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Comment by Thoeu388 | Hacker News Reader

This is the Real Deal, but not in away you would imagine.

So far "nigerian email spam" was easy to recognize. Grammar mistakes, bad translation, very bad wording... But now every fringe group, can generate gigabytes of text and arguments that make sense! This is the end of debate, consensus and interactive communication, as we know it!

Similar moment was in Africa in 1960, after they got AK45 and other cheap weapons. It was easy to dominate Congo River Basin with a few Maxim machine guns mounted on boats, when opponents had only spears. But when every tiny village gets comparable fire power, there are no colonies!

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> So far "nigerian email spam" was easy to recognize. Grammar mistakes, bad translation, very bad wording... But now every fringe group, can generate gigabytes of text and arguments that make sense!

"nigerian email spam" contains grammar mistakes, bad translation, vary bad wording... by design. To weed out those unlikely to end up sending money.

I don't know how you can make an argument that makes sense about being chosen by royalty of a country to help them in some way.

> "nigerian email spam" contains grammar mistakes, bad translation, vary bad wording... by design. To weed out those unlikely to end up sending money

this theory is popular, but ignores the simple fact that mostly it weeds out the 90% of people whose email provider offers spam filters which are entirely uncorrelated with gullibility, as well as how low-risk, high reward email exchanges with the tiny fraction of people that bother to reply are to anonymous scammers in faraway low income countries.

I agree LLMs aren't that helpful though: the better scammers are able to generate leads even more easily through copy/pasting other people's classified ads or genuine business enquiries. And yes, having fooled a relatively smart person with someone else's prose into sincere interest in doing business with them, they then reply with poor English, unsettling disinterest in anything other than the money and repeatedly reassuring you it's safe, and a payment proposal that makes no sense (not as a filtering technique but because that's the best they can do). LLMs only solve the first bit.

> mostly it weeds out the 90% of people whose email provider offers spam filters

Do you thing it weeds out 90% of politicians who talk total gibberish?

At end, it will enforce people who are in your social network. Some random celebrity will be ignored. Dude who lives 1 km from your location will be boosted.

It's amusing to see this popular "by design" explanation take hold with no evidence whatsoever.

Thank you! LLMs have raised the floor; not the ceiling. It's much easier to do stuff that was already kinda easy, but not easier to do things that were hard.

Maybe LLMs free up intellectual bandwidth for some, but what will we do with that increased productivity? Mostly scams for now, but I'm sure it'll be able to find many other net-negative or wealth-extraction applications.

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