The spam was advertising AI, the point of the article was how aggressively AI is being shoved down our throats, and it seems very likely that when he went to complain about the AI spam it was an an AI chatbot which gave him the useless answers until it finally "checked with the team" (presumably a human) who lied to him about what counted as AI spam.
It seems like this is very much about AI even though it's ultimately humans pushing AI and disregarding people's spam preferences. Right now, everything "AI" is ultimately humans (like the way humans are using/abusing the AI tools, or the human intellect behind all of the data that was used to train them and all of the knowledge they output, or the humans deciding what they'll allow their AI to be used for, or the humans failing to safeguard the users of their AI products, etc) so this is as much about AI as anything is.
>The spam was advertising AI, the point of the article was how aggressively AI [...] It seems like this is very much about AI
Yes, the gp you responded to already said the same thing that the particular email was about AI (Lumos) when he wrote : >", even if the product in question is AI-related."
To go beyond that, the gp highlighted that the bad behavior is rooted in companies ignoring customers' email preferences instead of the AI. The article is misdiagnosing the unwanted email issue as "AI Consent Problem" when it's actually fundamentally about "Email Consent Problem". The author deliberately opted out of email marketing and Proton ignored it (by "mistake") and this is a common misbehavior companies did before AI. It's worth separating those 2 factors out.
We get unwanted spam about "Amazon Pharmacy" and "Apple TV" that overrides our profile settings to opt-out of those emails but that doesn't mean we misdiagnose it as "Pharmacy Consent Problem" and "Video Streaming Consent Problem". Instead, the generalization is still fundamentally an "email consent" problem. Always has been. The repeated abuse of the customer's email address (with or without AI in the picture) is what the gp was emphasizing.
Likewise, if a future hot technology household such as residential robots causes email marketing campaigns that blasts unwanted spam about Tesla house robots... the issue of that unwanted spam "Tesla robots 10% off!" ... is still about ignoring customers' email preferences. The unwanted robots themselves would be a separate issue. Companies will continue to make "mistakes" to send out new marketing email spam with <HotNewThing> in the subject field that will infuriate customers. And the future root cause of that problem still won't be <HotNewThing> but instead about companies ignoring customers email preferences because the incentives and greed are too great.
It seems like this is very much about AI even though it's ultimately humans pushing AI and disregarding people's spam preferences. Right now, everything "AI" is ultimately humans (like the way humans are using/abusing the AI tools, or the human intellect behind all of the data that was used to train them and all of the knowledge they output, or the humans deciding what they'll allow their AI to be used for, or the humans failing to safeguard the users of their AI products, etc) so this is as much about AI as anything is.