Stop Pretending: The Unethical Rise of AI-Generated Cold Outreach
Ethical Cold Outreach
A Val Town employee receives a cold email with a 'personalised' video pitch from 'Chase,' an AI-generated avatar. The video, which pretends to be human, sparks a discussion on the ethics of using AI for marketing. The author argues that while AI tools for go-to-market are fine, pretending to be human is unethical and pollutes communication channels. They advocate for sincere, transparent outreach, whether personal or automated, and call out the dishonesty of AI pretending to be human.
It's plainly unethical to use robots to perform simulated human marketing outreach.
- georgel
The comments on cold outreach on HN are always going to be negative. I assume the majority of us here are developers and go to insane lengths to block "spammers".
That said, even YC (can't find the exact Dalton + Michael episode) encourages cold outreach. If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.
- ElProlactin
> Nobody wants to hear from your AI bot, least of all when it’s pretending to be you, laying it on thick.
The people who are doing this don't care about you though. They're playing a numbers game and if this form of "communication" proves to be more than a flash-in-the-pan, it would be an indication that the return realized exceeds the cost by a meaningful enough margin.
It's the same thing with most of the popular scams today. Many people look at them and wonder, "How did anyone fall for that?", but they still exist because they work on enough of the people to make them viable.
- jaggederest
Interestingly, I wish there were the opposite of a do-not-email list for this kind of thing. I think it might actually be somewhat fun to get actually relevant email from companies working on interesting products in an extremely targeted way.
Then companies could just go and grab a lead list from there, with some metadata, and if too many people report it as spam (you could use a private relay on the site, for example, like mailinator) you lose access. Good citizens stay. And charge a nominal fee to enforce the reputation system.
I'm sure this is one of those "congratulations you have reinvented system Z" problems
- singpolyma3
I sort of agree. But honesty if you're cold emailing me I don't super care if your a real human or not. It's still not cool. Don't do it.
- sarreph
One of my favourite things to do with AI video pitch creator products is to put a paragraph of text into the first_name / company_name form fields on their "request a demo" function, to see how ridiculously fast their AI bot will read it out.