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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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It's staggering when you think about the implications of this technology.

Do you think that people are just going to submit to getting sales calls from AI? Of course not. They will have their own AI to handle those interactions. Want to sell me something? Talk to my AI about it and if she likes it (always she) then I'll have a look.

It feels like AI will beget more AI here fairly quickly.

Does anybody actually engage with these salespeople? Seems like widespread AI adoption in the field will just give the marks even less reason to interact -- maybe (hopefully) just killing the whole cold-call industry.

If it’s email you won’t be able to tell. Expect 99% of sales emails in the future to be written by AI. Many already are.

That's what I mean -- one of my contractees has been spam-listed by google, so I had to completely disable spam filtering on my corporate Gmail (for some reason their whitelisting doesn't actually, like, ensure that I get emails from this guy) -- I get all this shit. And I read none of it -- nobody, bot or not, is going to get me to read about their excellent offshoring services or convince me to "schedule a followup meeting".

Does anybody read this stuff? Most people don't even see it, because it's already blocked by some bot -- but I can assure you it's supremely easy to tell when somebody is selling, and I ain't buying.

A flood of filter-evading bot spam would indeed make the sales strategy completely untenable for humans -- but that's not to say it would be tenable for the bots, either.

Why answer them? That just lets them know somebody's there.