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 pro­mote my new project [which was prob­ably also gen­er­ated with AI]. Write a cus­tomized email for each one and send it to them, using my email account.

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-size-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, often reaching 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 the author’s 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, these mes­sages “pee 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 fine — 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.