On AI generated spam

I got my start on the internet as a young child using the Cleveland FreeNet. It was a free dialup system that gave terminal-based access to services such as email, telnet, irc and games. The earliest email of importance (to me) that I sent was one to the sitting president George H.W. Bush. If memory serves me correctly, the Whitehouse had an email address with Compuserve. After a few days, someone, presumably a staff, replied to me. The experience was all very human. Much more like mail that was electronic than the email we love to hate today.

Over my decades of blogging on and off again, I've enjoyed getting emails from readers. There has been, of course, the spam that is inevitable with being on the internet, but this was usually very obvious and easily filtered out by spam filters.

These past few months, with the recommencement of my daily writing exercise, I've started to see an uptick in AI spam marketing to me based on the content of my blog posts. These emails are incredibly obvious and very pathetic attempts to pretend to be a human selling something to me that's tangentially related to posts that I've made. I wonder what the conversion rates are on these spam campaigns? Do enough people convert to make the tokens worth it? What's the future of everyone-has-it-human-to-human communications? Is there one? Maybe it's time to go back to paper letter writing?