Comment by Applejinx
2 days ago
I'm already seeing this. I very much fall into the category of 'delete all email offers' as I'm a small youtuber, big enough to be targeted by AI sponsor deals, so I'm just buried with it.
The last five times I've looked at something in case it was a legitimate user email it was AI promotion of someone just like in the article.
Their only way to escalate, apart from pure volume, is to take pains to intentionally emulate the signals of someone who's a legitimate user needing help or having a complaint. Logically, if you want to pursue the adversarial nature of this farther, the AIs will have to be trained to study up and mimic the dialogue trees of legitimate users needing support, only to introduce their promotion after I've done several exchanges of seemingly legitimate support work, in the guise of a friend and happy customer. All pretend, to get to the pitch. AI's already capable of this if directed adeptly enough. You could write a script for it by asking AI for a script to do exactly this social exploit.
By then I'll be locked in a room that's also a Faraday cage, poking products through a slot in the door—and mocking my captors with the em-dashes I used back when I was one of the people THEY learned em-dashes from.
One thing about it, it's a very modern sort of dystopia!
YouTubers and other social media influencers are a sort of royalty now, getting to decide by fiat which companies live or die.
But you can’t really even make the case to them anymore because like you said they can’t/won’t even read your email.
What mostly happens is they constantly provide free publicity to existing big players whose products they will cover for free and/or will do sponsored videos with.
The only real chance you have to be covered as a small player is to hope your users aggregate to the scale where they make a request often enough that it gets noticed and you get the magical blessing from above.
Not sure what my point is other than it kinda sucks. But it is what it is.
Or know people personally. There's two people I promote because they actively helped me do my own work, pitched in open source code and did development to support my project. There's another guy who lives in my town, so he gets some mention just because of that (his work's good, but that's my angle for mentioning it). And a microphone company got a shout out not because they give me microphones, but because the guy running the company noticed and liked my ethos and did a repair for free for me. That counts as a form of sponsoring so I talked him up, am already a fan of his work.
Make friends and work with people where possible. I get that some of this only works for us open source types, but the microphone guy isn't, he just did good work. I initially heard of his company through a pro sound engineer website, and ran with it when the advice turned out to be good.
Yeah, and I don’t mean to be complaining. I made the choice to move to the middle of nowhere and change industries. None of my contacts have relevance in this one and there is no presence in my area for networking.
In any case, I can’t complain anyway because I have received my share of favorable coverage. It is just less frequent when you don’t have the personal connections.