How to tell when a robot has written you a letter
medium.com
medium.com
That's horrible! I don't mind getting a printed letter but if I got a handwritten letter that I later found out was faked I would never, ever do business with that person again. Doing this means the very first step in an attempt to form a business relationship is an act of deception.
This is of course a classic submarine story: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Every time I feel like I have come to terms with marketing people as economic actors they manage to plumb some new nadir.
It's certainly in vogue to hate on marketers but it is not an identity, marketer is a hat that people wear. Just stop.
I like shiny new things as much as the next person. But I don't like marketing and I don't like being sold to. If someone's sole job is to convince me I need something and my life is worse off without whatever they're selling, why would I like them?
The hate for (some) marketers comes from the fact that some of them are fucking scum with bizarre feelings of entitlement.
"When those other companies do it then yes I guess it is spam but trust us you really want to read our unsolicited email".
You can give it to me.
But seriously, what a wonderful "problem" to have.
The difference is small but crucial. The salesperson's job is - for the most part - to sell to you personally. And the salesperson typically has a personal stake in it - so this is a transaction between two people.
On the other hand, it's the marketer's job to manipulate[1] you[2] into buying an idea and accepting it as your own. Nothing is off-limits - any psychological tactic that a marketer can employ is considered an acceptable means to the end. Astroturfing, deceptive advertising, "submarine" stories -- these are just the tip of the iceburg, and all of them are perfectly OK in the mind of the marketers under discussion.
Ultimately, it comes down to ethics - marketers seem to me to be like behavioral psychologists with no ethical guidelines that prevent them (or even discourage them) from playing out their experiments on people. And the experiments are all geared towards finding the most effective ways to exploit the way our minds work, to the benefit of the owner of the product or idea being marketed. [3]
I am aware that there are some who do have ethics, and apply them scrupulously. But in the marketing that surrounds us every day, I see no indication that they have any significant voice.
For those not familiar with Heinlein, some of the ideas raised in "If This Goes On..." are disturbingly relevant.
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1. And this is the general "you", not typically one specific individual.
2. The salesperson, too, will naturally try to manipulate you - but a) it's typically an interaction between you and the salesperson. b) you can also use the same or similar tactics on the salesperson. c) foreknowledge of the tactics used by a salesperson are often enough to protect against their effectiveness - not so with marketing.
What I'm trying to say is: Never Talk To The Marketers.
HTML layout very bad, neat little bullet points bad, good copy bad, lack of line spacing and excessive terseness good.
Don't waste time on presentation, so you don't feel like a marketroid.
What I'm saying is that the more personal-seeming it appears, the more attention the reader is likely to pay. An actual handwritten letter presents as a highly personal communication. Even where it's justa courtesy note, it says that the other person values your business enough to take time to literally put pen to paper. For example, a few times I've bough a used book via Amazon and it arrived with a hand-written note of the 'thank you, hope you enjoy it' variety. It may be done by some junior employee, but any firm that does that goes straight into my 'preferred sellers' list because it's a rare flourish of personal courtesy in a world where most things are mass produced and commoditized.
So I would put it down to scale and what they feel is important. In that case it was for the local children's hospital. Secretaries are great when you need it written right, not only correct.
If I got a letter with no indicator and it turned out to be someone's secretary I wouldn't be offended exactly but it would make me a little wary until I was more familiar with the person and their working habits, eg maybe they have total trust in their secretary, but the secretary isn't familiar with this convention.
Obviously I'm a bit old-fashioned about these things, bt these conventions came into being for good reason.
I kinda get excited I'm getting invited to something, I open it up, and its a fucking ad.
I don't understand how people do business with businesses that mislead you like this. I mean, if they think of you so little before you're a customer, imagine how badly they will treat you when you are one.
Open it up though, and the deception ends immediately. Just your usual tacky, glossy printed brochure.
For example, if two lowercase 'e's are exact clones of each other, you know it's a computer font.
> The best handwriting machines already vary some letters to avoid seeming too repetitive. Check out "offer" in the third line of that letter above: The "f"s are different from each other. The bot has been programmed to pen that letter a few different ways, the better to fool readers.
They have since did it a second time, but I will not be fooled again.
It's the misrepresentation that bugs me. If I get a handwritten letter I expect it to be from the person who signs it, and to be able to call that person up directly. So if it purports to be a personal note from the CEO and turns out not to be, that's when I'd get offended.
Well, yes, but they do what works. They wouldn't do it if it didn't work. Which means they manage to connect with something deep inside our minds. So, when you make statements about what marketers do, you're really commenting on how the human mind works - a jumbled, impromptu, cobbled-up-in-a-hurry mess (that somehow still manages to put rockets on Mars, by some incomprehensible miracle).
You can buy a wacom tablet with tilt sensors and make the robot replicate the same stroke. You could add randomness to it too.
To apply different amount of force with the robot you use a spring and you control the force with the distance to the paper, it is very simple to do.
We did exactly that with ABB robots in the University a long time ago.
We used wacom drivers for linux and the wacoms were over 200 dollars or so.
A robot that uses only 3 axis is not "five figures", it is basically a plotter and thanks to reprap you could make your own for over 300 dollars.
Those are probably the ones used by this people, but you can use a robot with more degree axis and you won't be able to differentiate it.
The robot seems to be working from just a small pool of characters.
Some sort of randomisation algorithm would work well here, varying the size, weight and slant or jitter of each letter would at least make it appear more random, and harder to spot.
Having said that, if you are someone who works on this sort of invention, please take a long, hard look at what you're doing with your life and consider just how this invention is contributing to the advancement of mankind.
This is a silly point that gets repeated far too often. You can make that statement to almost every developer and designer here.
Some people are quite satisfied advancing their own lives and that of those who are close to them.
That is quite true, and that is the problem. It is an inherently different philosophy, whether one's work should advance humanity as a whole, the local subset of humanity, or the local subset of humanity at the expense of the whole.
Everybody assumes if i see your advert I'm going to buy your product regardless how i run into it that's just plain not true.
It may actually have the opposite effect I'll remember it for wasting my time and avoid that annoying company that is spending way too much on advertizing instead of doing something useful with it.
"A basic principle unites all of the multipolar traps above. In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse."
Like many others that marketing/sales do to earn a quick buck while deteriorating the human condition even more. This is systemized abuse of human trust, and it makes society worse off.
I'm not a robot.
How do you know?
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.cgi
Although a simple way would be to just have a human write the original and have a robot copy it.
In this paper about "Nigerian" mail fraud http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf
researchers argue that it's very efficient for attackers to appear fraudulent, because this helps select the most gullible victims (true positives) while weeding out "false positives": people who respond at first, but are not scammed in the end.
From the abstract:
> "Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor."
Shouldn't marketers do the same? Isn't it more efficient to eliminate non-targets as early as possible, instead of dragging into the process people who will ultimately relent. If so, it would seem preferable to send junk mail that is very explicitly junky.
And if they'd have thrown it away, how likely is it they'll change their mind after having been tricked into opening it because it appeared to have been sent by a human?
The point of junk mail is not to be read, it's to generate valuable/actionable leads; I don't see how handwriting helps -- maybe it does, but we would need to see ultimate conversion rates (not just rates of initial inquiries for example).
The Nigerian-mail-fraud-scammer needs to get the gullible person to respond. If that's 1 out of 100,000 people, they need to do what they can just to get that 1 to respond. If 100 out of 100,000 respond, they have to sift through the "noise" of not-so-gullible people to find the true gullible one.
In this case, they just want to get you to open the letter and read the sales pitch (the goal isn't to find gullible people).
If you're sending out direct mail marketing and yet have an ordering process so cumbersome (or service of such dubious legality) that regular folks contemplating buying your product are a problem, your company isn't going to be around for very long.
Very explicitly junky mail works because the target demographic actually do get excited by the additional free services worth $100!!!! and nobody else would care to respond to the mail anyway
Other than the company is getting better at mimicing humans though I didn't get a whole lot out of it.
Here's my confession: I will probably have sent that exact same message to someone else in the past.
At the moment I personally click on the "new message" button, fill out the name, paste in the message, double-check I'm sending it from a socialcoder email address, and then I send it.
This "welcome" process would be trivial to automate and yet I hesitate to do so.
Robots (and scripts) also have a way of blundering into situations that humans would avoid but this isn't why I'm reluctant to automate.
When it comes down to it I don't want to take the human (me) out of the loop. It would feel like I'm duping the recipient who might naturally expect a human connection rather than a recorded message.
If the volume was very much higher I might - apologetically - automate the welcome message. It might not make any difference to the volunteers signing up, but it would make a difference to me.
In response, I received a form-letter generic apology with a stamped signature. The numeric code at the very bottom of the letter (and the fact that it didn't address any specific issue I'd raised) gave it away, though I had to squint to determine that the signature wasn't legit.
I don't know which bothers me more: the fact that they didn't actually care enough to write a genuine response, or that the get enough disgruntled customers that they have a standard apology letter ready to go.
The mortgage companies are worse, in that they plaster the name of your current (or former) lenders on them; even though they have no actual association. These are usually easy to differentiate from real mail though.
Then there's something even older: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laJX0txJc6M
This type of research is also pretty amazing for speech synthesis.
All of them were offers from realtors wanting to re-list our house and try to sell it, and it wasn't until I got two identical letters, in identical handwriting, from two separate realtors, that I realized they were computer-generated.
It's certainly possible to automate the sticking of stamps, but won't all those operations needed to "look real" increase the cost of junk mail in unsustainable proportions? Which is the point of course, from the receiver/victim point of view...
I don't read ground mail anymore.