Who said “AI” ain’t good for naught? It turns out, there be a use case! In the recent months, I started receiving more and more digital spam in me inbox. But this time around, it’s spam with flavor. A twist. Lots of emails labeled “a powerful and inspiring catch phrase” + “title of one of my books”. These would be all styled in a cutesy (yet highly repetitive) way so as to supposedly grab my attention, but if you have more than a quarter of a mashed potato in your head, you can easily see this is pure computer-generated pseudo-marketing dross.

So what gives? Well, apparently Dietrich needs his adventures. Or my career books needs the audience it deserves! Take any of my books, run it through some LLM, get a book summary, and then use that as the opening volley for a marketing email, which is meant to awe and inspire me, and make me believe that YOU and only YOU can solve all my book sales problems, should I have any that is!

Funnily, long long time ago, I pitched the following idea: I would give any marketing wizard 50% of my book profits if they truly show they are as good as they say. In other words, no sale, no pay, much sale, much pay, very nice. A very honest proposal, you would say, no? Alas, not a single soul answered the call, probably because they weren’t so sure they could cast the necessary magic, I guess. Or something. It doesn’t matter.

But here we are. This is but a brief article meant to amuse you, nothing more, nothing less. Once upon a time, writing “personal” marketing email was semi-hard. The person drafting the email had to actually bother doing a modicum of research, or at least try hard making a unique impression, so the other party would sort of believe that it ain’t just spam. Now, the machines give us all a fresh take on the bland foot-in-the-door nonsense. The thing is, if you read such emails, and all you see is your own backcover text reflected at you in a reworded manner, you can easily tag the material ash AI-generated spam, and toss it away. The machines still have a way to go to be able to convince cynics and skeptics like me. From your favorite author, farewell.