Comment by jerf

Another problem with this arms race is that spam emails actually are largely separable from ham emails for most people... or at least they were, for most of their run. The thousandth email that claims the UN has set aside money for me due to my non-existent African noble ancestry that they can't find anyone to give it to and I just need to send the Thailand embassy some money to start processing my multi-million yuan payout and send it to my choice of proxy in Colombia to pick it up is quite different from technical conversation about some GitHub issue I'm subscribed to, on all sorts of metrics.

However, the frontline of the email war has shifted lately. Now the most important part of the war is being fought over emails that look just like ham, but aren't. Business frauds where someone convinces you that they are the CEO or CFO or some VP and they need you to urgently buy this or that for them right now no time to talk is big business right now, and before you get too high-and-mighty about how immune you are to that, they are now extremely good at looking official. This war has not been won yet, and to a large degree, isn't something you necessarily win by AI either.

I think there's an analogy here to the war on content slop. Since what the content slop wants is just for you to see it so they can serve you ads, it doesn't need anything else that our algorithms could trip on, like links to malware or calls to action to be defrauded, or anything else. It looks just like the real stuff, and telling that it isn't could require a human rather vast amounts of input just to be mostly sure. Except we don't have the ability to authenticate where it came from. (There is no content authentication solution that will work at scale. No matter how you try to get humans to "sign their work" people will always work out how to automate it and then it's done.) So the one good and solid signal that helps in email is gone for general web content.

I don't judge this as a winning scenario for the defenders here. It's not a total victory for the attackers either, but I'd hesitate to even call an advantage for one side or the other. Fighting AI slop is not going to be easy.