The thing that’s so inherently wrong about it is that it’s dishonesty straight out of the door.
This person wants me to buy their product, and before they can get a word out about it they’re already lying to me - about the origin, the intent, the faux thoughtfulness.
I want nothing to do with shameless dishonesty. This isn’t the way to sell your product.
Wisp, if you’re reading this, I now have a permanent negative image of your brand.
Like all immoral things, it's only bad if you get caught. :( Most perpetrators will nog blog their shenanigans.
I wouldn't have figured out this was Ai, and might have engaged had if the topic was relevant to me. I would not have engaged with a traditional spam email even if it had been relevant to me, so there's a real incentive to do stuff like this.
I highly doubt that people employing this scheme are thinking it through though. Lets say you indeed engage with this email, not knowing its AI. Then when things are getting serious a human approaches you after all and you find out you were talking to AI all the time. Would you not be completely outraged by being fooled like this?
I think marketers underestimate that they may turn people off their brand in the long run by these tactics, because people do not like being fooled. And the more sophisticated the scheme the more outraged people are when they find out.
I would be outraged IF I found out. If the AI-to-human hand-off is smooth enough, there is no way to figure this out. In your scenario, if the AI's only task is to send gazillions of emails to generate leads, and then the human takes over when the leads come in, the respondents have no way to figure out that the initial email was an AI.
Of course, the answer is to have AI send a response with a CAPTCHA (assuming those still work), before showing the initial email to the recipient.
At my place of work there is an internal project ongoing whose goal is to determine which tasks could immediately be improved by leveraging AI. Its a desperate try to get into AI in general even though the company does not employ any people that would actually be able to dive deeper and have subject matter expertise.
Knowing the people (mostly marketers) leading the project I can 100% guarantee that they would call these Emails shenanigans a great idea and would immediately start (to tell someone) to implement it without taking a step back and thinking it through.
This person wants me to buy their product, and before they can get a word out about it they’re already lying to me - about the origin, the intent, the faux thoughtfulness.
I want nothing to do with shameless dishonesty. This isn’t the way to sell your product.
Wisp, if you’re reading this, I now have a permanent negative image of your brand.