How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

https://medium.com/message/how-to-tell-when-a-robot-has-written-you-a-letter-701562705d59

by Thevet • 12 years ago

187 100 12 years ago

blowski3• 12 years ago

Fascinating - I had no idea such a machine existed. Here is a video of one in action - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49ncf60zN8#t=16

gambiting• 12 years ago

It's not exactly the same, but pen-wielding robots existed for a long time(earliest examples are almost 200 years old!) - US presidents have been using them for a long time to sign official documents:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen

blowski3• 12 years ago

Now you say it, reminds me of the 'Automaton' featured in Hugo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton

andreasvc3• 12 years ago

This is so pointless. People have positive associations with handwritten letters because of the content that goes with it. If marketeers start using handwritten letters they will just ruin that association.

mnw21cam• 12 years ago

But in the few years before the association is ruined, those marketers that successfully fool people into reading their junk mail will make money.

Fuxy• 12 years ago

Or just piss off a lot of people for wasting their time.

Everybody assumes if i see your advert I'm going to buy your product regardless how i run into it that's just plain not true.

It may actually have the opposite effect I'll remember it for wasting my time and avoid that annoying company that is spending way too much on advertizing instead of doing something useful with it.

TeMPOraL2• 12 years ago

Exactly. Moloch in action.

"A basic principle unites all of the multipolar traps above. In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse."

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

ben0x539• 12 years ago

So? Marketeers didn't pay for that association and aren't really invested in not exhausting it.

andreasvc3• 12 years ago

Sure, and it wouldn't be the first advertisement strategy predicated on fooling people. I just think that any goodwill associated with handwriting will quickly evaporate and on top of that it will make their marketing copy less legible (handwriting takes more effort to scan/skim). I'd say it's a lose-lose situation.

MikeTV• 12 years ago

Time to invest in wax and a signet ring

raghuRM• 12 years ago

This machine seems a standard automation for pre-email era. Most of the e-mails sent by me now and in the past years at my work in HR, have been automated by me while retaining a good amount of "personalization" for most of the non-priority e-mail replies which helped me highly for saving time for my start-ups. You will be surprised at the amount of "personalized looking" e-mails received that are actually automated.

Handwash• 12 years ago

I think I'll just rip open the letter rather than analyzing the writing. Too many details to look at.

blowski3• 12 years ago

All my letters are either from a robot or my Nan.

anigbrowl6• 12 years ago

If you need to send out 200 personalized letters to sales leads but haven’t got the time to handwrite them yourself — or if your handwriting is, like mine, grotesque — then Maillift will generate them for you, using teams of genuinely carbon-based people.

That's horrible! I don't mind getting a printed letter but if I got a handwritten letter that I later found out was faked I would never, ever do business with that person again. Doing this means the very first step in an attempt to form a business relationship is an act of deception.

This is of course a classic submarine story: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Every time I feel like I have come to terms with marketing people as economic actors they manage to plumb some new nadir.

vdaniuk• 12 years ago

"Marketing people" is one of the most egregious generalization errors on HN.

It's certainly in vogue to hate on marketers but it is not an identity, marketer is a hat that people wear. Just stop.

philbarr• 12 years ago

Hating on "marketing people" isn't just an HN thing, I think. I'm fairly sure most people hate marketers, particularly because it's their job to try and part you from your money. In fact, on HN we are probably more lenient because we are some of the people that are interested in separating people from their cash.

zyx321• 12 years ago

The problem is that marketers exist to make you buy a product that you otherwise wouldn't. The hat of a marketer is not always that of a professional liar, but frequently enough that you do well to be wary of them. Much like police have no obligation or incentive to serve and/or protect anyone but themselves, marketers don't exist to solve any problem except selling the product. Any benefit you receive from interacting with them is just a side effect, which is why the conventional wisdom is to avoid them if at all possible.

What I'm trying to say is: Never Talk To The Marketers.

rm445• 12 years ago

Eh? It's a job that people go to work to do and work at all day long. Nobody, I hope, is completely defined by their work, but marketing person in a career, often titled with something dreadful but marketing-specific such as 'marketing executive' (whatever that may mean). Not a hat.

jorgis• 12 years ago

I hate marketers because they flood my mailbox with so much useless shit and paper that I miss mail from people I want to hear from. They've succeeded at making every form of communication that they touch useless, and I'm glad that it's illegal for them to call cell phones.

otherdave• 12 years ago

What about when you get an email from a website you just signed up for that opens with "Hi, Anigbrowl! I saw that you signed up for my site..." and is "signed" by the CEO. If you found out that was an automated email and that the CEO didn't really type it up personally, would you be equally upset?

mrfusion• 12 years ago

I got one of those and at the bottom it said "do not reply to this email." I thought that was pretty funny.

michaelbuckbee• 12 years ago

I have the opposite issue, I'm constantly sending out personal emails asking to help people with getting setup (it's for Heroku SSL stuff and people often misconfigure things) and can't get a response from them.

isaacremuant• 12 years ago

I don't get offended like above poster but I do think that if something is "signed" by a person in a position of power then that person should be aware what is being said in his name and be fully responsible to deal with whatever consequence it entails.

anigbrowl6• 12 years ago

When it's pretty obviously a form letter it doesn't bother me much. The nature of email is such that I know the same letter may be going to many thousands of people, or that large chunks of it might have been cut-n-pasted.

What I'm saying is that the more personal-seeming it appears, the more attention the reader is likely to pay. An actual handwritten letter presents as a highly personal communication. Even where it's justa courtesy note, it says that the other person values your business enough to take time to literally put pen to paper. For example, a few times I've bough a used book via Amazon and it arrived with a hand-written note of the 'thank you, hope you enjoy it' variety. It may be done by some junior employee, but any firm that does that goes straight into my 'preferred sellers' list because it's a rare flourish of personal courtesy in a world where most things are mass produced and commoditized.

ef4• 12 years ago

Would you be offended if you found out that a hand-written note you received was actually written by someone's secretary? Because that's pretty standard stuff most people wouldn't consider an ethical breach.

philh• 12 years ago

Today, no. But if I lived in a time when you could expect that a handwritten letter from the CEO was actually handwritten by the CEO, then maybe I would, because in that time, doing that would have been deceptive.

anigbrowl6• 12 years ago

Traditionally if you wrote a letter on someone's behalf (eg they instruct you by phone on what to say and to get it in the mail as fast as possible), you sign is 'PP J. Smith'. PP is short for 'per procurationem' meaning 'by the agency of'. You don't need to know Latin, just that 'PP [name]' means it was sent on someone's behalf.

If I got a letter with no indicator and it turned out to be someone's secretary I wouldn't be offended exactly but it would make me a little wary until I was more familiar with the person and their working habits, eg maybe they have total trust in their secretary, but the secretary isn't familiar with this convention.

Obviously I'm a bit old-fashioned about these things, bt these conventions came into being for good reason.

drzaiusapelord• 12 years ago

DirecTV and credit card companies do this to me all the time. I'll receive a letter that looks like some kind of greeting card or invite with no identifier but an address. The font used on the outside mimicks human handwriting, so it looks authentic if you're not really paying attention.

I kinda get excited I'm getting invited to something, I open it up, and its a fucking ad.

I don't understand how people do business with businesses that mislead you like this. I mean, if they think of you so little before you're a customer, imagine how badly they will treat you when you are one.

zvm• 12 years ago

I've noticed the dead give away for those is that they come with a "Pre-sorted Standard" stamp instead of the first class postage that most personal mail uses.

atjoslin• 12 years ago

You can always tell by comparing two of the same letters.

For example, if two lowercase 'e's are exact clones of each other, you know it's a computer font.

fixedd• 12 years ago

One of these "cards" was exactly what put DirecTv on my "don't do business with" list.

luckyno13• 12 years ago

I recently moved in a new neighborhood and I think it was Direct TV that sent me one addressed to "Our New Neighbor." At first I was like, well this is awesome, I must have at least one nice neighbor. Opening it was followed by a "dirty fuckers" sighed under my breath.

They have since did it a second time, but I will not be fooled again.

UrMomReadsHN• 12 years ago

What if instead of employing an outside company these were in house employees?

anigbrowl6• 12 years ago

It wouldn't bother me if they identified as such eg, eg 'Dear Mr X, I'm an account executive at BigCorp and I want your business because...' or even 'Dear Mr X, I'm writing on behalf of the CEO of BigCorp...'

It's the misrepresentation that bugs me. If I get a handwritten letter I expect it to be from the person who signs it, and to be able to call that person up directly. So if it purports to be a personal note from the CEO and turns out not to be, that's when I'd get offended.

Florin_Andrei• 12 years ago

Every time I feel like I have come to terms with marketing people as economic actors they manage to plumb some new nadir.

Well, yes, but they do what works. They wouldn't do it if it didn't work. Which means they manage to connect with something deep inside our minds. So, when you make statements about what marketers do, you're really commenting on how the human mind works - a jumbled, impromptu, cobbled-up-in-a-hurry mess (that somehow still manages to put rockets on Mars, by some incomprehensible miracle).

anigbrowl6• 12 years ago

Beating people to make them do what you want usually works too, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing. I'm well aware that marketing is matter of doing what works, but I don't consider it ethically neutral - there are good and bad ways to go about it.

droob2• 12 years ago

Except that it's rarely "what works" as much as it is "what we can convince somebody else works, so they pay us to do it." There is shockingly little measurement and followup in the marketing world, despite what the industry would like you to believe.

_mulder_• 12 years ago

Judging from the Robot letter in the article, the easiest way to spot a robot-penned letter would be that specific words are all the same. Look at the word 'the' in the picture, or even the 'th' in 'this'. They're all identical.

The robot seems to be working from just a small pool of characters.

Some sort of randomisation algorithm would work well here, varying the size, weight and slant or jitter of each letter would at least make it appear more random, and harder to spot.

Having said that, if you are someone who works on this sort of invention, please take a long, hard look at what you're doing with your life and consider just how this invention is contributing to the advancement of mankind.

jimiwen• 12 years ago

the amount of mechanical engineering, signal processing etc, involved, they could be working on a bigger, valuable in-need problem? even more artistic would be cool...

gk1• 12 years ago

Having said that, if you are someone who works on this sort of invention, please take a long, hard look at what you're doing with your life and consider just how this invention is contributing to the advancement of mankind.

This is a silly point that gets repeated far too often. You can make that statement to almost every developer and designer here.

Some people are quite satisfied advancing their own lives and that of those who are close to them.

MereInterest• 12 years ago

Some people are quite satisfied advancing their own lives and that of those who are close to them.

That is quite true, and that is the problem. It is an inherently different philosophy, whether one's work should advance humanity as a whole, the local subset of humanity, or the local subset of humanity at the expense of the whole.

droob2• 12 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

namuol• 12 years ago

Reminds me of the small company the protagonist works for in "Her".

sesqu• 12 years ago

To expand on this, the protagonist writes personal letters for other people, not because of penmanship but because of wordsmanship.

joosha• 12 years ago

As a kid, when I used to write on white paper, my lines used to slope and I used to throw them in the trash and try again. Over time, underneath the white sheet of paper, I started placing another paper that has lines and a margin, so I can see through the white paper and know where exactly I should write. The result was perfectly straight lines and a perfect margin.

I'm not a robot.

tripzilch• 12 years ago

I'm not a robot.

How do you know?

krallja• 12 years ago

"The Dots on The 'i's" and "The Rounded Right Margin" can both be fixed by having a human generate the strokes for the original form letter, like an Autopen with RAM. Write once, then make 30,000 copies of your exact handwriting with your handwriting robot.

Htsthbjig• 12 years ago

Well, you can't.

You can buy a wacom tablet with tilt sensors and make the robot replicate the same stroke. You could add randomness to it too.

To apply different amount of force with the robot you use a spring and you control the force with the distance to the paper, it is very simple to do.

We did exactly that with ABB robots in the University a long time ago.

We used wacom drivers for linux and the wacoms were over 200 dollars or so.

A robot that uses only 3 axis is not "five figures", it is basically a plotter and thanks to reprap you could make your own for over 300 dollars.

Those are probably the ones used by this people, but you can use a robot with more degree axis and you won't be able to differentiate it.

bhouston• 12 years ago

Yeah, fully replicating human hand writing with varying force and slight randomization of letters sounds fairly easy to do. Sounds like a project an intern can handle.

sp332• 12 years ago

https://xkcd.com/793/ Just model it as a <simple object>, and then add some secondary terms to account for <complications I just thought of>. Easy, right?

raverbashing• 12 years ago

3 axis would be x, y and tilt?

tcas• 12 years ago

3 axis is X, Y, and Z (up / down). 4, 5 and 6 are usually adding rotation to each axis.

ohquu• 12 years ago

Do you have any links to papers or code that could help get me started on such a project? This sounds like it'd be incredibly fun to build.

KiwiCoder• 12 years ago

When a volunteer signs up at Social Coder I send them a welcome message.

Here's my confession: I will probably have sent that exact same message to someone else in the past.

At the moment I personally click on the "new message" button, fill out the name, paste in the message, double-check I'm sending it from a socialcoder email address, and then I send it.

This "welcome" process would be trivial to automate and yet I hesitate to do so.

Robots (and scripts) also have a way of blundering into situations that humans would avoid but this isn't why I'm reluctant to automate.

When it comes down to it I don't want to take the human (me) out of the loop. It would feel like I'm duping the recipient who might naturally expect a human connection rather than a recorded message.

If the volume was very much higher I might - apologetically - automate the welcome message. It might not make any difference to the volunteers signing up, but it would make a difference to me.

alphydan• 12 years ago

This is news? The technology is 249 years old ... :)

http://www.chonday.com/Videos/the-writer-automaton

drivingmenuts• 12 years ago

Well, at least that's one marketing battle I've already won.

I don't read ground mail anymore.

Houshalter• 12 years ago

Computers can imitate human handwriting styles as well:

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.cgi

Although a simple way would be to just have a human write the original and have a robot copy it.

GrinningFool2• 12 years ago

I recently had a horrible experience getting a home mortgage, and when invited to leave feedback I did so - politely, but sparing no feelings.

In response, I received a form-letter generic apology with a stamped signature. The numeric code at the very bottom of the letter (and the fact that it didn't address any specific issue I'd raised) gave it away, though I had to squint to determine that the signature wasn't legit.

I don't know which bothers me more: the fact that they didn't actually care enough to write a genuine response, or that the get enough disgruntled customers that they have a standard apology letter ready to go.

bambax3• 12 years ago

What about stamps though? Real letters from real people have stamps that are glued on in an odd position; junk mail (or any automated mail) has the postage directly printed on the envelope.

It's certainly possible to automate the sticking of stamps, but won't all those operations needed to "look real" increase the cost of junk mail in unsustainable proportions? Which is the point of course, from the receiver/victim point of view...

bambax3• 12 years ago

Shouldn't marketers try the exact opposite approach?

In this paper about "Nigerian" mail fraud http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf

researchers argue that it's very efficient for attackers to appear fraudulent, because this helps select the most gullible victims (true positives) while weeding out "false positives": people who respond at first, but are not scammed in the end.

From the abstract:

"Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor."

Shouldn't marketers do the same? Isn't it more efficient to eliminate non-targets as early as possible, instead of dragging into the process people who will ultimately relent. If so, it would seem preferable to send junk mail that is very explicitly junky.

chc4• 12 years ago

It's unlikely that mortgage companies are deluged with bad leads because people thought the handwriting was legit. Weeding out false positives is only an issue if you have a false positive problem.

bambax3• 12 years ago

Why do you need handwriting if not to make people open the mail, who would have otherwise thrown it away?

And if they'd have thrown it away, how likely is it they'll change their mind after having been tricked into opening it because it appeared to have been sent by a human?

The point of junk mail is not to be read, it's to generate valuable/actionable leads; I don't see how handwriting helps -- maybe it does, but we would need to see ultimate conversion rates (not just rates of initial inquiries for example).

aed• 12 years ago

Maybe it's because they have different goals?

The Nigerian-mail-fraud-scammer needs to get the gullible person to respond. If that's 1 out of 100,000 people, they need to do what they can just to get that 1 to respond. If 100 out of 100,000 respond, they have to sift through the "noise" of not-so-gullible people to find the true gullible one.

In this case, they just want to get you to open the letter and read the sales pitch (the goal isn't to find gullible people).

notahacker2• 12 years ago

That site was posted on here before, to which someone quite reasonably offered the alternate hypothesis "what if the scammers sending those particular emails are on average really stupid, as attested by anyone who has ever attempted to interact with them"

If you're sending out direct mail marketing and yet have an ordering process so cumbersome (or service of such dubious legality) that regular folks contemplating buying your product are a problem, your company isn't going to be around for very long.

Very explicitly junky mail works because the target demographic actually do get excited by the additional free services worth $100!!!! and nobody else would care to respond to the mail anyway

leoc• 12 years ago

Similar machines have been in use for a long time to sign letters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen : US presidents (and LDS presidents) have long been fond of them. Presumably extending their use to whole handwritten letters is newer.

Then there's something even older: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laJX0txJc6M

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

It was an interesting advertisement for Mailift. I find it interesting to see the lengths that junk mail goes to in order to get read. At least at my house opened or not the conversion rate is zero. But clearly that isn't the case elsewhere.

Other than the company is getting better at mimicing humans though I didn't get a whole lot out of it.

kastnerkyle• 12 years ago

I think neural networks (RNNs to be specific) have the potential to do this - coupled with these handwriting bots it would be pretty hard to tell which is which. See the research of Alex Graves http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.html

This type of research is also pretty amazing for speech synthesis.

ubasu• 12 years ago

The best way to tell is to check if the postage says "Pre-sorted Mail" or if they actually spent money on first-class postage to send it. ;-)

cpwright• 12 years ago

One of the things that readily annoys me is the "Important Information About your Current Account" letters from a credit card company that are just purchase checks inside. I do tend to open them, just in case; but have never actually used one. I don't think there is necessarily any trickery going on here, but it certainly trains people to ignore mail from them.

The mortgage companies are worse, in that they plaster the name of your current (or former) lenders on them; even though they have no actual association. These are usually easy to differentiate from real mail though.

DoggettCK• 12 years ago

Realtors have been using these lately. Had to let my old house go back to the bank in a deed-in-lieu earlier this year, but within days of the MLS listing expiring with our realtor, we started getting mail forwarded to our new house that looked handwritten.

All of them were offers from realtors wanting to re-list our house and try to sell it, and it wasn't until I got two identical letters, in identical handwriting, from two separate realtors, that I realized they were computer-generated.

eksith• 12 years ago

If the amount of energy and money spent on this level of sophistication can be devoted to actual customer service, imagine their retention. After all, it's the retention that keeps your business going. If your customers will spread the word about you too, that's far more convincing than "convincing looking" handwriting.

paulgerhardt• 12 years ago

Is there a Makerbot equivalent for these machines?

lizavp• 12 years ago

Left handed with horrible penmanship skills -- this is wonderful!

tempodox• 12 years ago

Now, that is progress. Manipulating a corporate droid into closing a deal by sending them a hand-written / hand-botted / whatever letter is serious kung fu.

How to tell when a robot has written you a letter

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