John Scalzi Warns Businesses Off AI Emails After 8 Scam Messages in 30 Minutes
Updated
Updated · John Scalzi's Whatever · Jun 11
John Scalzi Warns Businesses Off AI Emails After 8 Scam Messages in 30 Minutes
2 articles · Updated · John Scalzi's Whatever · Jun 11
Summary
Scalzi said a legitimate company’s AI-written email looked so much like a scam that he contacted management to warn its domain might have been hacked.
Eight AI-written scam emails hit his inbox in roughly 30 minutes, he wrote, arguing that creatives now reflexively associate machine-generated outreach with fraud.
Dozens of similar pitches arrive daily offering marketing, podcast, book club or Hollywood opportunities, and Scalzi said that volume makes AI text easy to spot and easy to ignore.
His advice to businesses was blunt: write outreach yourself or pay a human to do it, because AI-generated first contact signals laziness, weak competence and a high chance of being filtered as spam.