| This is actually a call for research from YC-funded OpenAI: > Spam the Spammers > Investigate the use of language models to remove the profit from spamming. > Spammers generate a huge amount of undesirable traffic and attention. Their emails are merely annoying for most people, but a small fraction of users fall into their trap. Spammers receive responses from users extremely infrequently. Therefore, they manually reply to each email. > The task is to build a bot that automatically replies to spam emails. Such a bot shouldn't be easy to detect, which could be achieved by use of a powerful language model. https://openai.com/requests-for-research/#spam-spammers Could be an extension from Graham's A Plan for Spam, which basically called for a DDoS on spam servers: > As I mentioned in Will Filters Kill Spam?, following all the urls in a spam would have an amusing side-effect. If popular email clients did this in order to filter spam, the spammer's servers would take a serious pounding. The more I think about this, the better an idea it seems. This isn't just amusing; it would be hard to imagine a more perfectly targeted counterattack on spammers. > So I'd like to suggest an additional feature to those working on spam filters: a "punish" mode which, if turned on, would spider every url in a suspected spam n times, where n could be set by the user. http://www.paulgraham.com/ffb.html |