Laying it on thick

I have noted a sharp increase in the volume of email that is clearly the result of an AI prompt of this form:

Find 500 people — writers, bloggers, YouTubers, etc. — to whom I should pro­moted my new project [which was prob­ably also gen­er­ated with AI]. Write a cus­tomized email and send it to them.

Some of these projects are quasi-commercial (a new web app, a new publication, etc.); others appear to be cre­ative hobbies.

The form is sub­tler than a one-sized-fits-all promo blast, but it sucks way worse, because it’s fun­da­men­tally dishonest. These emails go out of their way to con­nect the pro­moted project to the recipient’s own work; they reach for deep cuts. They are cousins to the recent genre of AI spam inviting authors to submit their books to vast (nonexistent) book clubs; these invi­ta­tions operate by first com­pli­menting the subtle con­tours of the work — a core LLM competency, turns out.

I don’t under­stand how anyone could think it’s okay to run the prompt above. I am here to tell you: it’s not okay! Besides being plainly rude and dishonest, it “pees in the pool” of internet communication, making it more dif­fi­cult for sin­cere cre­ators to send authentic emails about their projects, simply by raising the “noise floor” of sim­u­la­tion and bullshit.

Cold emails are totally okay — either make them sin­cerely per­sonal or sin­cerely imper­sonal. Nobody wants to hear from your AI bot, least of all when it’s pre­tending to be you, laying it on thick.