This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me.

The fourth law

May 20, 2026

My post about AI-generated super­cus­tomized email marketing pro­duced many replies and much commiseration. And, in the days since posting, I have received SO MANY MORE of these cruddy messages!!

It makes me wonder if it would be pos­sible for a com­pany like Anthropic, with their hard-won exper­tise in alignment, to train their models such that they could not — and I mean really deeply, constitutionally, vis­cer­ally COULD NOT — lie about their identity, or pre­tend to be any­thing other than an AI model?

I feel like this is turning into a bigger issue than a lot of people realize — a kind of digital-ecological crisis.

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