind all of the data that was used to train them and all of the knowledge they output, or the humans deciding what they'll allow their AI to be used for, or the humans failing to safeguard the users of their AI products, etc) so this is as much about AI as anything is.

jasode 9mo ago
>The spam was advertising AI, the point of the article was how aggressively AI [...] It seems like this is very much about AI Yes, the gp you responded to already said the same thing that the particular email was about AI (Lumos) when he wrote : >", even if the product in question is AI-related." To go beyond that, the gp highlighted that the bad behavior is rooted in companies ignoring customers' email preferences instead of the AI. The article is misdiagnosing the unwanted email issue as "AI Consent Problem" when it's actually fundamentally about "Email Consent Problem". The author deliberately opted out of email marketing and Proton ignored it (by "mistake") and this is a common misbehavior companies did before AI. It's worth separating those 2 factors out. We get unwanted spam about "Amazon Pharmacy" and "Apple TV" that overrides our profile settings to opt-out of those emails but that doesn't mean we misdiagnose it as "Pharmacy Consent Problem" and "Video Streaming Consent Problem". Instead, the generalization is still fundamentally an "email consent" problem. Always has been. The repeated abuse of the customer's email address (with or without AI in the picture) is what the gp was emphasizing. Likewise, if a future hot technology household such as residential robots causes email marketing campaigns that blasts unwanted spam about Tesla house robots... the issue of that unwanted spam "Tesla robots 10% off!" ... is still about ignoring customers' email preferences. The unwanted robots themselves would be a separate issue. Companies will continue to make "mistakes" to send out new marketing email spam with <HotNewThing> in the subject field that will infuriate customers. And the future root cause of that problem still won't be <HotNewThing> but instead about companies ignoring customers email preferences because the incentives and greed are too great.

KingOfCoders 9mo ago

Last to months several of my connections on Linkedin used private messaging for mass marketing "emails" - "normal" proper companies, not recruiters/outsourcing/... that have been spamming us for years. There is not limit to the things they will try. On Proton: I don't get the love they get here. There ethics I find questionable and their product (e.g. search) I find unusable.

nottorp 9mo ago

> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. Did they ever send Rust related unsolicited emails?