Medium's CEO argues the true measure of success against spam is not the volume of "AI slop" received, but how little reaches end-users. The fight is won through sophisticated recommendation and filtering algorithms that protect the reader experience, rather than just blocking content at the source.
Related Insights
Elon Musk explains that shadow banning isn't about outright deletion but about reducing visibility. He compares it to the joke that the best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google search results—the content still exists, but it's pushed so far down that it's effectively invisible.
Simple spintax (swapping words like "hi" for "hello") was once a common trick to dodge spam filters. Today's advanced AI and machine learning algorithms easily detect this low-effort pattern. It is no longer a viable standalone method for improving deliverability and should be replaced with genuine personalization.
Creating reliable AI detectors is an endless arms race against ever-improving generative models, which often have detectors built into their training process (like GANs). A better approach is using algorithmic feeds to filter out low-quality "slop" content, regardless of its origin, based on user behavior.
The massive increase in low-quality, AI-generated prospecting emails has conditioned buyers to ignore all outreach, even legitimate, personalized messages. This volume has eroded the efficiency gains the technology promised, making it harder for everyone to break through.
Social media algorithms can be trained. By actively blocking or marking unwanted content as "not interested," users can transform their "for you" page from a source of distracting content into a valuable, curated feed of recommended information.
Medium's CEO frames the AI training data issue as a classic prisoner's dilemma. Because AI companies chose an "antisocial" path of scraping without collaboration, platforms are now forced to defect as well—blocking crawlers and threatening data poisoning to create leverage and bring them to the negotiating table.
Avoid building your primary content presence on platforms like Medium or Quora. These platforms inevitably shift focus from serving users to serving advertisers and their own bottom line, ultimately degrading reach and control for creators. Use them as spokes, but always own your central content hub.
AI makes it easy to generate grammatically correct but generic outreach. This flood of 'mediocre' communication, rather than 'terrible' spam, makes it harder for genuine, well-researched messages to stand out. Success now requires a level of personalization that generic AI can't fake.
History shows marketers often ruin new channels (email, SMS) by overwhelming them with low-quality 'spam.' The immediate push to monetize the agent channel could create a similar 'arms race' of spam-bots and anti-spam agents, eroding consumer trust and killing the channel's potential.
AI should not be the starting point for creation, as that leads to generic, spam-like output. Instead, begin with a distinct human point of view and strategy. Then, leverage AI to scale that unique perspective, personalize it with data, and amplify its distribution.
