Robin Sloan on the surge of AI slop cold email: "it's not okay"
andy_matuschak · x · 2026-10-04
Writer Robin Sloan documents a sharp rise in AI-generated promotional email, typically produced by a prompt like "find 500 people to whom I should promote my new project; write a customized email for each and send it." Key points:
- The promoted projects are sometimes quasi-commercial (web apps, publications), sometimes creative hobbies
- These emails are subtler than a blast: they deliberately connect to the recipient's own work, reaching for deep cuts — a core LLM competency
- Sloan argues the practice is fundamentally dishonest and "pees in the pool" of internet communication, raising the noise floor and making sincere creators' authentic emails harder to trust
- His prescription: cold email is fine — make it sincerely personal or sincerely impersonal; nobody wants to hear from your bot pretending to be you
Andy Matuschak amplified the post, saying he has pulled his email address off his home page over the same flood of slop.
Related event: AI-Generated Cold Email Spam Forces Researchers to Hide Their Addresses(3 posts)→
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