But now its superb - reporting that a mail is spam does a good job of marking future mails from that sender as spam and moving messages from spam folder to inbox does the opposite.
They’re super obvious ones too with a nonsensical email address, a repeating pattern about mcaffee or Norton in the title and an almost empty body with a pdf attached.
Meanwhile Gmail also happily never learns when I tell it something isn’t spam either.
It also blocks just about any small domain that emails me for the first time. No amount of SPF or DKIM will convince Google that you're legitimate party, there's some kind of minimal volume you need to send Google to make your emails arrive to Gmail inboxes the first time.
It works when it works, but when it doesn't, it's broken without repair. It works _most of the time_ and it's better than Outlook (though that's not a high bar to clear).
What? This hasn't been true for at least 15 years. Instead, Google's spam filter is far, far more aggressive than could conceivably be appropriate, and it routinely filters important communications from people you know.
The issue with AI isn’t that it simply gets things wrong — as is frequently pointed out, so do humans. The issue is that it gets things wrong in a way that comes out of nowhere and doesn’t even have a post-rationalised explanation.
The big claim about AI systems (especially LLMs) is that they can generalise, but in reality the ‘zone of possible generalisation’ is quite small. They overfit their training data and when presented with input out of distribution they choke. The only reason anyone is amazed by the power of LLMs is because the training set is unimaginably huge.
In fifty years we’ll have systems that make this stuff look as much like ‘AI’ as, say, Djikstra’s algorithm does now.
Part of that has to do with the fact that language is not the same for an LLM as it is for a person. If I say to you the sentence "The cat sat on the mat", that will evoke a picture, at the very least an abstract sketch, in your mind based on prior experience of cats, mats, and the sitting thereupon. Even aphantasic people will be able to map utterances to aspects of their experience in ways that allow them to judge whether something makes sense. A phrase like "colorless green dreams sleep furiously" is arrant nonsense to just about everybody.
But LLMs have no experiences. Utterances are tokens with statistical information about how they relate to one another. Nodes in a graph with weighted edges or something. If you say to an LLM "Explain to me how colorless green dreams can sleep furiously", it might respond with "Certainly! Dreams come in a variety of colors, including green and colorless..."
I've always found Searle's argument in the Chinese Room thought experiment fascinating, if wrong; my traditional response to it was "the man in the room does not understand Chinese, but the algorithm he's running might". I've been revisiting this thought experiment recently, and think Searle may have been less wrong than I'd first guessed. At a minimum, we can say that we do not yet have an algorithm that can understand Chinese (or English) the way we understand Chinese (or English).
[0] https://openai.com/index/openai-and-apple-announce-partnersh...
In any case, dealing with spam/phishing is always an arms race.
One of the drawbacks of AI, is that I suspect it will have patterns that could be figured out, and folks will learn that (crooks tend to be a lot smarter than most folks seem to think. I'll lay odds that every hacker has an HN account).
Report don’t bitch about it.
If you do not wish to engage in good faith, you’re free to skip the submission and carry on with your day. You don’t need to succumb to the impetus of making repeated low-effort replies.