O Brave New World

So. Just out of curiosity, how frequently are YOU contacted by an AI generated account? I am now getting two or three solicitation per week and it borders on maddening.

Are you being asked to link-in to new accounts with the following attributes:

• Hyper-realistic image of an attractive female;
• Indistinct title associated with some non-existent financial entity based in NYC (or, in my case, Italy, for some reason);
• Vague and poorly phrased solicitation to become colleagues with no specified gain or value?

LinkedIn is starting to feel like a dating site, where the less discerning participants play the numbers game.

In the 90s, executive nerds stood on stages at tech conferences and made elaborate promises about this newly mass commercialized thing called "electronic mail". Rolling-in right on their heels was this thing called "spam" to taint those promises.

The tech community came together, by necessity, to somewhat successfully combat it, but I fear that this time around, it's different.

AI learns from its "mistakes", and unlike the telltale signs of a spammed solicitation (that still can be gleaned from an email header), AI can double back and completely rewrite its approach in subsequent generations.

It was very easy for me this morning, to report "Bonnie Smith from Queens, NY" as "not a real person". But the algorithm that spawned Bonnie sits quietly in the background, collecting tens of thousands of data points each day, amplifying aspects that get her connection request accepted and eliminating those that get her reported. It's only a matter of time (and a short amount of it at that) before Bonnie's children sneak past my defensive line and sell my quarterback something it doesn't need.

O brave new world with such [real] people [no longer] in it.