Graham noted a telltale journalistic tone exposes these drafts
A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.
Many users objected to AI-written founder pitches as inauthentic slop that erodes signals and gets trashed by investors, while a few saw no issue with using AI to craft emails from spoken ideas.
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I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI. It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?
A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.
i have found this as an interesting byproduct of the rise of obvious ai writing in pitches
all the companies say it’s a big timesaver and i guess that’s true in a sense bc i send AI-written pitches directly into the trash
A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.
This is a pretty deep question / assertion that is difficult (for me) to disagree with right now.
It reminds me of the first "letter quality" printer in Upson Hall and how using it for freshman work generated reactions from my professors. Many thought the "format" distracted from the content and was some sort of ruse on my part. Others thought the formatting caused them to look more carefully at the work as a result. Still others told me to use a typewriter like a normal student.
A wakeup call was a a chemistry lab I turned in with one note on the first page "Incredible presentation. Crap writeup. See me!"
Then Macintosh came out and everything changed. What will be Macintosh for AI generated/assisted writing?
A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.
The problem is deeper than what @paulg is highlighting. It’s that we’re losing signals of authenticity. Language (especially written) has never been a perfect window into what is “truly inside” us, but with AI it is rapidly losing signal. A fix for this would change the world.
I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI. It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?
I am struggling with this, my brain loses the ability to focus when I think something is written by AI... And it may not be, but if I feel it, something makes me lose interest. I am especially troubled by this, because people who are non-native speakers, might need that professionalization to give them an equal playing field. One thing I recommend, is that if you are going to use AI to write something, is to make it as short as possible.
@brianfagioli everyone has a different opinion on this, the ones I find particularly lazy are the ones that are clearly blasted spam
to me, if you can’t take the time to craft this in a way that I specifically would find interesting enough to write abt it, it’s not worth my time to read it
🔥
i have found this as an interesting byproduct of the rise of obvious ai writing in pitches
all the companies say it’s a big timesaver and i guess that’s true in a sense bc i send AI-written pitches directly into the trash
@MikeIsaac been getting AI pitches, cover letters, job applications etc. from younger ivy league students or recent grads from top schools disproportionately, have you seen this?
i have found this as an interesting byproduct of the rise of obvious ai writing in pitches
all the companies say it’s a big timesaver and i guess that’s true in a sense bc i send AI-written pitches directly into the trash
Actually a lot of thing that I currently get like DMs or even replies under my posts are all writen by AI.
The structure is super easy to see, as it's often smth like this.
"Everyone things X, but Y is correct".
Like every LLM writes like this, cuz of the extensive amount of such training data.
@paulg These "founders" truly believe that people can't tell the difference.
And I guess boomers can't, but that demographic won't be around much longer.
@paulg you should write a piece on why it's important to not outsource your thinking while embracing new technology
Spot on, Paul.
Once your brain learns the pattern, AI-written founder emails become almost comically obvious — that slightly too perfect, hard-hitting journalistic tone with zero real friction.
I’ve caught myself rereading my own drafts lately just to make sure they still sound like me and not like some polished AI version.
Authenticity is getting harder to fake the more AI improves.
I would say that if you feel this way is cause we used to associate style with authorship as voice was expensive no? You had to earn it through reading, failure, imitation, and eventually taste. Now AI breaks that link. As anyone can now produce the outer garments of seriousness without the inner architecture of judgment. So the irritation you feel is almost aesthetic before it is intellectual I guess. It feels like counterfeit gravitas, a kind of borrowed authority with none of the biographical weight
@paulg the moment someone recognizes your email was written by AI they stop reading it and that defeats the whole purpose
So what? founders using cowork to save time. Where is the problem? Why focus on the tool used, rather than focus on the substance. They may struggle with English or how to express themselves and wanted to fully guve you the context and the comprehensive scope they want you to know. Miscommunication and lost in translation was the biggest defect in business before AI. Ai improved that a lot.
Stop stigmatizing people for using efficiency tools, not everyone took a writing class.
@adidshaft I'm past chasing deals. I only engage with earnest founders working on interesting projects, and that kind of founder is not sending AI-generated emails.
Here’s a twist: some people actually have spent a lot of time and energy training themselves to write well, correctly, and could probably write better than any of the AI’s currently. I happen to be one of them. I want awards for writing. I won her journals, published, and pure reviewed articles without any revision. I’ve won it written winning complex technical proposals. There’s a sale in them, but there’s also a lot of information compacted and made so that anyone who can read could understand that’s what real writers do. I’m concerned that if you read some of the reports and proposals, I wrote 20 years ago, you would obviously say they were written by AI because they use more than two syllable words, they use punctuation correctly and they are conceptually sound and readable. The AI were trained from good writing or they wouldn’t be able to write the way they do. Some of you say it’s hard hitting and there is a distinction that can be made but not all correct and good writing is done by AI and if you want something hard, I can write that too. Generally, I tend to use a gentle tone, but it’s all there for the taking. It’s OK to not like a hi it’s OK to not use AI. It’s OK to use AI but you need to be careful with it and that’s the part many of you are missing. You don’t know how to interpret it and you don’t know how to use it carefully yet.
I would also prefer someone speaking like a "fuckin hillbilly" and actually saying something interesting, over speaking very professionally and saying basically nothing. Pure AI writing has a lot of (questionable IMO) style without really any substance.
Even if you start with good ideas and tell AI to rewrite it more professionally a lot of the substance is removed. It'll hedge hedging, add unnecessary adjectives, and invent buildup framing that isn't quite correct.
You gotta be super involved and hands on if you use AI for writing.
@MikeIsaac Well. I mean. Call me crazy, but I don’t see an issue with someone verbally speaking to AI and telling it to craft an email. The AI is just translating and organizing thoughts into written words.
@LotusTile @paulg @davidbessis @JarekSyg That's not true. Most good writing boils down to having writers' ear - the sense of rhythm in how you craft sentences and paras. There are obvs people who are competent - logical, high spatial/numerical iq, domain expertise - while having clunky, ugly prose.
