People hate being cheated, but keep offloading emotional labor to AI

Every week I get pitch emails full of "your work truly resonated" and obvious template text. Senders think they cracked cold outreach. Nah.

When you send an email that reads too AI-ish, people think you're lazy, you're a fraud, or you didn't respect the person enough to write it yourself.

Personal messages work because someone SPENT TIME ON YOU. LLM model-generated ones feel like an insult to your intelligence.

Yet every company demands "AI-native" hires. Shopify requires proof a task can't be done by AI before hiring someone. Meta cut thousands in the name of "AI efficiency."

So we end up with this double standard: "When I use AI, it's smart efficiency. When you use it on me, it's laziness."

It can be considered hypocrisy, but that’s human nature. When people are forced to showcase their AI usage because their livelihoods depend on it, some take it too literally.

Nobody has decided where the ethical line is drawn, so everyone places it right behind their own behavior.

📌 I do positioning, brand strategy and communications to help tech founders look and sound like category leaders, not like AI slop. People don't trust tech they don't understand, so I make your product trustworthy. hey@dariastrategy.com