By now we've all grown used to the constant barrage of forecasts, warnings, capabilities, pitfalls, cautions, examples, experiences, trials, offers and more about AI, and how it will take over and remake our very existence. This virtual companion is coming for your job, your kids' teachers, as well as your therapist. That said, most would agree with author Joanna Maciejewska's post that "You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
Indeed, the first wave of AI that we all got familiar with was its ability to generate stuff out of thin air that felt very much as if it had been created by flesh and blood humans. We give it a prompt for an essay, picture or video, and off it goes. Now as we are getting more comfortable with it, we're starting to ask it to do more compound tasks: write this and then send it out and get reactions, or find this info, organize it and then present it back in a specific way. For most of us, we only see the results when we ask for it or go looking for it. But it goes the other way as well: it can come looking for you.
That's what Greg found out. A longtime friend and associate, he's no stranger to technology and the ways of the modern world. As part of that, he is adept (as are many) at quickly weeding through his email inbox, deleting countless "targeted" notes to him which are supposed to capture his eyeballs, but which he sniffs out in a second with their generic come-ons.
But then there was this one. The sender meant nothing to him, but the subject line caught his attention: "MPI WestField President's Award + Waldorf Events + Myuser." While the last phrase meant nothing, the first two were specifically related to personal things from his past. As such he opened it: "Hi Greg. Your recent President's Award from MPI WestField caught my attention – well-deserved recognition for someone with your event production expertise." Well, yeah, not so recent, but he did win that award a bunch of years back. And who doesn't like it when people recognize your accomplishments?
And so he read on: "That three-week orientation at the Waldorf+Astoria must have been quite the production to coordinate!" Again, a legit reference from a past project, and while not unknown, not something that would have been common knowledge. And it wasn't done trying to cozy up to him: "The real reason for my outreach, however, is about your real estate photography business." This was a sideline Greg started, but had never promoted, advertised or mentioned on any of his accounts. He did do some online research, but nothing traceable to him (or so he thought).
What followed was a more generic marketing pitch for outreach services, one which, had it been up front, Greg would have immediately ditched. Turns out the key was in that last subject word, a company called Myuser. They offer a service wherein they scrape the web for any and all information about a person, then use AI to craft an approach letter that seems like they know you. And they had trained their servers on Greg.
In thinking about it, much of what was there was hiding in plain sight. While the award was from 2017 and the production gig from 2015, Greg had mentioned them in a now abandoned Twitter/X stream. As to the research on real estate photography, while he usually poked around in incognito mode, certainly he might have left some breadcrumbs somewhere online. And as we've seen in countless examples, if it's out there someone can find it. In the past it might have been a conspiracy theorist sitting in a dark basement clicking around for a few weeks. Now, all it takes is a Myuser account, and a buck fifty per head with a minimum one-month order, and Greg is yours for the taking. Or as Clay Shirky, a professor at NYU put it, "It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public."
When Greg related this story to me, as with many, I was interested because it was something not in my world. But it turns out that "they" weren't done. The email to him closed with this: "P.S. Your work on that National Townhall with live audio streams in Pasadena shows you understand the power of technology in professional services!" That turned out to be a gig that I had hired him for to cover for me. Uh huh: guess it's only a matter of time till they come knocking on my door.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford, for better or worse, has left lots of online tidbits. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
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