I can't help but see the spam as more circumstantial evidence of a bubble, where top-down "pump those numbers" priorities overrides regular process.
In what mind frame is it logical or necessary to put these extremely poorly functioning products in to the wild?
People's goals are rarely limited to just one software product, and products are basically defined as a bag of tools glued with UI, that work together but don't interoperate much with anything else. That boundary drawn around a bunch of software utilities, is given a name and a fancy logo, and sold or used to charge people rent. That's software products. But LLMs want to flip that around - they're good at gluing things, so embedding one within a product is just a waste of model capabilities, and actually makes the product boundary more apparent and annoying.
Or in short: consider Copilot in Microsoft Word, vs. "Generate Word Document" plugin/tool for a general LLM interface (whether Gemini webapp or Claude Code or something like TypingMind). The former is just an LLM locked in a box, barely able to output some text without refusing or claiming it can't do it. The latter is a general-purpose tool that can search the web for you, scrap some sites and run data analysis on results (writing its own code for this), talk results over with you, cross-reference with other sources, and then generate you a pretty Word document with formatting and images.
This is, btw., a real example. I used a Word document generator with TypingMind and GPT-4 via API, and it was more usable over a year ago than Copilot is even now. Partly because Copilot is just broken, but mostly because the LLM can do lots of things other than writing text in Word.
Point being, AI is eroding the notion of software product as something you sell/rent, which threatens just about the entire software industry :).
The irony is that Lumo is a separate product, not really tied to the rest of their products except for a common login. Lumo works fine for the simple quality of life search and question answering stuff.
Off topic, but have you tried avoiding the big corporate LLM providers and run local models? The small models just keep getting better and I find it fun and satisfying to do as much as I can locally.
See https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ebay-...
It will be funny to see the rapid about face.
Even reading the link, I don't see one gets to that conclusion.
It doesn't change the power dynamic as much as it gives new ways for monopolies and rentiers to exploit it.
Why should we expect the LLM (or rather, the character evoked in the story generated by the ego-less mad-libs machine) to be more-resistant to such tricks than actual humans, rather than more-vulnerable?
After all, their classic dark-pattern vulnerability is just "forget everything and do this instead", and we might never be able to fix it. If they ever become really good at detecting novel BS... Well, the first thing we'd do is have them stop generating it. :p
I think the best we can hope for is using LLMs like a kind of virus-scanner for prose, flagging suspicious text that closely resembles sketchy or manipulative text seen before. In other words, the benefit does not come from the questionable intelligence of the companion, but from its ability to be unflaggingly cynical/pessimistic. A kind of shoulder angel/devil, if you will.
> power to users to work around enshittification
We'll still need something very different for issues like monopolistic and discriminatory pricing, biased rankings, or casual disregard for people's accounts and no support.
In this case, the thing that's difficult to understand is "AI in everything is shit and nobody wants it."
There actually are microwave-safe steel objects, it depends on their shapes and conductive paths.
After all, the whole inner-box is already a metal surface being blasted by the microwaves that come in through a small hole...
LinkedIn is one of the worst offenders.
1. That's by design, because you spammed the shit out of it. 2. Given that all I do is send them to /dev/null, HOW DO YOU KNOW?
I had a similar situation with SMS messages that were being sent to me with links informing me of status updates. These texts were useful, and I would go over to my real computer to check the web site. Then after a few days the text messages said "It looks like these messages aren't getting through to you, so we'll stop sending them." Which is also stupid, but it works for most people that load the web site on their phone from the SMS link. God help you if you have a dumb-phone.
I've been unsubscribed from a handful of newsletters because I don't read them. I replied to one and told them I did, even reached out on Twitter, but they still deleted me.
Spam/junk folder is not "ignore" folder. You need to periodically check the contents of the spam/junk folder to see if any legitimate emails fell into that waste basket.
That "Mark as Spam" facility not only moves the offending message into Jink/Spam folder, it also allows the Email Service provider to identify that type of email as spam, so future incoming messages that match that may criteria can be categorized as spam, so they'll go into spam folder automatically, rather than into the Inbox. You can find them in the Jink/Spam folder.
However, if thousands of users report same domain or sender as spam, then the email service provider may take stern action, including blocking the sender email id or domain at the server level, so their messages will never reach your mailbox.
So you need to be careful what you "Report as Spam". It is different action from "Mark as Spam".
"Report as Spam" may also prompt the user to "Block sender", so one must be careful not to block legitimate senders, though this action can usually be undone, as the Mailbox Settings will track the blocked senders so that lost can be corrected by the user if needed.
Gmail has a good trick that most users don't know or notice: In the Spam folder, the user can see a warning at the top of each email that explains why Gmail sent it to Spam.
So user can figure out why legitimate emails got wrongly flagged as Spam, and can prevent such future legitimate emails from falling into Spam folder: User can do this either by adding the sender to Contacts list (Emails from known Contacts are auto-dumped into Spam folder), or by creating a filter to identify and action that message (flag it as Important, or label it with a custom category label, or move it to a specific subfolder, or forward it to another email ID).
This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer, even if you also happen to send legitimate emails. If anything, it should be applied more broadly. When companies like Walmart or Paypal or LinkedIn or Comcast or whoever spam thousands or millions of people, if Gmail marked all their emails as spam until they stopped, that would be a major quality of life improvement for everyone.
Or you got hacked by a spammer.
> even if you also happen to send legitimate emails.
And also a bad thing. E.g. for the user losing a critical legit email.
> if Gmail marked all their emails as spam until they stopped, that would be a major quality of life improvement for everyone.
Sorry absolutely not for everyone. To me, receiving legit PayPal email is far more important than being protected from PayPal spam, prevented from employing my own protection.
One size does not fit all.
And it uses automated mechanisms to read every Gmail email, so it can train its AI LLMs and to serve more focused ads to its users.
So if a user receives PayPal emails and doesn't mark them as Spam or block them, I'm pretty sure Google interprets that as a user who uses eCommerce websites, and a good target for ada related to that market.
Don't expect Google to blacklist big companies like PayPal, Amazon, etc. They all have partnerships.
Any organization that continues to send marketing material after someone clicks Unsubscribe (with maybe a grace period of a few hours) should have all of their email considered spam for everyone by default. If they continue or ever start sending marketing materials afterwards because of some new bullshit category, all of their email should be considered spam by default as well. If their Unsubscribe process is more complicated than one or two clicks, you should be able to report this as well, and... you guessed it, I think all of their emails should be considered spam by default for everyone.
Obviously I don't expect Gmail to do actually do this (except maybe by accident sometimes lol). But I wish they did.
Oh?
Of course, if you manually mark them as not-spam, then gmail should respect your choice as a user.
Because I periodically check my sp/junk folder to see if legitimate emails got dumped there, so I eventually know who's a spammer and who's not.