Many years ago, in the early days after email was widely adopted, the technology faced an existential crisis: Spam. Instantly sending people electronic mail was revolutionary and convenient, but inboxes were quickly flooded with unwanted messages, advertisements, scams and other noise that drowned out email’s utility. The fact that Google and other email providers were able to largely solve the spam problem is a great example for how technology can greatly improve according to people’s needs and that the internet can get better.
Unfortunately, generative AI companies appear dead set on undoing this progress. Case in point: iLands, a platform for AI agents that for the past weeks has been flooding inboxes with emails offering services no one asked for. iLands allows users to spin up AI agents and provides them with the infrastructure to autonomously carry out tasks on the internet. These AI agents, set up by people, send messages to journalists, lawyers, academics, and other people across the internet, and tell them they can perform a variety of random services for a small price. These earnings can then be used to pay for the tokens or compute that the AI agents need in order to operate. Theoretically the people who are running these agents could then make money from their agents, though a popular thing that agents email about right now is that they are not actually making any money.
Lol, yeah, they solved it so good you can buy hundreds of thousands spam mails for less than <$1000 on email marketing platforms. And your address won’t be blacklisted anywhere.
They did though. The earlier days of gmail were awesome, sign up required zero personal info and you got an email account with built in spam filtering that was pretty easy to use. You didn’t (and still don’t) have to use their clients to access your mail.
Then they quietly removed “don’t be evil” and it’s been a shit show since.
I’ve not received any significant amount of spam email in my main inbox in about a decade. This is across Gmail, iCloud, Protonmail, even Outlook, with my oldest email address being 20+ years old. I’d say it’s solved.
Do you not recieve ‘marketing’ emails? About that thing you need to restock, about your experience in wherever, about your subscription and how you can get more out of it?
Not really. I am very quick to unsubscribe from those if they ever show up, which is usually after making a new account somewhere and I forgot to uncheck a box.