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4g | 3 years ago

Using these tools to mitigate spam is as likely a scenario as this, imagine that every spam mail receives a masterfully crafted response showing utter fascination and interest in SEO, or helping out a Nigerian prince. Every phone call to an unregistered number is answered by an artificial, frail, and forgetful lady that is trying her best to register gift cards.

When reporting an e-mail as spam it will not only block the address but waste the spammers time, rendering the actions unprofitable.

discuss

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kibwen|3 years ago

At the same time, it's not necessarily pleasant to consider the prospect of an internet where 99.9% of traffic is generated by AI-powered spambots engaged in adversarial games with AI-powered anti-spambots.

atorodius|3 years ago

I thought we are already nearly there? I remember reading 90%+ of emails are spam and this was a while back

epicureanideal|3 years ago

There are still solutions in that case. Email addresses only allocated to verified humans, which only accept email from the same addresses or specifically allowed outside email addresses.

Alternatively, email addresses that are necessarily paid for that have maximum sending limits or extra costs above those limits, so those addresses are not profitable for spam bots to use.

I could imagine some kind of “super priority email” that costs a dollar or something, that gets prioritized and is very unlikely to be marked spam.

More ideas: Maybe the amount paid per email sent changes depending on the percent of previous emails marked “accept emails from this sender”. Maybe some percentage of the e-mail fee is given to the recipient of the email.

Note that if a highly spam resistant email account is adopted by everyone the amount of spam sent may fall significantly. Gmail doesn’t count because it still isn’t as good as a system where sending millions of spam emails is simply too expensive.

yieldcrv|3 years ago

Cyberpunk 2077 features a world after this has happened. Not because it happened, its just after. If there is a reference to an older internet it features its disuse due to this.

sangnoir|3 years ago

Every day we get closer to the Slug from Accelerando (by @cstross): a self-owned sentient corporation/419 scam

cortesoft|3 years ago

Why is that bad? As long as it is invisible to humans and doesn't cause bottlenecks, who cares?

sharkweek|3 years ago

But it does make for an interesting idea as a plot device in speculative fiction!

nbardy|3 years ago

I think the opportunity cost of better employee will make it hard for that to scale.

If you’re that good at scaling systems like that someone with legit traffic would be able to pay more than the spam companies.

Tsiklon|3 years ago

Part of this is what I imagine is behind the “Blackwall” in the Cyberpunk universe.

ThrowawayTestr|3 years ago

Honestly the most likely source of computers becoming self-aware.

mimimi31|3 years ago

>imagine that every spam mail receives a masterfully crafted response showing utter fascination and interest in SEO

That would necessitate reliably detecting the emails as spam in the first place though. False positives in particular could be devastating. Imagine a chat bot coming up or going along with business proposals in your name for example.

crummy|3 years ago

You could do it with humans - every time you click "mark as spam" it doesn't just trash the email, it begins a long and drawn-out chatGPT conversation with the spammer, stringing them along.

just_boost_it|3 years ago

There's lots of legitimate email traffic that would find itself stuck in here. I could see business questions being answered and those answers actioned on. Or legitimate sales prospecting resulting in actual orders being placed. If you choose to let a tool do your communication for you by impersonating you to the extent that another person would reasonably expect that they're talking to you, then I'm not sure you can just say "lol, that just was my spam bot" as a way of getting out of it.

ilyt|3 years ago

> Using these tools to mitigate spam is as likely a scenario as this, imagine that every spam mail receives a masterfully crafted response showing utter fascination and interest in SEO, or helping out a Nigerian prince. Every phone call to an unregistered number is answered by an artificial, frail, and forgetful lady that is trying her best to register gift cards.

Right. And who the fuck would pay for GPU time for that ?

walrus01|3 years ago

Sure, turn loose these tools to answer the actual spammers/UCE. But:

Speaking as an ISP, if somebody turns loose what is clearly an AUTOMATED tool shitting up the contents of my abuse@ispname.com inbox with reports from some software script, I can guarantee you it goes to /dev/null

At some point we will just block their MX at the SMTP transfer point and call it a day.

98% of that already is abusive DMCA rights holders who are ignoring our federally designated DMCA-agent address for copyright violation complaints. With their automated 3rd party things complaining about people torrenting Yellowstone or whatever.

Actual reports that are clearly written by a human saying "hey it looks like this /32 of an IP address is compromised as some sort of botnet" will get a thousand times more attention. Or the very rare cases where we have a network-engineering emergency escalation and somebody calls me on the phone.

Anything generated by chatGPT or similar will be clearly obvious enough that it matches a similar pattern and comes from an automated script.

Waterluvian|3 years ago

Oh my god a future where you are never ever quite sure if your online circle of friends are human or not.

jimkleiber|3 years ago

I wonder if that inspires new platforms or types of tech that verify someone was typing it in vs pasting. But then do bots get better at typing it into the input boxes? Ugh.

InCityDreams|3 years ago

And you're confident right now?

EGreg|3 years ago

Sure, but most spam will go the other way. When you're in a forum and you express an opinion that doesn't fit what the bot swarm is designed to police, they will gang up on you and argue against you from various angles, and you'll think your opinion is just super unpopular. If you are a famous person they'll do reputational attacks, after amassing karma points and followers across the swarm. Then they'll move on to combating the remaining human-powered outlets like nytimes.com, becoming the next Vox or Vice, but totally AI-powered. Their bots will spread their articles over the other ones. And finally, having driven humans underground in the dark forest of social media, they'll basically dominate the Internet.

The real sea change will come, though, when bot swarms control capital. For example, amassed for doing spam tasks. That capital can be deployed in a variety of ways, but the point is that corporations and networks will prefer bots because they generate more social capital, in coordinated ways, and also amass more financial capital than humans.

If you think this is far fetched, IT ALREADY HAPPENED on wall street and hedge funds. Bots have replaced people in trading and control the capital. Humans who trade among the bots get fleeced and don't even know it.

arcticbull|3 years ago

> Every phone call to an unregistered number is answered by an artificial, frail, and forgetful lady that is trying her best to register gift cards.

Kitboga has actually been playing with this. [1] Apparently his bot was successful enough to get some bank accounts from scammers that he reported.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maP2DwgdBts

5e92cb50239222b|3 years ago

If as a (hypothetical) Nigerian prince spammer I get a "masterfully crafted response" from a mark, it would be obvious right away that I am talking to a bot. The kind of people who respond to such bait would hardly be able to write anything like that.

Kamq|3 years ago

A "masterfully crafted" response to a nigerian prince spammer would probably sound a lot like a person who can barely write, possibly with what sounds like the beginning of dementia setting in.

sipos|3 years ago

A lot of spam is just a link to a page for someone to download malware or enter card details. It is already relatively easy to get these taken down if you care enough to, but a waste of time as the senders have moved on by then. The idea that spammers cannot make something that people tricked by their scam will use, but that insulates them from time wasters, is ridiculous.

themitigating|3 years ago

It wastes my time and spammers will create new addresses automatically

wolverine876|3 years ago

So the two AIs will be talking to each other, trying to suss out if the other is fake (a sort of Turing test), trying to con the other to keep talking or to really buy in?

codetrotter|3 years ago

Reminds me of Adventure Time Season 4, episode 10: Goliad

https://adventuretime.fandom.com/wiki/Goliad_(episode)

(Spoilers follow)

> Princess Bubblegum is concerned over her mortality, and reveals her designated successor to Finn and Jake. However, things get out of control when the heir turns against Princess Bubblegum.

> […] The heir is Goliad, a pink Sphinx with a mound on her forehead […]

> […] Goliad reveals that her mound concealed a third eye, and proceeds to psychically control Finn and the obstacles in the course for a perfect completion. She explains that with her in control, everything would be perfect. […]

> […]

> […] Finn and Jake confront Goliad but are beaten by her psychic powers. Goliad tries to read Finn's mind, and Finn narrowly avoids revealing the plan by interrupting his memories with nonsense. The new creature; another sphinx with an eagle's head, white feathers, and golden hair; rescues Finn and battles Goliad. Goliad tries to convince her brother, named Stormo, that they should work together, but Stormo refuses by screeching. They engage in a psychic showdown, but with their powers matched the two creatures are eternally locked in a mental stalemate.

beachy|3 years ago

Sounds absurd all right. But what's to prevent this from being the future of the internet?

jahewson|3 years ago

Fun idea but impersonating someone else, especially your customer, sounds like a way to land in hot water. Also LLMs are not exactly cheap.

miketery|3 years ago

I think for next few years that will be cost prohibitive for 95% of Americans.