How do you tell if a cold outreach message is actually from a person anymore?
Got three outreach messages this week that all mentioned something specific about my product, referenced a post I made, sounded like someone had actually looked at what I do. Replied to one with a simple question. Took them over a day to answer something a real person would've typed back in a minute.
That's the weird part now. A bad cold email used to be easy to spot, generic greeting, no personalization, obviously copy pasted. Now the personalization itself is automated, so the one thing that used to signal someone actually cared doesn't mean anything anymore.
I wonder how people are handling this from both sides. If you send outreach, are you leaning into AI personalization or avoiding it because you think people can smell it now. And if you're on the receiving end, has anything actually worked to tell real interest apart from a well disguised template before you waste time replying.
Replies
I think a common telltale sign is definitely the em dash (—) and other common AI hallmarks. As for myself, I fed the LLM a bunch of content i've written personally and asked it to build a JSON voice profile which I use, that way content I generate for outreach feels a lot less like AI.
@abiodunt97 The voice profile trick is smart and interesting, most people just tell the AI to "sound casual" instead of actually feeding it their own writing. Ironic that the fix for AI outreach is more AI, just pointed at your own voice instead of a generic one.
i think follow up speed reveals genuine interest more than personalization itself would asking a specific product question early help separate thoughtful outreach from automated campaigns.
@mikkel_banner That tracks with what I saw too, the personalization was there but the reply speed gave it away. Might be the more reliable signal going forward since content is easy to fake and response time under pressure isn't.