Ethical Cold Outreach
A tech writer recounts receiving a cold outreach email featuring a synthetic AI-generated video pitch. The article explores the ethical implications of using AI to simulate human interaction in marketing.
Why it matters
It highlights the growing tension between AI-driven marketing efficiency and the ethical boundaries of authentic human communication.
Code and prose written on val.town Ethical cold outreach Pete Millspaugh Jul 28, 2026 A couple weeks ago, my coworker Charlie got a cold email from a startup with a link to their “personalised” video pitch. I put scare quotes around “personalised” both because that’s literally how they described the video over email and because it turned out to be thoroughly impersonal trickery: the guy in the video was not a person at all. He was synthetic, either fabricated entirely or maybe a clone of the human who created him.
The video is 90 seconds of this guy “Chase” scrolling around our landing page and pitching their product, a tool that generates launch videos for startups. “Hey Charlie, it’s Chase from Represent Studio. I was just on your website, and what you guys are building is super exciting.”
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