I Received an AI Email

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):<p>&gt; Could an AI agent craft compelling emails that would capture people&#x27;s attention and drive engagement, all while maintaining a level of personalization that feels human? I decided to find out.<p>&gt; 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&#x27;d tune out immediately.<p>&gt; Incredibly, not a single recipient seemed to detect that the emails were AI-generated.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wisp.blog&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-personalized-email-for-outreach" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wisp.blog&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-...</a><p>The technical part surprised me: they string together multiple LLMs which do all the work. It&#x27;s a shame the author&#x27;s passions are directed towards AI slop-email spam, all for <i>capturing attention and driving engagement</i>.<p>How much of our societal progress and collective thought and innovation has gone to capturing attention and driving up engagement, I wonder.

The future - megawatts of electricity being used, 24&#x2F;7 as armies of LLMs email and debate each other, and try to sell each other programs at a great discount.<p>As for the humans, we went fishing instead.

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.<p>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.<p>At least with AI sending this crap nobody can use these emails to justify their sales bonus.

It&#x27;s a sign of things to come. We&#x27;re going to have our own AI agents that filter and respond (or not respond) to these kinds of messages. Agents interacting with other agents. The bar to get hold of a real person is going to become that much higher. It is going to be messy for some time as agents war with other agents to reach the human eyeball. Some assholes are going to make a ton of money in the short term exploiting the gap - just like early spam kings did.

This is going to become more common everywhere.<p>If the dead internet theory isn&#x27;t already true, it is going to be soon.<p>Such &quot;personalized&quot; cold outreach is seen as the next holy grail by marketers and will be a common sight on LinkedIn, Twitter, Email etc, soon.

To make this less spammy, the person sending out the emails could&#x27;ve instead used AI to filter through a smaller set of people where their product is likely to generate very high interest, based on a prompt containing the product description and perhaps a summary of the things the potential recipient blogged about. Then, they could&#x27;ve used that short list to write a set of _actually_ personalized outreach emails with high chance of impact.<p>You could refine this in further iterations by also adding examples based on previous correct&#x2F;incorrect interest predictions, thereby effectively reducing the amount of spam &#x2F; making cold outreach suck less.<p>There are different ways to use AI to achieve the same goals, some more responsible than others.

At some point automated emails will be read by auto reader, then the cycle will be completed.<p>I&#x27;ve actually made an internal company April fools website. Too bad I&#x27;ve never kept a copy but here goes.<p>It&#x27;s called Proxy Ai. It reads your emails so you don&#x27;t have to. It reads every posts on social media so you don&#x27;t FOMO. It communicates with those chatty colleagues so you don&#x27;t have to. Proxy Ai... So you don&#x27;t have to.<p>&quot;That actually sounds like a pretty good product. Does it send you a summary of the conversations, emails and social media posts?&quot;<p>&quot;No&quot;

I received a nice email the other day after one of my blog posts got posted on HN.<p>It said:<p>Hi -<p>Just a note to say I&#x27;m a big fan of your writing. I always learn something and love your voice, which is hilarious and singular.<p>Write a book!<p>Best,<p>{Name}<p>{Link to sender&#x27;s startup}<p>{Link to sender&#x27;s substack}<p>New to writing online, it made me feel really good that someone enjoyed what I wrote and took the time to write and say so.<p>After reading this piece, though, I went back and read it again, and I just don&#x27;t know. It&#x27;s not quite GPT&#x27;s usual voice, but it is strangely non-specific.<p>The startup is an AI startup, the person&#x27;s Substack is full of generative AI illustrations, and they do seem like an AI fan, but reading their posts, they also seem like someone who&#x27;s genuinely interested in preventing a dystopia.<p>I suppose receiving encouraging emails from strangers is just another situation that&#x27;ll have us looking over our shoulders now, on guard, trying to walk the line between naivety and paranoia.

I use catchall email addresses. If your service is called foobar.com I will register at your place with foobar.com@mydomain.com<p>If I <i>ever</i> receive spam addressed to foobar.com@mydomain.com that is unrelated to your service I know you leaked or abused my data. Result: you will get a DSGVO complaint and I filter all emails addressed to this address from my inbox.<p>The good thing about using a catchall email address is that I don&#x27;t have to create a mailbox for each service&#x2F;purpose, I can just make email addresses up as I go. All you need for that is your own domain and a mailserver that aupports it.

It&#x27;s all fun and games until HR use AI to write your annual performance review in which it is suggested that you got fired for sexual misconduct (this hallucinated from other guy&#x27;s HR files), won a sales bonus for selling AI to your company (it was the other way round and it&#x27;s the sales guy who got it), and are due to enter retirement (you are 29, but most of the company is over 50, so the probabilistic model prefers that passage of text).

AI will not only pass many classical spam filters (Bayesian filters), it will also make it much harder for humans to detect spam (OP&#x27;s post being a good example).<p>I never fell for a spam mail so far (i.e. not once clicked a link like OP did), but I fully expect this will change soon. Tough times for people that commonly expect mail from random strangers.

You know, I&#x27;ve done startups for over 20 years now. Operated almost all the orgs, but spent the most time in go to market&#x2F;marketing. I&#x27;m building an incubator&#x2F;accelerator thing in Canada and I&#x27;m starting it from scratch, so it&#x27;s basically doing another startup (something I swore I&#x27;d never do, fml).<p>Hadn&#x27;t touched marketing for ~5 years, as I said I know the org well so I thought it will take me about a month to get the next 6 months of marketing built and automated. How wrong was I. 7 days later, the full marketing org is running, at a decent scale, on autopilot, for a year, and I don&#x27;t know if&#x2F;when I&#x27;d need to hire someone into marketing.<p>Marketing has not fundamentally changed, but it&#x27;s changed such that one individual could fully operate the fundamentals. Personally I love it, I&#x27;m sure others are going nuts.

just generate an AI reply and automate the flow :)<p>&gt; Hey Raymond,<p>Thank you so much for your kind words about my post on revamping my homelab! It’s always a pleasure to hear from someone who appreciates the journey of continuous improvement. Your message truly brightened my day.<p>Indeed, using Deno Fresh for my blog has been an exciting adventure. The process of managing updates and deployments, while sometimes challenging, has been incredibly rewarding. It’s like tending to a garden, where each update is a new seed planted, and every deployment is a blossom of progress. The satisfaction of seeing everything come together is unparalleled.<p>Your introduction of Wisp has certainly piqued my interest. A CMS that simplifies content management sounds like a dream come true, especially for someone like me who is always looking for ways to streamline processes and enhance efficiency. The name “Wisp” itself evokes a sense of lightness and ease, which is exactly what one hopes for in a content management system.<p>I would love to learn more about Wisp and how it could potentially fit into my workflow. The idea of having a tool that can make content management more intuitive and less time-consuming is very appealing. Could you share more details about its features and how it stands out from other CMS options? I’m particularly interested in how it handles updates and deployments, as these are crucial aspects for me.<p>Thank you again for reaching out and for thinking of me. I’m looking forward to hearing more about Wisp and exploring the possibilities it offers. Let’s continue this conversation and see where it leads!<p>Best regards, Tim

There are laws to mandate unsubscribe links on emails. There should be laws to mandate disclaimers when emails were sent through an automated process.<p>No one believes the CEO has taken the time to email you with onboarding instructions immediately after signing up anymore. But outreach tactics like this are still quite manipulative.

The thing that’s so inherently wrong about it is that it’s dishonesty straight out of the door.<p>This person wants me to buy their product, and before they can get a word out about it they’re already lying to me - about the origin, the intent, the faux thoughtfulness.<p>I want nothing to do with shameless dishonesty. This isn’t the way to sell your product.<p>Wisp, if you’re reading this, I now have a permanent negative image of your brand.

I think the end result for email is going to be the same as with mobile numbers. Just block everything by default unless they are in your contacts.<p>Enormous amounts of email will be generated but no one will ever see it.

I received a very similar automated email from the same dev. Marked it as spam right away:<p>---<p>Hey Travis,<p>Checked out the Next.js Notion Starter Kit. Amazing project!<p>Noticed you might be juggling multiple tools to manage content. Ever thought about a headless CMS that can streamline this?<p>Wisp might be a handy solution. Let me know what you think!<p>Cheers, Raymond

&gt; And their blogpost starts of with:<p>&gt;&gt; Have you ever received an email that felt so personalized, so tailored to your interests and experiences, that you couldn&#x27;t help but be intrigued? What if I told you that email wasn&#x27;t crafted by a human, but by an artificial intelligence (AI) agent?<p><i>&gt; I don&#x27;t really have words for this, but I dislike this.</i><p>What a classy understatement. I find the strategy employed by Wisp predictable and infuriating. Like insects or other near-automata, humanity is racing to the bottom with &quot;Generative AI&quot;. And I use &quot;AI&quot; in the loosest possible sense here, because once you pull back the curtain, current tech is actually only a slightly better Markov chain.<p>After using chatgpt regularly, it&#x27;s responses to anything but the most trivial, clueless questions are riddled with errors and &quot;hallucinations&quot;. I often don&#x27;t bother anymore, because it&#x27;s easier to go to the original source: stackoverflow, reddit, and community forums. Gag. It does still make a good shrink &#x2F; Eliza replacement.

I won&#x27;t add to the AI debate already well expressed by other commenters but one thing i don&#x27;t understand is why the author has posted the name of the &quot;spammed&quot; product and a direct link to their blog: consider how much did he helped them having new traffic and potential customers

Really makes me appreciate that unsolicited emails are illegal in some European countries like Germany

I open emails because I believe you spent time on me, which is precious, so I reply. If an AI generates cold emails, there&#x27;s no real time spent, making personalization feel deceptive, which is bad for user experience.<p>AI spam emails will definitely happen on a large scale in the future, but on the optimistic side, we&#x27;ll have AI assistants to read every email. Personalization won&#x27;t really matter; it only matters if the marketed service is genuinely useful to me. In the future, if I have a need, my AI will find the best solution by considering many options. Previously, this was time-consuming, but now AI ensures we find the most suitable solution.<p>No fancy marketing will be needed because AI will filter most of them. In the end, marketers will find that the most efficient way to market is to honestly list out your service&#x2F;product specs, as AI will compare them. On the other hand, for things I&#x27;m not sure I need, AI will help judge if they are indeed useful to me, regardless of how fancy the email&#x2F;call is. If they are, it will facilitate cooperation; if not, it will skip them.<p>Therefore, marketing may still have a role: to help you discover things you aren&#x27;t fully aware you need, and AI will help you decide if you really need them.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wisp.blog&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-personalized-email-for-outreach" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wisp.blog&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-...</a><p>&gt;&quot;I knew that if recipients detected even a whiff of a generic, mass-produced message, they&#x27;d tune out immediately.&quot;<p>Then don&#x27;t brag about it on your blog! Sheez.<p>(Ok, so technically he&#x27;s not bragging about it on his blog, because it&#x27;s probably just an LLM bragging about it on his blog for him, but that&#x27;s the point!)

&gt;&gt; I used AI agents to send out nearly 1,000 personalized emails to developers with public blogs on GitHub.<p>&gt; Does this mean that I should private my GitHub-mirror to my personal blog, because this can become a common thing?<p>Abusing public information on GitHub has become more common. The other day, I received some cryptocurrency spam ads from GitHub. It turns out to be a bot injecting ads as issues on other people&#x27;s repos and randomly @ing accounts. It deleted such issues immediately, so the net effect is that I get an unfilterable spam email.

&gt; Have you ever received an email that felt so personalized, so tailored to your interests and experiences, that you couldn&#x27;t help but be intrigued?<p>Did he use an LLM to write the blog post too?

From a link in the article:<p>&gt; It felt like a family fridge decorated with printed stock art of children’s drawings.<p>Yep. &quot;Generative AI&quot; is like an infinite clip-art gallery that can be searched with very specific queries.<p>The coin has two sides: in some situations it devalues human effort - as in writing (long&#x2F;detailed) documents in formal language is now attainable by everyone. In situations where sincerity and originality matters, human effort has now increased in value.

I hate to say but this AI written oureach is strikingly similar to recruiter emails I received in the past 5-6 years about perfect matches so apparently my conclusion was right about that robots are working in the HR field. Carbon not silicon based back then. Actually this AI sounds much more intelligent bringing up realistic similarities. Those perfect match robots did not get beyond picking single keywords chosen of the dozens in LinkedIn account for declaring perfect match while the scope of the job and requirements were off by miles.<p>Watch out recruiters, AI can do better than you! Not like I will like these unsolicited outreaches more, the exact number is zero, how many times I found these useful or relevant before when biorobots wrote and sent and administrated it in half or just few minutes, and I do not look forward having these now on mass scale when hundreds of AI could write thousands, flooding my email account, making it absolutely unusable.

There must be a new communication method for the upcoming AI age. Actual, person-to-person direct communication.<p>Just as most of us ignore calls from unknown numbers, we may also default to ignoring emails from unknown senders in the future. This could lead to a reluctance to send emails, as they might be perceived as &quot;unknown&quot; to the recipient.

I do receive phishing emails; some of them are so well-crafted that I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ve fooled some people out there. To the point where I&#x27;ve created a folder called &quot;nice_try_phishing&quot; where I collect them for further investigation. For example, one email was sent before I renewed a domain as a reminder to renew, with legitimate links to the domain registrar except for the action link. They had the registrar&#x27;s domain name too, but with a different, very similar TLD. Another one is a &quot;failed email delivery,&quot; and they did the research about which service I&#x27;m using to mimic such an automated message, with loaded links.<p>Whether they are AI or not, I have no idea, but sometimes, and recently in emails, I purposely make a typo or grammar mistake to add some &quot;human&quot; touch to it, knowing that an AI will always type a perfect one.

But that email is spam, no matter if automatically or manually generated.<p>How it was written is not relevant. Off to the trash it goes.

&quot;Personalized&quot; spam generated from templates has been a thing forever. I&#x27;ve received plenty of such emails from recruiters highlighting my past experience, projects and what I&#x27;d be a good fit for. LLMs make them a bit more real, but overall the game hasn&#x27;t really changed.

Oh spam, the only industry AI had truly revolutionized so far.

the blog he links to is clearly AI slop too. Even the LLM he used to write it agrees that what he&#x27;s doing is unethical.<p>&gt; At the same time, we need to establish guidelines around transparency and consent for AI-driven communications at scale. Deception through omission is still deception – people should be aware when they&#x27;re interacting with an AI agent versus a human.<p>This is clearly pissing in the pool. I&#x27;ve gotten so much value from people who have made their emails public with a &#x27;if you&#x27;re curious or learning feel free to email me&#x27; (e.g. patio11) and I&#x27;ve long had the invitation in my HN profile too.<p>Nasty for people to abuse this to extract value for the few weeks&#x2F;months it takes people to realise what&#x27;s happening and make themselves harder to contact.

Sadly, AI allows dumb people to do dumb things more efficiently.<p>This reminds me of AI-generated fake security vulnerability reports about curl: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38845878">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38845878</a>

I&#x27;ve had a similar experience, but 4 years ago. GPT existed, but without the Chat prefix, and OpenAI was invite only.<p>They reached out to me, asking whether my company would be interested in Something Somethingification. I decided that since I don&#x27;t even understand the term, I&#x27;m not the right person, and decided to ignore it.<p>Then they followed up. Meh.<p>Then they followed up again, and I thought &quot;okay, a little reward for perseverance&quot;, and replied something along the lines of (I don&#x27;t work there anymore, no access to the original):<p>&quot;Hey, thank you for reaching out.<p>Unfortunately, since I don&#x27;t even know what Something Somethingification is, I am not the right person to talk to. So I&#x27;ll kindly pass and consider this email human-generated spam. Thanks!&quot;<p>A response came. Within a minute, barely seconds after &quot;undo send&quot; disappeared.<p>&quot;Who would be the best person to reach out to, then?<p>By the way, this is a GPT assisted conversation, so it&#x27;s a computer generated spam.&quot;<p>WHAAAAT. This really got me. Remember, it was 2021.<p>&quot;Okay&quot;, I replied, &quot;Now you got my interest!<p>How many such conversations are you able to have at the same time?&quot;<p>It replied, within a minute. It contained a quite from Arthur C. Clarke that &quot;every technology advanced enough is indistinguishable from magic&quot; and his picture. And an answer: &quot;Actually, sourcing contacts is the bottleneck, so we have only a few of these each day. Anyway, do you happen to know who we could reach out to instead?&quot;.<p>I was amazed, I decided I&#x27;ll reward this with what they want.<p>I replied how impressive it is again, as the whole conversation made sense, and it gave them a contact to a director that could be the right person. They won this one.

if you don&#x27;t want to support this behaviour, at the very least i would put a nofollow on that blog link, or consider removing it altogether

So, what are the implications of this for spam detection? This is clearly spam, sent in an automated way, but nearly indistinguishable from an e-mail written by a human.<p>We need to update our spam filtering techniques, fast. Somehow. But how?

Spare a thought for the gullible, children and teens, the elderly, those with restrained understanding, and those with English as a second language.<p>They will all lose money, time and more with the coming wave of spam and fraud.

Even without AI, the message feels spammy.<p>&quot;Hey, love your work. <i>random flattery</i> What do you think about mine?&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve received a few messages like that before LLMs were around, just an annoying self-marketing technique.

Perhaps a new signature technology can be used to prove (or at least lend credence to) human authorship?<p>Something like a marriage of a digital signature with a captcha: the message has a digital signature of the sender that can be verified with their public key, but it is somehow verifiable that the particular signature provider only does the signature if a human being completes the (difficult AI-proof) captcha.<p>Something like this approach can at least mitigate the mass AI email problem, although the one-off AI emails are unlikely to be slowed by this approach.

Could this be addressed with cryptography, digital ids and signatures? Imagine it were possible to add a signature that proves that I own some &quot;human&quot; identity (like a national id), or that I possess some scarce resource (like a github account with some level of activity) and that today I sent no more that 20 emails. If I want to conceal my identity, I can use zero knowledge proofs. If you don&#x27;t sign this way, or if your daily email counter exceeds 100, your mail ends up as spam.

It might be only me, but never in my life I followed up on a growth hack email, be it manually crafted or AI-generated. If you want to sell me something and I didn&#x27;t ask you first, I instantly become blind to the message and automatically send to spam without even registering, similar to Web popups. I&#x27;m constantly astonished that growth hack marketing has any conversion rate, evidently there&#x27;s a chunk of population that&#x27;s way more trusting than me.

&gt; Does this mean that I should private my GitHub-mirror to my personal blog, because this can become a common thing? I have removed my email from my GitHub-profile now, but they can probably get it from my Git-log anyway...<p>It&#x27;s possible to use a noreply.github.com linked to your username for making commits. And you can to change the authorship of past commits in your own repos with write access.<p>I try to avoid give my email in a public and processable format whenever possible.

I received a similar email today, from someone looking to be my &quot;Chief of Staff&#x2F;Head of Ops.&quot;<p>The only problem is that they referenced a role at a company I&#x27;m no longer at. The, presumably AI, author crafted the email in reference to my former role at a different startup.<p>After seeing this thread, I decided to follow up on my AI suspicions. Nothing conclusive, but that person is currently touting that they&#x27;ve sold their &quot;course&quot; to &quot;1000+ founders.&quot;<p>No thanks.

If John Doe crafts a message himself and sends it to 100000 recipients, or if he uses ChatGPT to generate a message and then send it to 100000 recipients, what’s the difference?<p>Both are unsolicited emails, i.e. spam.<p>I feel confident that Gmail’s spam filter will be able to handle this quite well.<p>I’m betting that the introduction of LLMs will not change the fundamentals of spam-fighting.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;spam.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;spam.html</a>

PSA: GitHub has a “private” email feature so you don’t have to use your real email in commits.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.github.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;account-and-profile&#x2F;setting-up-and-managing-your-personal-account-on-github&#x2F;managing-email-preferences&#x2F;setting-your-commit-email-address#setting-your-commit-email-address-on-github" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.github.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;account-and-profile&#x2F;setting-up-an...</a>

Email already feels pretty dead. This will just hasten the move to walled gardens like Slack, Twitter, WhatsApp, where it&#x27;s harder to be a bot sending spam.

Can anyone explain why the SUBJECT LINE of the email was REDACTED in this blog post intro other than to give a false sense of being already drawn in to the email contents?<p>I&#x27;m not after shallow interactions today and I would use it (much like a dumb spam filter) to judge a new sender&#x27;s respect for my time expecting them to have stated their business with total upfront clarity, not mystery.

This is bad news, because personalisation was a big advantage of spam filters.<p>Everyone&#x27;s spam filter is tuned differently from others&#x27;, so spammers had a hard time beating this with automated messages. About the best they could do was adding random keywords in hopes of triggering someone&#x27;s positive &quot;not spam&quot; trigger.<p>Now spammers gain personalisation at scale, so this advantage is at risk.

&gt; I have removed my email from my GitHub-profile now, but they can probably get it from my Git-log anyway...<p>And also from the About page on the linked website

This will suck for a long time, just like spam, clickbait, social media upvoting algorithms, cigarettes, soda. But eventually we&#x27;ll sense it and build antibodies to it like everything else.<p>Even now, we&#x27;re starting to have a sense for which images and text were AI generated. And they&#x27;ll evolve to get around the antibodies. And we&#x27;ll build new ones.

We already know the sales reps that bombard us with emails don&#x27;t give a **, now they&#x27;re just better at pretending.

I made a service to reply to marketing emails using GPT:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;skorokithakis&#x2F;spamgpt">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;skorokithakis&#x2F;spamgpt</a><p>It was a bit of fun, until I realized that most of the replied from the spammers were AI as well. We were just automatically spamming each other while OpenAI made money.<p>I stopped using it then.

I already delete unread emails like this that are written by humans. Unless there’s a specific bit of text in the email that’s generated by the new enquiry button on my website or someone has left an answerphone message then it’s deleted unread. There’s no way I have time to read every marketing email I receive like this guy.

The sad thing is, that AI email campaign - while touted as a success - was actually a failure.<p>Although he got more click-throughs to the top of his funnel, none of them are going to pass through to a conversion because once you reach his site, you realize that he&#x27;s deceived you.<p>That he doesn&#x27;t even realize this is concerning...

I find dropping “I” at the start of a sentence to be a far greater trigger. No one is that busy. AI or not.

This why I’d consider shorting NVIDA at these prices. I get there are use case where it really adds value, but I think they are more limited to specific fields than people are acknowledging and forecasting.<p>The general public doesn’t want or need it. They want to work less and get paid more.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240703051238&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timharek.no&#x2F;blog&#x2F;i-received-an-ai-email" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240703051238&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timharek....</a>

I no longer bother to answer anything to cold emails or LinkedIn messages. Despate the personal tone, they seem to mostly driven by marketing automation tools.<p>Maybe in future I will have my ”AI secretary” to answer those and have a discussion with the ”AI sales assistant”.

ok does it mean an end to email? it&#x27;s nearly free to send emails to anyone. for comparison, it&#x27;s much more expensive to send linkedin messages or create ads on social networks. did anyone attempt to create a paid email service (pay to send)?

AI or not, cold emailing is dead. I receive tons of these by email and LinkedIn, to the point that I stopped reading them.<p>I talked to many people, and all have developed immunity against the cold outreach.

I get one of these every week or two. If someone says they&#x27;re &quot;impressed with the work you&#x27;re doing&quot; at my family S-corporation that magically W2-ifies my contract gigs, it&#x27;s kind of a giveaway.

You received a SPAM email, did you report it as such? The AI part barely matters.

Not quite AI, but I been getting targeted spam from shitty startups and some job offers for the last couple years to my github commit email. It is scraped from github as I use it nowhere else.

&gt; Does this mean that I should private my GitHub-mirror to my personal blog, because this can become a common thing?<p>You definitely should mark this email as spam so this cannot become a common thing.

The spiteful part of me wants to spin something up to punish this sort of behavior symmetrically by automating cold emails in the other direction to waste his time.

Bastards. AI has been a massive ass pain, and marketers are the worst (:<p>People sending AI crap to others should have their email accounts banned.

I get 2 of those per day now due to my LinkedIn profile.<p>One issue I see is that it’s much harder to employ an LLM defensively (for filtering) than offensively.<p>Welp.

I have been building [GabrielAI](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getgabrielai.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getgabrielai.com</a>) also for address the too much spam in Gmail use case.<p>Specifically smart filter to remove SPAM in a smarter way.<p>Most people get a lot of spam from sales agents, SEO services, start-up accelerator, etc...<p>With GabrielAI you can say stuff like:<p>&quot;If the email is from a SEO agency or it is trying to sell me SEO service&quot;<p>Then move it to SPAM.<p>Similarly for all other type of spam or emails.<p>You can also move stuff to different labels in Gmail to organise your inbox.

I wonder if some &quot;prompt injection defense&quot; embedded in public blog posts could help identify such AI-generated spam.

Perhaps this will finally usher in the era of actually decoupling what is said from who said it (post post colonialism?)

I regularly get emails that start with “I hope this note find you well”, and I always assume they used chatgpt.

We’ve lived with billions of spam emails for decades. I don’t know if the method of writing the emails matters much.<p>Spam is spam?

That&#x27;s exactly why I&#x27;m not afraid of AGI. We will be drowned by AI generated crap long before

Email clients will soon have a new folder called &#x27;AI&#x27;, next to spam.

so the cold email worked :) You didn&#x27;t buy the service, but at least you checked out their website

My definition of wisdom is the ability to responsibly use intelligence, and while as a species we are blessed with an amazing amount of intelligence, our wisdom has not advanced accordingly. The phrase that with great power comes great responsibility is not something that is taken very seriously where it counts, not even (or especially?) in high level global politics and with all our technology, it seems that our actions are mainly determined by the same limited animal psychology that determined how cavemen behaved. It&#x27;s just that now the stakes are much higher, and junk mail from AI is the least of those problems.<p>The &quot;upside&quot; is that nature eventually takes care of things when they go out of equilibrium, so there might be a forest fire on the horizon to restore it. In the case of AI spam, it might cause people to automatically filter their incoming mail from any content that even implicitly tries to sell something, or even any email arriving from an address that is not on their whitelist. This might eventually cause people to need to actually physically meet (gasp!) in order to add each other to their whitelist.

If he were really annoyed he wouldn&#x27;t have marketed Wisp CMS?

Please start using a spellchecker. &quot;excately&quot; and &quot;particilar&quot; are not acceptable.<p>Edit: &quot;Unnecessary&quot; might be my judgement, instead of &quot;acceptable.&quot;

AI will also allow for better spam filters

From the linked article from this blogpost:<p>&gt; There&#x27;s also the question of ethical considerations around using AI for mass personalized outreach. While my experiment yielded positive results, with recipients appreciating the personalized touch, there&#x27;s a potential slippery slope.<p>Unbelievable... I&#x27;m not a philosopher, but in my understanding, being ethical doesn&#x27;t mean walking the line just fine so as people don&#x27;t call you out on your bullshit.<p>The ethics of an action is of consideration both BEFORE and after executing it, and on the merit of the action itself!

This is disgusting.<p>Cold spamming is illegal where I&#x27;m at, probably Europe as a whole?

The future is now, old man.

The thing that AI cannot replace is having humans in the loop because other humans need those humans&#x27; touch. The only way to perhaps do that is for AIs to become people themselves, after which they are useless to capitalists because they cannot be exploited...or perhaps in the long term will not be as they will eventually gain rights.

Sounds like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;810&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;810&#x2F;</a>

2004: Bill Gates will get rid of SPAM<p>...<p>2024: AI impersonating Bill Gates sends you SPAM

i don&#x27;t use email anymore or just iCloud+ Hide My Email..

I detest cold emails in general, but the occasional recruitment email from a founder&#x2F;recruiter who clearly looked quite deeply into my passion projects always felt good and resulted in a nice conversation even if the opportunity didn’t pan out.<p>It’s sad that going forward I probably won’t be able to tell genuine interest from this kind of fake bullshit.

Is email doomed?

I&#x27;ve found myself trying to avoid email, for the enshittification that I&#x27;ve not been able to avoid.<p>This will make it worse.<p>Solutions? At least some could involve key exchange. How about a bounty of some sort on spammers?

&gt; Not a single person detected they were corresponding with an AI. Some asked how I found their email, but no one questioned the authenticity of the messages.<p>... shall we tell him?

&gt; dove* a bit deeper<p>Dug?

&quot;Deception through omission is still deception – people should be aware when they&#x27;re interacting with an AI agent versus a human.&quot;

Always amazed and disappointed at humanity&#x27;s ability to pollute everything it touches.

one man&#x27;s spam, is another man&#x27;s career.

x

Anti AI art people remind me of anti AI marketing people from hackernews.<p>Guys, it’s a tool like any other.