AI has killed the cold email: professor gets 75 PhD inquiries months before 2027 cycle
random_walker · x · 2026-09-13
Arvind Narayanan says AI is killing cold outreach: months before the Fall 2027 PhD admissions cycle he has already received 75 inquiries, one of 10-15 categories of unsolicited email he gets, with exponential growth expected until December.
He concedes some non-native English speakers may use AI for understandable reasons, but the sheer flood combined with AI's ability to fake signals of genuine interest makes it impossible to adjudicate individual motivations — the cold email channel is effectively dead, a tragedy of the commons.
Related event: AI-Generated Cold Emails Flood Professors' Inboxes, Killing the Signal(4 posts)→
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