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.
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.