Gmail has AI powered spam filters for years. Stupid title
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
88 points (93.1% liked)
Technology
59329 readers
5628 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I was gonna say, if they're not already using AI that's dumb as fuck because that's probably one of the absolute best use-cases for it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A big portion of the letters here are "homoglyphs"—by diving into the endless depths of the Unicode standard, you can find obscure characters that look like they're part of the normal Latin alphabet but actually aren't.
The closer you look at an email like this, the worse it gets: "C0NGRATULATIONS" has a zero replacing one of the "O" characters, the underlined letters in "Jᴀ̲ᴄ̲ᴋ̲pot" are so strange they don't even come up in Unicode searches, and a lot of spaces are swapped out for periods or underscores.
Alternative approaches that used a "fixed vocabulary size" or "lookup table" for homoglyphs made them resource-intensive to run.
RETVec is open source, and Google hopes it will rid the world of homoglyph attacks, so even your local comment section could be running it someday.
RETVec appears to work a lot like how humans read: It's a machine-learning TensorFlow model that uses visual "similarity" to identify what words mean instead of their actual character content.
Google's similarity demo uses the same technology to identify pictures of cats, so turning that into the world's fanciest optical character recognition system sounds pretty doable.
The original article contains 731 words, the summary contains 187 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
"Google's similarity demo uses the same technology to identify pictures of cats, so turning that into the world's fanciest optical character recognition system sounds pretty doable."
Oh, well then.
Being in the US, the very presence of these homoglyphs should be a flag for any of my mail. I imagine that similar rules could be applied in most languages, especially once there's a decent sample size.
I'm getting 30-60 spam emails a month for the past 4 months out of the blue. Hopefully they fix that.
It's already annoying enough to send attachement to a Gmail user.