“When consumers believe emotional marketing communications are written by an AI (vs. a human), positive word of mouth and customer loyalty are reduced.”
— Colleen P. Kirk & Julian Givi — Journal of Business Research
Before starting Stigma Marketing & Development up again, I already hated email. It was difficult to manage, and since high school, I had gathered a small handful of accounts. Administrative and personal management were not strong suits, and it was one of the reasons I took the entrepreneurial plunge (I knew it’d make me grow a lot).
However, one thing I was not prepared for was the onslaught of marketing emails and phone calls I’d receive as a small startup marketing dude. It’s pretty obvious Stigma Marketing & Development is a solo gig and doesn’t offer a singular niche marketing service, but more offers a consulting and development-first, authentic leadership approach to marketing. For example, it really shouldn’t take much digging to figure out I’m not a candidate for a Forbes list or podcast for marketers with campaigns in the millions (I’ve been interviewed for one). However, daily, from both phone calls and emails, marketing people have targeted me—a marketing guy—and taken up so much time, while clearly not knowing much about me.
This is more than a nuisance. This is something they create for themselves, and many of these campaigns and strategies, using AI to replace real human knowledge and familiarity, human skill, and creative and critical thinking, have been a double-edged sword. On one side, they are helping with marketing outcomes for people by boosting scale and reach, content creation, and more. On the other side, there’s an inverse response, and it’s been one I’ve been beating a bit of a drum about.
After more than a year of doing this, I’m grateful for the growth and opportunities I’ve had, and for the mistakes I had to swallow and learn from. This drum beat is one I wasn’t sure about, and one I wasn’t sure others weren’t also beating more of. Even from a business standpoint, it seemed like an opportunity, and a possible human-based, anti-fragile1 disruption to the existence of the AI era.
It turns out others are beating the same drum and others are hearing it too. Let’s explore how email marketing can confuse marketing, discredit your marketing, ruin first impressions, and risk being a tactic that could lose the soul of your marketing and business: its humanity.
The Unstoppable Rise:
Quantifying AI Adoption in Email Marketing
“We found significant susceptibility to AI-driven manipulation: participants in the manipulative groups were significantly more likely to shift their preferences toward harmful options … compared to those interacting with the neutral agent.”
— Sahand Sabour, June M. Liu, Siyang Liu, et al.. Human Decision-making is Susceptible to AI-driven Manipulation (arXiv)
AI adoption in email is widespread and accelerating, driven by quantifiable performance metrics, but these immediate gains often mask ethical and qualitative risks, creating a foundation for toxic tactics.
This is where the problem starts: we’ve allowed optimization metrics to override integrity. The system is set up to incentivize volume over value, and AI is the ultimate tool for that volume.
The Scale Promise vs. The Real Problem
The global AI market is massive, estimated between $279.22 billion and $638.23 billion in 2024, emphasizing the massive investment currently underway.2 It is the operational baseline now.
Marketers are adopting this technology in droves: a staggering 69.1% of marketers have integrated AI into their operations, and specifically, 49% are using it for email marketing.3 Why? Because the metrics look good on a spreadsheet: AI-driven email campaigns show a 13% increase in click-through rates (CTR) and a 41% rise in revenue for companies that personalize emails.4
But those performance metrics are exactly what create the foundation for the toxic tactics I’m dealing with daily. I get several emails a day from podcast interview invites, FORBES list offers, and white-label SEO services. I’m adamantly on the human side, and I work outside of these structures. It’s my method, philosophy, and model—it’s my heart, and I got the evidence for it. So, why are they saying false things about me, clearly faking looking at my stuff, and using cliché and clear AI slop?
Another fun fact: sometimes I get questions from retainer clients about the same kind of emails, from fake domain letters to marketing offerings that promise the New York Times. Some of these are legit, some are worth it, but nowadays, more and more of them are just junk amplified by AI.
The Psychological Weaponization of Hyper-Personalization
(The Guilt Trap)
AI’s effectiveness stems from optimizing classic psychological triggers (urgency, scarcity, reciprocity) to an intrusive degree, pushing communication past helpful personalization and into calculated manipulation and guilt.
This is where AI crosses the line from being a tool for service to a weapon for exploitation.5 AI can analyze communications for emotional states like urgency, frustration, or satisfaction.6 This predictive power gives the marketer a choice: enhance the experience or exploit a weakness.
“With access to vast amounts of data … the potential for even more sophisticated forms of manipulation” is a major concern in AI-driven marketing.
— Elijah Clark. Forbes
The Optimization of Psychological Principles
We see this exploitation in the automated “guilt traps.” I get emails that are clear guilt trips, pretending like they’re waiting, acting like they know what my life is, and even suggesting we’re avoiding them. It’s just a cold email, and worse, it’s AI-slop with a psychological aftermath.
- Urgency and Scarcity: AI analyzes user behavior to deploy highly refined Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) tactics, designed to push impulsive purchases.7 This is where the emotional triggers are perfectly timed to create pressure.
- Tone Adjustment: Instead of just yelling “Your cart is expiring!” (a classic tactic), AI tools can leverage sentiment analysis to deploy a softer, yet still pressing, approach, like adjusting the tone to a more empathetic but still urgent, “Still thinking it over? Here’s a little nudge.” They may also employ tactics like, “Guess you’re busy?” or “We were talking about your business the other day,” as thinly veiled attempts to manipulate a response.
- Hyper-Contextual Targeting (The Next Best Exploitation): This goes beyond static segmentation. This is the Next Best Experience (NBX) capability—where AI proactively delivers the exact right message at the exact right time. This transition from reactive marketing to calculated, proactive pressure constitutes the core manipulation. When driven purely by siloed algorithms, this over-targeting makes the customer feel “spammed” and overwhelmed, completely destroying the relational experience.8
Expert critique confirms this isn’t just a hunch. Academics warn that AI raises explicit ethical concerns regarding “customer manipulation” and “unintended consequences”.9 When companies are allowed to subtly influence behavior by exploiting personal weaknesses or emotional states, it raises significant ethical questions regarding consumer autonomy.
Using AI for email efficiency is one thing; using AI to replace humanity and engineer guilt is another. I get it’s a fine line and subtle, but it matters already and will matter more as time progresses. At least, that’s what the trends seem to suggest.
The AI Sloppiness:
The Detectability and Erosion of Trust
The efficiency gains of generative AI are often nullified by poor outputs that lack genuine human context and nuance, leading to detectable “slop” that shatters trust, as seen in user-reported examples.
If the AI isn’t manipulating you, it’s flooding us with generic and manic content. The efficiency gains of generative AI are often immediately recognizable because the content lacks the rough, unique, human edges that build connection. From flat content to the lack of meaningful transparency, and from AI phone calls to personalized email sales, AI is amplifying unethical use. This is the “slop” in the automation and personification of marketing tactics.
The Robotic Tone and Loss of Nuance
Data indicates AI-generated content struggles to replicate emotional nuance or storytelling power, leading to copy that is often described as “formal and generic.” For example, the phrase “plays a significant role in shaping” is hundreds of times more frequent in AI writing than in human writing.10 That’s the tell.
The simple lesson is clear: People connect with people. A human touch is critical: in one study, AI-generated email copy was described as “well-structured but somewhat generic” and “impersonal,” and while it achieved a high click-to-open rate (CTOR), almost no one replied directly.11 It won the click battle, but it lost the relationship war.
“Promising areas of application must be balanced with ethical risks — including psychological targeting, privacy, and manipulation — to preserve trust and integrity in brand-consumer relationships.”
— E. Hermann & others. SAGE Journal: Generative AI in Marketing (2025)
The Fact of AI Detectability (User Experience Validation)
Modern AI text detection is highly accurate, with tools claiming up to 99% accuracy. These tools work by analyzing “statistical patterns” and deviations from “known human patterns”.12 The detection isn’t just for academics; consumers feel it.
When cold emails fail to fake originality and authenticity, it fundamentally “undermines trust” needed for the intended sale.13 When recipients recognize the content is machine-generated, they risk feeling “tracked” or “surveilled,” which triggers psychological reactance. Reactance is a state that causes people to develop negative evaluations and hostile behaviors toward the brand. This feeling will be what your brand becomes. The perceived authenticity and the brand itself are ruined.14
I experienced this directly with the above “Frank” SMS example. This person, named Frank, pretended I had said I wanted something… which wasn’t true. So, I told him that, and his bot or system kept replying as if I hadn’t said anything on the matter. It was clear quickly this was fake, but “Frank” was texting as if it were a real, personal dialogue. That’s not a conversation; it’s a poorly executed surveillance tactic. It became fun fodder for a blog post. I doubt the real Frank will be trying to save that lead, especially with the AI system on his end: I’m just another number.
Shifting the Model from Optimization to Authenticity
The only sustainable solution is to leverage AI for efficiency while strictly governing its output with human strategy, thereby prioritizing the Authentic Marketing model over toxic, high-volume tactics.
The data is clear: AI is not going away, but it is fundamentally limited. The best strategy is to see it as an assistant or co-pilot, not the pilot. Humans are still the ones driving the market, as well as making and being served by AI. That dynamic probably isn’t going away anytime soon.
The Augmentation Imperative
The role of human experience and judgment is still critical. As Harvard Business School researchers state, “New research shows human experience and judgment are still critical to making decisions, because AI can’t reliably distinguish good ideas from mediocre ones or guide long-term business strategies on its own”.15 This defines the necessary co-pilot role for the technology. AI can streamline, check compliance, and automate execution16, but it cannot replace genuine strategic thinking or emotional connection.
An Alternative Model:
Anti-Fragile Marketing
The solution is to flip the script. The Upside-Down, Value-Based Funnel is the strategic frame where marketing is a natural extension of real business and begins with authentic value. It’s rather basic: do marketing authentically.
This requires prioritizing Authentic Service and the 6th P of Marketing: People. Instead of chasing clicks by manipulating psychology, we focus on building trust. Research confirms this is the anti-fragile asset: 94% of consumers are likely to remain loyal to brands that consistently practice transparency.
By adhering to authenticity and employing strategies like Credibility Stacking and the Macro-to-Micro Workflow to scale human-generated expertise, marketing becomes adaptive, anti-fragile, and future-proof. This ensures AI is constrained to enhance execution, not disrupt the core mission of genuine connection and ethical engagement. It will also help prevent polluting the digital Infosphere with so much noise. Marketing should feel like a relational conversation, not a manipulative interruption.
“The ethical considerations of advertising when applying AI should be the core question for marketers”
— Authors of “Advertising Benefits from Ethical Artificial Intelligence” (Journal of Business Ethics)
Works cited
- Anti-Fragility: The core concept of “anti-fragility” was popularized by professor and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. The term describes systems that go beyond mere robustness (which resists shock) or resilience (which recovers from shock). An anti-fragile system is one that doesn’t just survive volatility, chaos, and disorder, but actually improves and grows stronger because of it. ↩︎
- Artificial Intelligence Market Size | Industry Report, 2033 – Grand View Research, accessed November 20, 2025, https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/artificial-intelligence-ai-market ↩︎
- Top 51 AI Marketing Statistics for 2024, accessed November 20, 2025, https://influencermarketinghub.com/ai-marketing-statistics/ ↩︎
- 578 Email Marketing Stats You Can Use in 2025 (Regularly Updated), accessed November 20, 2025, https://tabular.email/blog/email-marketing-stats ↩︎
- The Dark Aide of AI in Marketing: Physiological Manipulation or Enhanced Consumer Experience – ResearchGate, accessed November 20, 2025, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395030601_THE_DARK_SIDE_OF_AI_IN_MARKETING_PHYSIOLOGICAL_MANIPULATION_OR_ENHANCED_CONSUMER_EXPERIENCE ↩︎
- How to Do Email Sentiment Analysis in 2 Ways [Template & Tips] – SentiSum, accessed November 20, 2025, https://www.sentisum.com/library/email-sentiment-analysis ↩︎
- The Dark Sides of AI in Digital Marketing | by IIDM – Medium, accessed November 20, 2025, https://medium.com/@support_93697/the-dark-sides-of-ai-in-digital-marketing-f144cd7f2b20 ↩︎
- Next best experience: How AI can power every customer interaction – McKinsey, accessed November 20, 2025, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/next-best-experience-how-ai-can-power-every-customer-interaction ↩︎
- Artificial intelligence and predictive marketing: an ethical framework from managers’ perspective – Emerald Publishing, accessed November 20, 2025, https://www.emerald.com/sjme/article/29/1/22/1244219/Artificial-intelligence-and-predictive-marketing ↩︎
- Top 7 Proven Tips To Avoid AI Detection In Writing In 2025 – GPTinf, accessed November 20, 2025, https://www.gptinf.com/blog/top-7-proven-tips-to-avoid-ai-detection-in-writing-in-2025 ↩︎
- Do AI-Generated Emails Work? Check Our Statistics – GetResponse, accessed November 20, 2025, https://www.getresponse.com/blog/do-ai-generated-emails-work ↩︎
- AI & Plagiarism Checker for Teachers & Schools – Copyleaks, accessed November 20, 2025, https://copyleaks.com/academic-integrity ↩︎
- Navigating AI Ethics: A Practical Guide for Professionals – The Authentic .AI, accessed November 20, 2025, https://www.theauthentic.ai/ourthoughts/navigating-ai-ethics-a-practical-guide-for-professionals ↩︎
- Consumers and Artificial Intelligence: An Experiential Perspective – Marketing Institute Ireland, accessed November 20, 2025, https://mii.ie/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Consumers-and-Artificial-Intelligence.pdf ↩︎
- AI & Society | Institute for Business in Global Society – Harvard Business School, accessed November 20, 2025, https://www.hbs.edu/bigs/ai-and-society ↩︎
- The Next Big Thing In Influencer Marketing: Scaling Powered By AI – Forbes, accessed November 20, 2025, https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesagencycouncil/2025/11/06/the-next-big-thing-in-influencer-marketing-scaling-powered-by-ai/ ↩︎
