Giving at least a courtesy reply to every initial cold email received was a longstanding goal of mine, especially when they were from entrepreneurs or folks trying to break into tech. The ROI in this commitment was always questionable (although we found at least one great investment this way), but it came down more so to values: when someone clearly put the effort into trying to reach me, I wanted to respect them. People did this for me in various ways and I would pay it forward! The evangelism even extended to preaching repeatedly that the power of a good cold email should never be underestimated. But now in 2026 I might need to discard this principle, and it’s because of AI slop.

“Hi Hunter – You’ve written about [non existent blog post, or something I did write that the LLM misunderstood] and your investments in [often the most random of our portfolio companies] makes you an excellent candidate for our current fundraise.”

Of course there are infinite variations of this, but the number of clearly AI-authored and automated cold pitches has increased so dramatically in the last few quarters that reviewing emails from senders I don’t recognize has gone from moderately enjoyable to just awful. What’s even sadder is these folks are poisoning the channel for people actually doing thoughtful outreach. A digital tragedy of the commons?!!?

How to solve this? Well, since my email client Superhuman bought GPTzero I assume some sort of “send AI emails to spam” option is coming but (a) I’m worried about false positives and (b) this seems like a cat and mouse game. Do we need to rethink some version of sender reputation scoring at an individual level (ie how to determine that the sender is of interest to me by some measure – so you don’t need an intro, but you do need a footprint)? This is more nuanced than general spam filtering.

Until then, I’ll try my best.