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.
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.
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.
> 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.
We're talking about a group of people whose core skill is convincing people to pay for stuff that isn't worth it. You and I may know they're worthless, but that doesn't mean they're not getting paid.
Let's assume you have a mom that loves you very much and she let's your know by text on a semi-regular basis. She asks you to come by on Friday. That might seem like a nice idea to you. You reply yes, and you go.
Now, imagine you got messages from what appears to be not 100 but, oh I don't know, 1 000 000 000 000 000 of the very best moms that have ever existed.
And they all do love you so very much. And they do let you by writing these most beautifully touching text messages. And they all want to meet up on Friday.
What is going to happen next? Here is what is not going to happen: You are not going to consider meeting any of them Friday, any week. You will, after the shortest of whiles, shut down to this signal. Because it's not actually a signal anymore. The noise floor has gone up and the most beautifully crafted, most personalized text messages of all time are just noise now.
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
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)
> However, there is only one kind of noise that is noise for everyone: literal noise.
I feel like you're a bit too literal here. When people talk about noise it doesn't mean mathematically pure noise. A signal-to-noise ratio close to 1 is also colloquially called noise.
He is talking about semantic noise. Something that appears to have substance but is just slop actually. When everything is that. Then all email will become equivalent to slop. How could it not? Someone will be burned once or twice, but after that, there is a semantic phase shift.
Consider that we have fairly decent anti-spam measures which do not look at the body of a message. To these methods, it is irrelevant how cleverly crafted the text is.
I reject something like 80% of all spam by the simple fact the hosts which try to deliver it do not have reverse DNS. Works like magic.
E-mail is reputation based. Once your IP address is identified by a reputation service as being a source of spam, subscribers of the service just block your address. (Or more: your entire IP block, if you're a persistent source of spam, and the ISP doesn't cooperate in shutting you down.)
To defeat reputation based services driven by reporting, your spams have to be so clever that they fool almost everyone, so that nobody reports you. That seems impractical.
How AI spammers could advance in the war might be to create large numbers of plausible accounts on a mass e-mail provider like g-mail. It's impractical to block g-mail. If the accounts behave like unique individuals that each target small numbers of users with individually crafted content (i.e. none of these fake identities is a high volume source), that seems like a challenge to detect.
These IP blocklist services also have a reputation of their own: if you are trying to send legitimate mail, there's a good chance your IP is on several of these blocklists for reasons you have nothing to do with. You can only remove it by grovelling and paying lots of money (extortion). So using one of them will cause you to reject legitimate mail.
What is "just slop" though? A spam advert for a product is still an advert for a product. Therefore it's not just semantic noise, it is still an advert for a product, and therefore his point is invalid: there is an ROI and people will continue to be employed to do it
Let's just call it slop then. Peak HN: Another conversation is logjammed by nitpicking the precise definition of a word rather than discussing the overall point.
Except I am still discussing the point: the companies won't stop getting an ROI because "slop" still produces an ROI, even if people know it's slop, because it isn't contentless noise, it has semantic content.
Just because you and the others don't understand what point I'm making doesn't mean the conversation is "logjammed". I am still discussing the overall point, you just don't see it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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P.S.: From the random free-association neuron, an adapted Harry Potter quote:
> Fudge continued, “Remove the moderation LLMs? I’d be kicked out of office! Half of us only feel safe in our beds at night because we know the AI are standing guard for misinformation on AzkabanTube!”
> “The rest of us sleep less soundly knowing you have put Lord Bullshittermort’s most dangerous channels in the care of systems that will serve him the instant he makes the correct prompts! They will not remain loyal to you when he can offer them much more scope for their training and outputs! With the LLMs and his old supporters behind him, you’ll find it hard to stop him!”
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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!”
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.
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...
When they're paying real money to scam you, wasting their time isn't a terrible idea. Like keeping the Microsoft virus scammers on the phone for an hour while you set up a virtual machine for them to remote into.
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.
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.
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 .
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Marketing is fundamentally aimed at changing people's opinions. This can be done
1. covertly (why do you need to do it covertly? Would people mind if they knew? Doesn't that indicate you're doing them a disservice?)
2. overtly, against people's will. (Again, doesn't that indicate you're doing them a disservice?)
3. overtly, with their consent (express or assumed). How often have you seen this happen?
The "indicates" vs "shows" distinction above deals with the edge case of "interacting with covert/unwanted marketing is actually good for them, even if they don't know it". I dare you to make that argument...
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.
> 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.
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[0] Or negative-sum, if you account for externalities.
> 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.
Are we supposed to silently suffer because capitalism says so?
Spammers and salespeople are pretty much on the same level as criminals in my book. Heck, whenever someone calls me for some sort of unsolicited survey or similar, I think "these people have such low standards, they would also sell heroin on the street if they had any source."
Suffering is "the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship".
Having to delete the occasional marketing or sales email that get past your spam filter is hardly any of these. Annoying or frustrating, yes. Suffering? Really?
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.
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.