You are joking right?

You know what makes a more humane email? A person sitting down and writing that email like a human being.

This, of course, isn't just an issue with tools but also marketers who popularized this nonsense. Brian Dean, Neil Patel, just to name a few.

These emails _stink_ and if you are comfortable with leaving a bad impression on people then by all means go ahead and write this gibberish.

And yes, I'm self-aware of how critical I am being but unfortunately people have become numb to emotion and will rather send 100 automated emails for a chance of 1 conversion, than a handful of personally written ones for a chance of having them all lead to something.

On top of that, you're wasting people's time.

These emails that have the buzzword of "stumbled", "your audience", "loved your content BUT can you do THIS for me? - get instantly sent to Trash.

How low do you have to stoop to be comfortable with sending an automated email that says, "I am impressed by what you created.".

Are you, impressed?

This response would have benefited from a more humane wording. I wish the tone on HN would be less hostile. Just shows that some help wording things can be a useful tool.

The effort reeks of automated hypocrisy.

I am aware that hypocrisy is tolerated in vast areas, but be reminded that it is a mortal offence in others.

A "kind" word has the opposite value when said unfelt.

People are not great at detecting hypocrisy from people they don't already know intimately. The general idea of automating pleasant sentiment in personal async communication should work (not this implementation, which seems more fit for mass mailing) for a bit. We will be quick to adjust to recognize it as automated and see roughness or even borderline rudeness as a positive signal of personal attention.

People are not great at detecting hypocrisy from people they don't already know intimately.

I immediately suspect hypocrisy when someone I don't know sends me a super-friendly, over-familiar, and flattering email asking for something.

I mean none of that. Just nice polite and positive-sounding messages. For me that simply describes most of communication except with close friends/family (there were a couple of colleagues who would swear and be negative or frank to the point of rudeness but it's generally rare).

I'm sure in most cases people do not genuinely feel that way towards me and are faking niceness (being hypocritical) but rejecting all of it would mean rejecting a lot of actually nice people, so with people I don't know well I assume good faith and respond or not based on the substance of what they write. This is what I mean by "bad at detecting hypocrisy".

Nobody is rejecting niceness.

We are rejecting falsity - it is lying. We are warning: don't do it. Act properly. Properly is "respectfully". With proportionate measures. Lying is plain disrespectful, and more.

Being nice and warm to people is lying and falsity unless you feel that way towards them genuinely. If you don't think so then I guess you may be among those employing such hypocrisy without a second thought. In routine communication I probably won't detect your hypocrisy because again people are bad at this. I will assume you are genuine and reply to you. An idea like proposed, if properly implemented, may help other people who are less adjusted and perhaps incapable of employing such hypocrisy.

Why? They're using big banks of computers to try and emotionally manipulate people at scale, do you really think that being nicey-nice to them is going to bring them to some sort of moral epiphany? I tried it for years, they just classify that as sucker behavior and laugh it off.

I think you're right to be critical in this case, and I'm not defending the service. But as far as whether you can use GPT to write a more humane email, you definitely can. You just need a well-constructed prompt.

At it's core it's just a text prediction machine. If you prime it with language such as, "the recipient of the following email found it to be thoughtful and enjoyed reading it. The recipient was amenable to what the email said, and had a good opinion of the email's author afterwards", it will try to predict a message that would most likely follow that kind of text. I have found that it's usually better than myself at accomplishing that.

Isn’t big part of what makes something humane that it comes from a human being, who means what they’re saying?

There’s something uncomfortable about trying to simulate ‘the human touch’ to improve conversion rates. When the mask slips, and people discover your emails for what they are, I’d say it’s more alienating than any traditional mass email

These examples look pretty close to the form letters I get from recruiters on LinkedIn. Because let's be honest, it's not possible to send a personalized cold sales email because you don't know the person. Trying to be overly familiar in an initial email is a turnoff to me in any context.

I was assuming this would be about filling in the blanks on emails you share with family to keep in touch or something, but that's a harder problem since then the AI needs to actually know things about the relationship. Still, certainly seems like an approachable problem by tweaking some novel-writing AI to consume your personal emails and then use an interface like NovelAI or something to co-write an email with the AI (or KoboldAI to keep things local).

Gross. This is the digital equivalent of those awful junk emails with fake handwriting printed on the envelope/letter. I automatically reject anything that comes at me this way since the opening move in the communication was a lie by the sender trying to create a false sense of personal communication. Detecting AI in text email is a lot more difficult but the discovery that a firm was using this approach for its marketing would be an instant blacklisting from me.

I know your intention is to help others grow their business and you've doubtless invested a lot of work in this. But since the ultimate purpose of your tool is to automate the business of persuading people to spend money, please stay the fuck out of my inbox.

And now I’m thinking about how to build a spam filter that runs parts of emails through GPT and then matches the output with the entire email to arrive at a score.

Because I would love a way to automatically filter out generated bs like this. Hell, even have it interact with the sender totally automatically to waste as much of their time as possible!

Sadly, AI-driven SPAM like this has pretty bad side-effects for the entire economy because it erodes trust.

Whenever we have a public job opening, I put an uncommon and unrelated word into the text description and mandate applicants to reference it, like "transparent frog". Any email who doesn't contain the phrase gets deleted immediately. It's my version of a CAPTCHA to get rid of this SPAM.

Apart from the whole I don't think that word means what you think it does thing, the issue with this is that the output seems to be equivalent to what you would expect an American marketer to produce and spam out after scraping linkedin. Presumably this is because there are a lot of examples of that style of email present in the training data. Personally if I received any of these I wouldn't even get past the first line before marking it as spam, which probably wouldn't do the reputation of your mail server much good.

It's an interesting, if slightly evil, idea, but I'd want the style of the output to be different or customizable before actually using something like this. In other words it needs a "tone of voice" setting. Write intro to someone in voice of cynical Brit / enthusiastic Canadian / morose Finn etc.