The AI-generated "I'm a really nice person doing good things and I'm writing to you to ask for cash" emails are now coming at the rate of dozens per day.
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@pluralistic : for me, it’s AI-generated "Your book is so good, it should be more widely known, hire us to to facebook/instagram PR"
The funny thing is that most of the email is basically summarizing my books, sometimes up to 10 paragraphs.
Nobody would ever summarize a book to its author ;-)
@pluralistic : (I felt for the first one because it summarized my book without proposing anything. I thought it was a genuine reader who had asked a chatbot to send me an appreciation email.
So I replied "Don’t use a chatbot to write me an email, tell me what you want"
And then I received a very long generated apologize "You are right, I should have been upfront about what I was offering" with a PR offer.
So the email address was directly connected with the bot itself!
What could go wrong?
@ploum I get hundreds of these per day. The new variety don't propose to perform ANY service for me - they just hit me up for a "donation" after a couple paragraphs of automated flattery.
@pluralistic : you know what seems to have helped a bit?
Next to my email, on my contact list, I wrote that "mails should be send by humans else they will be marked as spam, I don’t accept generated emails".
I then tried to have an agent send me an email and it replied "Ploum is asking human only email, you should probably write it yourself"
(I’m sure it would do it given a few prompting but that’s probably enough to stop most of it right now)
@pluralistic well finally we know who actually had their "boring routine work" automated
@pluralistic
I'm getting increasing numbers of docusign requests to an account I run which is published on a website. (It has to be, not my call).
Fortunately the treasurer uses a separate account for their work, but they seem to be getting gradually (slightly) more plausible.
@pluralistic
It's funny that conservatives never tell these people to "get a job and stop leeching."
@pluralistic im so happy that I managed to keep my important emails private since a long time since the one I used on my webpage in the about was like a crazy collection of madness spam, and that was before "AI"
@pluralistic Here, too: https://mastodon.online/@NatureMC/117376724094121716
Seams to be a new scam wave.
@pluralistic Campaign fundraising emails? Or other random people?
@dneary The latter - "I'm a hardworking student/refugee/activist/parent who admires your work $DETAIL, $DETAIL, $DETAIL, would you 'contribute' $X to my education/project/medical treatment, etc."
@pluralistic In related news, it's that time of the year when yellow jackets are increasingly frantic, desperate and aggressive.