Sure, AI spam can severely disrupt peoples attention by competing with "real" people more competently. But people will not have twice the attention. We will simply shut down our channels when the number of real-person-level-ai-spam goes to infinity, because there is no other option. Nobody will be fooled, very quickly, because being fooled would require super human attention.
Granted, that does not seem super fun either.
We're talking about a group of people whose core skill is convincing people to pay for stuff that isn't worth it. You and I may know they're worthless, but that doesn't mean they're not getting paid.
Now, imagine you got messages from what appears to be not 100 but, oh I don't know, 1 000 000 000 000 000 of the very best moms that have ever existed.
And they all do love you so very much. And they do let you by writing these most beautifully touching text messages. And they all want to meet up on Friday.
What is going to happen next? Here is what is not going to happen: You are not going to consider meeting any of them Friday, any week. You will, after the shortest of whiles, shut down to this signal. Because it's not actually a signal anymore. The noise floor has gone up and the most beautifully crafted, most personalized text messages of all time are just noise now.
So once someone’s mom passes away, you can’t really fool them with 1 or dozens of message from other moms anyway.
"Noise" in context doesn't mean random characters, it means garbage or spam or content not worth your while.
Yes, it could be that for you a given advert is irrelevant or not worth your while, but the point he was making is that it won't even be worth it for the advertiser to put out the advertisement because it will be noise for everyone.
However, there is only one kind of noise that is noise for everyone: literal noise.
So long as the spam is about something, it is relevant to someone, and therefore it does not necessarily have zero ROI.
EDIT: The only kind of noise that has no semantic is actual "mathematically pure noise" as the person below commented (/u/dang banned my account so I can't reply)
I feel like you're a bit too literal here. When people talk about noise it doesn't mean mathematically pure noise. A signal-to-noise ratio close to 1 is also colloquially called noise.
Consider that we have fairly decent anti-spam measures which do not look at the body of a message. To these methods, it is irrelevant how cleverly crafted the text is.
I reject something like 80% of all spam by the simple fact the hosts which try to deliver it do not have reverse DNS. Works like magic.
E-mail is reputation based. Once your IP address is identified by a reputation service as being a source of spam, subscribers of the service just block your address. (Or more: your entire IP block, if you're a persistent source of spam, and the ISP doesn't cooperate in shutting you down.)
To defeat reputation based services driven by reporting, your spams have to be so clever that they fool almost everyone, so that nobody reports you. That seems impractical.
How AI spammers could advance in the war might be to create large numbers of plausible accounts on a mass e-mail provider like g-mail. It's impractical to block g-mail. If the accounts behave like unique individuals that each target small numbers of users with individually crafted content (i.e. none of these fake identities is a high volume source), that seems like a challenge to detect.
Ergo slop and semantic noise.
Companies that used adverts which weren't noise went out of business long ago.
