I mean, back when I was spam filtering setting up a simple Bayesian classifier was easy. Train it on your spam and ham and it worked damned good. "Mission Accomplished".... until it wasn't. Spam rates started climbing and it started getting harder than ever to filter them.

There is always an incentive to get spam to bypass filters, so as your filters increase in accuracy, those attempting to pass said filters adjust their behaviors.

Spammers/cheaters/whateverers will at least just use a second pass filter that uses one of these 'ai scoring' systems to beat said AI scoring systems. So while it's worthwhile to do it at this moment, this window will rapidly close.

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stymaar 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think it's a very good remark, as there's significantly less email spam than 20 years ago.

Another example is ad-blocker-blocker. There was a little bit of an arm race between ad blockers and advertisers in the middle of the 2010s, but it didn't last long. Advertisers mostly just decided not to care about ad-blockers.

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pixl97 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>Advertisers mostly just decided not to care about ad-blockers.

Directly not to care because they lost in court.

And yet the biggest advertizer on Earth (Google) decided to change their browser to make adblocking far more difficult. That or they say "just use an app, oh and turn on notifications". I'm not exactly sure who you think won the arms race there, but it seems like we the user did not.

There is significantly more spam than 20 years ago, just less of it reaches your inbox. This is a very important distinction as the cost of spam filtering is just as high as ever. On top of that most people have given up on their own email servers and instead depend on Google/Microsoft to do it for them. This allows these companies to have an overwhelming influence on email on the internet, to the point they can send spam with near impunity, and where if your system does it will be nuked from orbit by their systems.

And much like now Google supplies both the email spam, and the solution to the spam, they'll gladly supply the LLMs spam and the LLM solution while applying their 'flavor' of what's allowed to the entire internet.

	▲	stymaar 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Directly not to care because they lost in court. I'm pretty sure the illegal sport streaming websites didn't stop doing that just because it became illegal, otherwise they could have stopped their activity altogether while they were at it… > I'm not exactly sure who you think won the arms race there, but it seems like we the user did not. I, at least, won when the webiste showing ads gave up the race (for the past decade at least, only time will tell about the future). > nd yet the biggest advertizer on Earth (Google) decided This is actually an argument in my direction! The owners of websites (which are also the ones posting slop today) didn't care enough and the situation only changed because Google moved. I expect the same thing with slop. Individual websites won't make any effort to make their slop unblockable, and it will only be a problem if OpenAI/Anthropic/Google decide that they care about this market. But unlike Google in the ads market, I don't think the model providers have any reason to care. The web is already dead in their mind anyway. > There is significantly more spam than 20 years ago, just less of it reaches your inbox. This goes against your very argument from earlier! > On top of that most people have given up on their own email servers and instead depend on Google/Microsoft to do it for them. Out of convenience, but you don't need that to be practically free of spam. Whatever version of SpamAssassin is being run on OVH's mail servers has been enough for that purpose for me. > they'll gladly supply the LLMs spam and the LLM solution while applying their 'flavor' of what's allowed to the entire internet. Again, they don't care about the web. They just crawl it for content but they don't want you to read any webpage, they want you to stay in their chatbot. Every other use-case is nonexistent to them (except coding agents, of course, but that's a different product altogether).