this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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55
Who needs a sneaker bot when AI can hallucinate a win for you? - EQL Blog (www.eql.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
8 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

By this point, we’d narrowed down the affected users to a single email client - Yahoo Mail, which is where we got suspicious. Had Yahoo Mail introduced any features lately that might be causing this…?

As it turns out, yes, yes they had. A quick Google search revealed that a few months ago Yahoo jumped on the AI craze with the launch of ”AI-generated, one-line email summaries”.

At this point, the penny dropped. Just like Apple AI generating fake news summaries, Yahoo AI was hallucinating the fake winner messages, presumably as a result of training their model on our old emails. Worse, they were putting an untrustworthy AI summary in the exact place that users expect to see an email subject, with no mention of it being AI-generated 🤯

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

iOS does a decent job of showing it - on the normal list of messages, you get the sender, the first 45 letter or so of the subject, and then their “summarize” icon followed by two smaller-font lines (about 75 characters) of the summarized body

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

Yeah that's the way to do it. I run [email protected] so I'd like to think I know what I'm talking about.