Writing to me with AI

Lately, I’ve been absolutely slammed with emails and mentions on social media that are definitely AI generated. In my inbox, it’s always a random general compliment of my blog or my newsletter, and then it’s a product pitch. The product is always very obviously vibe-coded. In my mentions, it’s constantly someone asking for help with a GitHub support ticket. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s at least 15-20 a day, if not more. I actually found a forum where people were pasting agent instructions to mention me on Twitter to get their tickets accelerated. There’s an author that I enjoy and follow named Robin Sloan, who had a “pop-up” newsletter issue this past summer that sums up my feelings well: It’s plainly unethical to use robots to perform simulated human marketing outreach. I know people were doing that long before the arrival of LLMs; it was unethical then, too. If you want to use a robot to send me a customized pitch, write: “Hello, this is an automated message from Robot…

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