Got'em what? It's a paragraph about someone else's agent annoying them with emails.

I mean, technically it got them to write about it, but not from the intended angle, which is important.

I'm looking for a contractor to do my concrete. 2 companies had AI agents. Instant no thank you, I'm just going to go with a guy that still answers his phone.

Maybe. There are legitimate use cases. For example, data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable. There are startups that are using voice AI agents to call providers and ask them "hey are you still accepting these insurance plans?"

Obviously it would be great if the was a, ahem, legal consequence for not keeping this data up to date and available. But you know, if a frog had wings right?

I already practice this. If you can't be bothered to construct a coherent sentence as a form of interpersonal communication, you can also go fuck yourself. Its beyond degrading.

Before anyone hits me with the "oh what about people who don't speak English" -- I legitimately don't care. I'd rather do the extremely human and now seemingly endearing ritual of trying to figure out what you're trying to say in our respectively broken interpretation of human language than read one sentence of Claudeisms.

The rise in clearly agentic inbound spam hitting my inbox is insane.

It will mention some obscure internship fact from my LinkedIn, and then tie it to some perceived deficit with the product I'm working on.

I never thought I'd say this, but I miss the old automated spam.

social stigmas work locally, AI agents contact globally, there are only two ways social stigma is going to really work:

1. If an AI agent contacting people becomes big enough news that everybody the operator know reads about it. So AI agents asking people to send it child porn seems an unlikely edge case, but sure if that happens the person whose agent it is will get the social stigma.

2. If the AI agent accesses the owner's contacts list and starts asking for people to send it money so it can complete its task.

hard social stigmas just produce defiance and cheaters.

so, in other words, that seems like the way to breed more realistic acting agents rather than getting rid of them.

What does "contacting another human" actually mean when all of these messages are being answered by agents first? If I'm texting my friends and family I expect that to be answered by a human, but beyond that I am partially expecting it to be answered by an agent, and possibly routed to a human eventually.

Just have your agent answer their agent.

As long as they pay me, I have no problems with clients writing to me through any kind of third party agent, whether human or machine.

I mean, I get your point, but at the same time, I'll happily send my AI agent to talk to support in trying to get them to honor their warranty. I shouldn't have to know case law and jurisdictional responsibility for them to do what they agreed they were going to do. And if I can have my AI agent do the brunt of that work and that heavy lifting, and I get what's owed to me, fine.

Yes, the bot detection wait IS starting to get out of hand. As for solving a puzzle, I just exit the page and move on with my day.

meanwhile agents have been able to pass these captchas for a while now, so it's unclear what the point of them now is. It's like they want to keep out the dumb bots, but any agent with reasonable intelligence can come in.

This is the real hidden cost of the bots. I absolutely loathe the human verification hoops I have to jump through now, more than anything else mentioned in this thread.

yesterday I visited a page with TWO! captchas side by side. When I got through the second one the first one had expired...

Reddit blocks anonymous mobile web traffic behind a capcha now.

One way to look at this is that the internet is healing. Platforms are closing themselves off to growth and scabbing over.

A few weeks ago my dishwasher broke, flooded the kitchen, and refused to drain. I went to the manufacturer’s website to download the manual so I could drain the basin, except then Cloudflare flagged me as a bot for suspicious activity trying to download the right PDF (there’s the dimensions, spec sheet, installer manual, and user manual) and I couldn’t access the manufacturer’s website anymore.

Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page.

To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.

> The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.

This is similar faulty logic the Elon era X/Twitter used to try to "stop" bots - forcing them to pay $Y dollars a month to use the platform. To a botter, that is a dream - you mean I can just pay to get past your defenses, and once I'm in, it's assumed my traffic is good? Sign me up, instantly.

There is no dollar amount using this structure that genuine users are willing to pay that will also stop botting.

You've made a good case for "giving up the internet entirely", thanks!

If AI ruins social media, then that's a huge net good.

I think it's quite possible for a reversal to happen, where nerds will start meeting IRL while everybody else flocks to web spaces.

Honestly the golden era ended around 2010, once the normies showed up en-mass for social media. The late 90s and early 2000s were so much fun on the internet, and I'll always be sad that today's nerdy teenagers won't get to experience that.

I have a few ideas for my own retro internet projects but I'm making sure I can protect them from the AI scourge first, or at least do my best to.

I stopped reading papers, journals, blog/internet posts, books, etc written after 2022 unless lots of people repost it as high quality (and even then i take caution because how do i know it is not agents just lauding random things in convergence?).

My time reading older (e-)books has skyrocketed.

I basically stopped using reddit, threads and hacker news.

I recently noticed I need to stop watching youtube videos made after 2024 too. This is especially a problem with shorts and reels on instagram. a few days ago I watched a short describing some random spiderman comic lore, and it was full of errors. The errors aren't even always about being referencing the lore correctly. Sometimes these AI videos will make a claim and then never explain it or even contradict it.

I cant even read some manga recently because I am pretty sure some mangaka are using AI a lot more than they claim they are. The recent one piece chapters since egghead have unreal pacing, and I am not even sure if the storyboarding is made entirely by oda anymore. By unreal pacing I mean this, some one piece arcs 15 years ago would be 24 chapters, but in recent arcs, just one fight or character talking takes 13 chapters! The pacing change is completely different. Togashi of HxH is very upfront about considering/using AI tools, and the quality of HxH has not dropped, so maybe I am being pessimistic.

As soon as there's any discriminatory action taken based on that identification there's the incentive to lie and not use it and it becomes the same cat and mouse spam/antispam detection rat race sites already face.

But how would you enforce that, particularly against bad actors in countries that care less about enforcing laws and norms?

Spam calls are still a massive scourge even with Caller ID, SHAKE/STIR, and not for lack of trying.

Micropayments

The solution is probably legal, not technological.

We need a legal solution to automated spam, AI or not. It does tangible damage to communication systems when 99/100 of your e-mails doesn't come from a human being.

Yeah, the solution is to do things in person and realize that the internet should be treated as an additive, not a replacement, to in-person interactions.

emdashes are probably the least useful method of recognising AI work nowadays.

I'm pretty sure they've actually popularised their usage by everyday people who're now more aware of their existence and usage.

highly doubt Jason or 404 is out here just telling AI to write a story.

An em dash surrounded by spaces on either side tells you it was AI.

AI: This is how we think about these things — because they're important to think about — when we want to accomplish a task.

More likely human: This is how we think about these things—because they're important to think about—when we want to accomplish a task.

Not bulletproof for obvious reasons but it's easy to spot who was at least lazy with AI using this heuristic.

I think you don't know 404 Media very well, or writing styles for that matter.

or it's a journalist's writing in a somewhat-formal publication?

Don’t try to recreate good times! You’re right - good take on it all. If these companies wanna replace us all they can fooken get on with it and have done so I can go riding my bike all day.

Exactly. If we had the semantic web, content and presentation were separated, or any of the other dreams that died then AI agents wouldn't be so useful because we'd be able to do stuff like that already without them. Instead for decades piles of worthless gunk has got between people and what they're trying to do in order to prop up the whole ad economy that has wrecked it all.

While I do agree that it's very good people will touch grass it's also entirely possible to simply ignore the haters, make stuff with or without AI, and have fun.

This is a form of accelerationism that I can get behind. The humane Internet died a long time ago. There’s not much worth saving.