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Comment by castigatio | Hacker News Reader

It's a sign of things to come. We'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.

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This is the _exact_ scenario described in the novel Permutation City by Greg Egan. There's a whole little spot devoted to describing one of the character's setups for having their own little agents to pretend to be them in order to fool agent-powered spam emails into thinking they're being read by a real human.

The crazy part is that book was released in 1994! Iirc Greg Egan isn't a big fan of modern "AI", wishing instead for a more axiom-based system rather than a predict-the-next-token model. But in any case, I was re-reading it recently and shocked at how closely that plot point was aligning with the way things are actually shaping up in the world.

The timeframe for this happening in the book was 2050 btw

But this is already the situation in the last 15 years, your gmail spam filter is already a machine learning algorithm that filters out automatically generated content. Mail as a vetted technology is way ahead of other forms of communications in the department of filtering unwanted content.

Anyone that tried to set up a new email domain will tell you its quite a serious task. Email spammers are constantly on the run, setting up new domains, changing up the content to evade spam filters. Its very time consuming, hard and unpredictable. It time for social media to close the gap with email and make spamming effectively as hard.

I postulate that if we applied similar techniques to social media after a couple of years online discourse is going to improve. Or we are not going to do this and the death of the open internet will continue.

IMO Facebook has an even better solution: simply don't let people send you unsolicited private messages unless they're a friend or a friend of a friend. Lots of email spam gets through my spam filters, but I've never been spammed through Facebook Messenger before (except maybe once or twice when a friend got their account compromised).

Things get much harder when you want to view public posts by strangers, but I imagine some kind of similar reputation-based system could still work.

I hope my Ai agent doesn't fall for the Ai agent who found my distant Nigerian prince cousin and wire them 10,000 so they can send me my 100,000,000 share of the family inheritance.

I already started readying for it. I'm ensuring that ALL services that have my email have a Plus Address on them. The plus addresses are random and labeled only on my end.

Still not close to 100%, but when I feel like I do, I will then have a filter and an automated message telling people that removing plus addresses from my email is forbidden and I will not read their message if they do.

You will tell me where you found me, or I won't even listen to you. Because in the future, with an even larger infestation of automated agents passing off as human, that's the bare minimum I need to do.

I like your idea. Let me know if you create a browser extension / Gmail addon to automate the flow :)

I am pretty confident the spammers will remove the `+` suffix from your email. And this is why I find the Apple fake email building solution a lot better because they build a fully different email per service. No way for the service to be able to cheat and discover my real email address from the one I give them.

Still a smart enough system might be able to discover a valid email from my other id info, like my name. But this start to be a lot of work, while just `s/+[^@]*@//` is easy enough to do.

I started worrying about the `+` address functionality as well, so I set up postfix aliases with `me.%@domain` (I use postgres for domains/aliases/accounts) and then have my virtual_alias_map run the query `SELECT a1.goto FROM alias a1 LEFT JOIN alias a2 on (a2.address = '%s') WHERE '%s' = a1.address OR ('%s' LIKE a1.address AND a1.active = true AND a2.address IS NULL)` - I know have `.` address functionality and can do the same functionality. It's much more common for email addresses to have `.` in them, so its' less likely to trigger alarm bells.

Technology ruins everything it touches doesn't it?

I was recently thinking about this Ozempic fad and how it will lead to no one being overweight but just be dependant on Ozempic...until food producers that made everyone fat in the first place with their processed junk will produce Ozempic resistant foods...and then we are really in a world of hurt.

What incentive do they have to make Ozempic resistant food? Ozempic resistance seems like an odd thing to optimize for. Or are you suggesting it will happen accidentally?

Ozempic reduces appetite, right? So food producers cannot be happy about it.

I love the idea of the comic villainy of someone who deliberately chooses to organize a team to find ways to circumvent Ozempic in order to keep their buyers unhealthy and addicted. Could such a schemer have an internal monologue, and what would it consist of? What do they see when they look into a mirror? Their experience of reality must be utterly fascinating and alien.

Just ask an MBA focused on short term profit.

Read the blog post that this blog post talks about - the one that says "we use AI to spam people, isn't it great?". It will be something like that. As long as there is money to be made, the internal monologue is just "hope this works and I get more money".

> What do they see when they look into a mirror?

A person deserving of riches, that is about to get them. Nobody sees themselves as the villain. Well, maybe some, but vanishingly few.

I mean, see the tobacco industry.

They already did this pre-Ozempic - a lot of foods are optimized to keep you eating, and that's why there's an obesity crisis. Low nutrients, high sugar and fat. In the post-Ozempic world there will surely still be things that trigger the continued appetite of Ozempic users. Especially with the FDA having just been neutered.

Read Philip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" (or see the movie). They're forcing overweight people in Ozempic rehab to farm the ingredients to make more Ozempic!

No, there are many things technology has improved, not ruined

Of course I don't have a tally on how much things it has improved vs not improved but there are many things I can think of which are considered good but also resulted in bad: (social media providing connection while causing depression, cars providing freedom of movement vs pollution etc.) so its probably not something that can be truly decided one way or the other.

Here's an Odd Lots podcast on that exact topic:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-is-how-the-food-i...

Title: "This Is How the Food Industry Is Preparing For a Post-Ozempic World"

Is there a summary?

Not that I'm aware of, but I'm not a bloomberg subscriber.

Man I was just talking hypothetical, now that they are doing something its even worse! :(

Haha, exactly this. I've built and successfully been using Unspam[0] for this reason since about a year ago. In corporate/business world, anything where SDR sales are involved this form of automated AI outbound mail has picked up a lot. Tools like Apollo automates this AI process (both finding leads to mail, and then crafting the mail).

For interest sake, users of Unspam that have a title of CEO on their Linkedin see about ~10% of all mail making it into their inbox be categorised as spam (leadgen, recruitment, or software dev services).

[0] https://unspam.io

Most likely, SDR = Sales Development Representative, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_development#Process

Correct! :')

Just saw this, and as a small business owner in the B2B market, this sounds very useful. Gmail's existing spam filters do not reliably detect this type of marketing.

I wish your landing page had a simple "how it works" explanation with a screen shot or diagram, rather than forcing me to sign in directly, and also allowing the app to read *and* send emails. Also, I don't see any pricing?

Finally, signing up, I got an error:

Error 1101 Ray ID: 89d4e0957c2f5a44 • 2024-07-03 06:39:15 UTC - Worker threw exception

Thanks for the useful feedback! Totally forgot that pricing was never added to the landing page → have added to the todo list to fix up.

Where in the process did that error occur for you?

I see in the logs that an error registered, but unfortunately no detail attached. I've beefed up the logging a bit in the onboarding journey on my side to see what could be breaking here if we try again.

Mind trying to log-in/sign up again? You can use "HACKERNEWS" as a promo code, which would make the first month free.

The error occurred right after granting permissions from my Google account. The permissions were granted but I could never access your application page. I just tried again, now I got an "Error handling OAuth callback" after granting permissions. Signing in again does not work either. (I did remove all of the app's permissions in my Google security settings before, so to Google it looked like the application was requesting all of its permissions again.)

I do see it in the logs now. So weird, as dozens of people successfully signed up without this issue. Have added more logs now again to double down on that specific area where this issue is caused. Maybe another login attempt now will be able to uncover the gap.

Thanks for removing the permissions in Google, as that's also key in this debugging.

Mind if I send you an email to debug further there?

Quick shoutout to slhck for helping me debug and resolve this issue. Thank you!

tl;dr: Ran into issues because the DB was expecting a profile picture URL from Google auth (string) or NULL, but JavaScript being JavaScript tried to insert "undefined".

I don’t think fully automated replies is happening any time soon. There’s way too much risk for you as a user.

Would you seriously enable it even if Gmail offered it?

Highly unclear.

I love this direction. It could be that the writer’s AI agent knows that he’s looking around for a new CMS so asks for more info, compiling this for review. Or it says ‘not interested’ and the conversation is muted.

All without the writer needing to be involved in reading the cold outreach.

Why do you need “AI” to do Bayesian filtering?

They said other things besides just filtering, like writing responses.

Will this mean in-person business interactions will thrive because it will be the only way to avoid spam? Will companies hire thousands of people to deliver message in-person because emails no longer work?

Will our AI overlords create perfect androids to fool us into thinking we're interacting with a human when it's just LLMs disguised as people? Are we ourselves delusional because we're actually already LLMbots so advanced that we can't distinguish thought and running inference? Why do we have only 12 fingers?

If it gets that bad, I’ll simply not respond to anything outside of my circle of friends and family. That is 95% of the communications I need. I think we’ll all have to have some kind of pop type verification for each other that we’ll share in person or over verifiable communications channel, no one will read this morass of horseshit.

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