> Has anyone else noticed that the AI industry can’t take “no” for an answer? AI is being force-fed into every corner of tech. It’s unfathomable to them that some of us aren’t interested. The entire AI industry is built upon a common principle of non-consent.
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.
The really strange thing is that so much of it doesn't work. Like I get that the SOTA models perform some tasks quite well and have some real value. But the AI being implemented in every corner creates a lot of really bad results. The Shopify code assistant will completely wreck your site and basically gets nothing correct. It will write 100 lines to change a color of a single DIV. The Amazon product Q&A will give you wrong information more frequently than not.
In what mind frame is it logical or necessary to put these extremely poorly functioning products in to the wild?
It's a desperate attempt at staying relevant, even if most of those companies don't realize it yet. Because of its general-purpose nature, AI subsumes products. Most software products that try to "implement AI in every corner" would, from the user's POV, be more useful if they became tools for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.
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 :).
I have been enjoying reading this thread, but with some irony: sure the email spams pushing their Lumo LLM private chatbot were a mistake, and I bet they stop doing that fast.
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.
It gives a lot of power to users to work around enshittification in the software services they use. Dark patterns and user funnels and upsells and other bullshit suddenly stops working when users can ask ChatGPT to operate a service for them.
> Dark patterns and user funnels and upsells and other bullshit
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.
Saw an AI generated product feature list on walmart's site that listed a stainless steel rack as microwaveable. If someone can sue mcdonalds for hot coffee, I imagine someone burning their house down while microwaving steel probably could sue too. Intelligence of the plaintiff not withstanding.
Agree. The number of services i use where the apps continually add new marketing preferences which are defaulted to ‘enabled’ despite the fact that all other preferences are disabled is disgusting and clearly used by some companies to ignore people’s actual preferences.
They're checking to see whether any of the links they put in the emails are being fetched from their servers. It's stupid, but it works for most people.
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.
Only if people naively automatically load remote content. My inbox receives the bits that actually come in the email and nothing else. If you send an empty email with all images, you sent an empty email...
So they'd miss it anyway, my mail client is firewalled to only be able to access the mailserver.
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.
Have you noticed certain financial providers sending blatant marketing emails with no unsubscribe option and a comment along the lines of "these emails are not marketing"
Yet rife. My complaint to a major UK provide was rebuffed with the blatently false assertion that the email promoting a website refresh was an essential service email.
I think that's fine. If 20% of the emails from some company (let's say Paypal) are spam, then all email providers (especially Gmail, the largest provider) should mark ALL of their emails as spam by default until they stop spending spam. If they want to keep spamming, they can at least humiliate themselves by telling people to check their spam folders for their emails.
If you lose an account due to negligence, it's on you, not the service provider.
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).
>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.
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.
> This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer
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.
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.
Sure, you can manually unmark them as spam, and gmail should respect that preference as well. But for the rest of us, it would be an improvement if Paypal was sent to spam by default until they were forced to stop sending spam.
I already have a ton of gmail filters and folders, most of which I rarely check.
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.
My bad. I meant to say: "Emails from known Contacts are auto-dumped into Inbox (they won't go into Spam folder)" (even if you had marked earlier emails from that sender as spam, but later added that sender as a Contact, so thenceforth they'll get treated as legitimate emails, not spam).
But if you have some filter for that Contact, that takes precedence.
I mean if said company first spammed you and you marked them as spam, then it is on them. No different than if someone sent you a bunch of unwanted letters and you threw them out, but one of them happened to be relevant. It's on the organization sending you junk.
Right, and I think that if they send spam, all email providers (especially gmail, the largest provider) should mark all their emails as spam by default. They are doing what is described above at a large scale, so large-scale reactions are needed.
Of course, if you manually mark them as not-spam, then gmail should respect your choice as a user.
The trick is create a filter to weed out such junk. And if a company sends me marketing fluff without unsubscribe option, then it goes in the junk/spam folder, and I may eventually discontinue my account with that service provider altogether.
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.
In Windows 10, they added a shortcut Ctrl+Win+Alt+Shift to open Microsoft Office 365 (or whatever they call(ed) it). Caused me a ton of confusion and annoyance when I picked up my laptop by the corner of the keyboard.
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.