5 comments

  • ElProlactin9 minutes ago
    &gt; Nobody wants to hear from your AI bot, least of all when it’s pretending to be you, laying it on thick.<p>The people who are doing this don&#x27;t care about <i>you</i> though. They&#x27;re playing a numbers game and if this form of &quot;communication&quot; proves to be more than a flash-in-the-pan, it would be an indication that the return realized exceeds the cost by a meaningful enough margin.<p>It&#x27;s the same thing with most of the popular scams today. Many people look at them and wonder, &quot;How did anyone fall for that?&quot;, but they still exist because they work on enough of the people to make them viable.
  • sarreph8 minutes ago
    One of my favourite things to do with AI video pitch creator products is to put a paragraph of text into the <i>first_name</i> &#x2F; <i>company_name</i> form fields on their &quot;request a demo&quot; function, to see how ridiculously fast their AI bot will read it out.
  • singpolyma321 minutes ago
    I sort of agree. But honesty if you&#x27;re cold emailing me I don&#x27;t super care if your a real human or not. It&#x27;s still not cool. Don&#x27;t do it.
    • ElProlactin14 minutes ago
      &gt; It&#x27;s still not cool. Don&#x27;t do it.<p>So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about <i>any</i> product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in?
      • Macha3 minutes ago
        My friends are. But then it&#x27;s not cold.<p>The problem is way more people are convinced (or just hoping, or just setting off an automated system that is even less discriminating than that) that I am interested in their product than I have inclination to check their pitch out, especially given their to-date 0% success rate.
      • dgellow10 minutes ago
        That’s the case in germany. Unless you give your explicit consent of course
        • ElProlactin6 minutes ago
          I&#x27;m not German but I&#x27;d venture a guess that people still receive unsolicited outreach in Germany.<p>The internet is global. A person sitting in Palo Alto, a shack in a rural village in Southeast Asia, etc. doesn&#x27;t care about German law and is, in all but a few exceptional cases, beyond its reach in the real world.
      • gyanchawdhary3 minutes ago
        Exactly. How dare anyone contact him without first submitting a formal application for permission to exist in his inbox. Wait .. how dare I assume their gender .. wait, am I even allowed to comment ?
    • rsyring19 minutes ago
      Word.
  • jaggederest15 minutes ago
    Interestingly, I wish there were the opposite of a do-not-email list for this kind of thing. I think it might actually be somewhat fun to get <i>actually relevant</i> email from companies working on interesting products in an extremely targeted way.<p>Then companies could just go and grab a lead list from there, with some metadata, and if too many people report it as spam (you could use a private relay on the site, for example, like mailinator) you lose access. Good citizens stay. And charge a nominal fee to enforce the reputation system.<p>I&#x27;m sure this is one of those &quot;congratulations you have reinvented system Z&quot; problems
    • dewey12 minutes ago
      You are basically just describing targeted advertising and it&#x27;s already working like that, just not by email and probably more accurately than people putting themselves into buckets.
  • xgulfie11 minutes ago
    This is true for &quot;AI content&quot; in general. People feel betrayed when they find out, and publishers try to hide it best they can.