
How to tell when a robot has written you a letter - Thevet
https://medium.com/message/how-to-tell-when-a-robot-has-written-you-a-letter-701562705d59
======
anigbrowl
_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](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
"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
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.

~~~
DanBC
I don't care that people are trying to part me from my money. Often I'm trying
to get rid of it. {EDIT: whenever you buy anything you're trying to get rid of
that bit of money. This is true for poor people as well.}

The hate for (some) marketers comes from the fact that some of them are
fucking scum with bizarre feelings of entitlement.

"When those other companies do it then yes I guess it is spam but trust us you
really want to read our unsolicited email".

~~~
ForHackernews
> I don't care that people are trying to part me from my money. Often I'm
> trying to get rid of it.

You can give it to me.

But seriously, what a wonderful "problem" to have.

~~~
DanBC
You want to buy a tv. You set aside an amount of money to buy that tv. From
that point you're trying to get rid of that bit of money in return for a TV.

~~~
chc
I don't think that's an accurate description. If you got to the store and they
told you that, I dunno, you're the millionth customer and your TV is free, I
doubt you'd feel like you failed to get rid of the money. Because you weren't
trying to get rid of it — you were giving it up as a concession to get
something else you want more.

~~~
Retric
I think that's a good point, but for many people going shopping they are more
or less trying to spend money. They have a minimum budget and will just buy
more stuff or come back the next day if what they want is on sale or
something. Suppose, you got everyone on your list a nice Christmas gift for
20$ total, would you really stop shopping at that point?

~~~
chc
If there weren't anything else I wanted, yeah, I would. I don't know a lot of
people who buy things they don't want just to get rid of money. Maybe the
obscenely wealthy or very compulsive people, but most people I know only part
with their money in exchange for things they want, and otherwise are glad to
keep it until they find something they do want. (They may not be fastidious
about _how much_ of their money they're parting with compared to how much they
want the things, but it doesn't seem like they part with money just to be rid
of it.)

------
Htsthbjig
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
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
[https://xkcd.com/793/](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?

------
_mulder_
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.

~~~
gk1
> 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
>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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
They could always be using the money they're making from selling handwriting-
robots to fund homeless shelters and college scholarships.

------
andreasvc
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
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
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.

~~~
runarberg
This is not how advertisements work. You're not "persuaded" by a single ad.
Rather you are _primed_ into believing it. A few days (or even hours) after
you've seen an ad, you forget the source, but the content remains in your
memory. The next time you see similar content, it will be more likely to
stick. This goes on a few iterations, and pretty soon, out of a given
population, the average individual is more likely to behave as suggested by
the advertisement. What you thing _during_ the advertisement is only
secondary.

~~~
andreasvc
I know that theory, but I suspect it doesn't apply to these faux personal
messages. For example you might get a coupon from some company because of your
birthday, and the goal is clearly to get you to use that coupon within, say,
two weeks. The handwriting is thus intended as a nudge towards immediate
action as opposed to mass media advertisements which prime you for brand
recognition.

~~~
runarberg
Well you are more likely to read a seemingly handwritten letter then a printed
one. That alone will expose a greater proportion to the content, where they'll
be primed to certain keywords more likely to be picked up at a later through a
mass broadcasted medium. And by that time, perhaps they'll relate that keyword
to some personalized source, hence, a greater effect. You know, just like
coupons relate a sense of _favor_ to keywords/logos and therefor have a
greater effect on persuasive power of a given proportion of the population.

------
joosha
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
> I'm not a robot.

How do you know?

------
Houshalter
Computers can imitate human handwriting styles as well:

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

------
bambax
Shouldn't marketers try the exact opposite approach?

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

~~~
chc
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.

~~~
bambax
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).

~~~
chc
The point is to get people to open the letter, yes. Having people open the
letter who won't actually respond has _zero cost_ to the advertiser. The
letter itself is a sunk cost, so trying to push people away from opening it is
not beneficial. By trying to entice them to read, in the _worst case_ , they
just throw away your letter a little bit later. More people opening the letter
is not a negative like being deluged with thousands of false leads would be
for the Nigerian scammer.

------
ChuckMcM
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.

------
KiwiCoder
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_.

------
krallja
"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.

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

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

------
GrinningFool
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.

------
blowski
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49ncf60zN8#t=16)

~~~
gambiting
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen)

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton)

------
cpwright
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.

------
leoc
Similar machines have been in use for a long time to sign letters
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen](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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laJX0txJc6M)

------
kastnerkyle
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](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.html)

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

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

[http://www.chonday.com/Videos/the-writer-
automaton](http://www.chonday.com/Videos/the-writer-automaton)

------
DoggettCK
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.

------
bambax
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...

------
raghuRM
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.

------
ubasu
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. ;-)

------
eksith
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.

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

I don't read ground mail anymore.

------
tempodox
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.

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

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

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

------
paulgerhardt
Is there a Makerbot equivalent for these machines?

