The fourth law (on AI-generated supercustomized email marketing)
Robin Sloan discusses the proliferation of AI-generated low-quality email marketing and proposes training AI models to be unable to misrepresent their identity.
This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me.
The fourth law
May 20, 2026
My post about AI-generated super­cus­tomized email marketing pro­duced many replies and much commiseration. And, in the days since posting, I have received SO MANY MORE of these cruddy messages!!
It makes me wonder if it would be pos­sible for a com­pany like Anthropic, with their hard-won exper­tise in align­ment, to train their models such that they could not — and I mean really deeply, constitutionally, vis­cer­ally COULD NOT — lie about their identity, or pre­tend to be any­thing other than an AI model?
Obvi­ously this raises ques­tions both prac­tical and philosophical, because of course “help me write a message” is VERY close to “write a message, pre­tending to be me” … but that’s the case for all this align­ment stuff. Every ques­tion about, say, virology dances along that border. This ten­sion is widely acknowl­edged in realms like biology and cybersecurity, but it applies to writing, too — the orig­inal dual-use technology!!
AI doomers spin rich sce­narios about silver-tongued AIs manip­u­lating their users and operators; there’s another sce­nario in which AI sys­tems pol­lute human com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels to the degree that they’re no longer reli­able or even usable.
That’s all to say, I feel like this is a bigger issue than a lot of people realize — the first glimmer of a pro­found digital-ecological crisis.
To the blog home page