ChatGPT: Trust, Attention, and Humanity
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After meeting with several candidates and conducting interviews to hire someone for her team, Anne Hathaway received the usual round of thank-you emails from applicants reiterating their interest in the position.
So far, nothing unusual, since thanking the person who interviewed you after a job interview is common practice in the United States.
The problem, according to Hathaway, was that many of these emails were incredibly similar.
The writing style, phrasing, and even the overall structure of the messages seemed almost identical despite having been sent by dozens and dozens of different candidates.
The actress got the impression that many applicants had used artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT to write the emails for them.
During the interview in which Hathaway shared this anecdote, Meryl Streep also weighed in on the subject, arguing that a thank-you letter should be something personal and that, in her view, if someone cannot even take a few minutes to write a couple of lines in their own words for an opportunity they consider important, then they do not deserve the job (source: "Anne Hathaway Says She Was Spammed With ChatGPT-Written Thank-You Notes After Hiring for a Recent Role: 'Nobody on That List Gets That Job'," Fortune).
What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from This News
People Want to Do Business with Other People
Regardless of whether you like the two actresses or agree with their respective positions, if we set ChatGPT aside for a moment, what emerges from this story is a business principle that has always existed: people prefer doing business with other people (source: "Five Fundamental Truths: How B2B Winners Keep Growing", McKinsey & Company).
In business, we naturally tend to prefer those who inspire greater trust, and trust is largely based on the perception of authenticity.
When it comes to email marketing, as in the specific case we will analyze today, when we read an email that feels as though it was written specifically for us, we get the sense that someone on the other end invested time and attention in crafting it.
By contrast, when we receive a message that could have been sent to a hundred people at once by automatically changing a single variable such as the recipient's name, the effect is completely different, and many of us tend to ignore and delete these emails without even giving them a chance (source: "Personalization in Email Marketing: The Role of Non-Informative Advertising Content," Stanford Graduate School of Business).
This applies to email marketing just as much as it does to any other aspect of business.
It is a psychological mechanism as old as humanity itself, yet it remains just as relevant today, if not even more so, given the growing amount of AI-generated text.
Of course, this does not mean that entrepreneurs should stop using ChatGPT or any other technological innovation: suggesting anything of the sort would be absurd and completely misguided.
Technological progress should always be encouraged because, when used properly, automation allows us to complete tasks faster and more efficiently.
The point is that people need to be able to trust brands, and they are unlikely to trust a brand that communicates through articles that were obviously written by artificial intelligence.
We all know that Google is not particularly fond of content generated entirely by AI, but human beings are lazy by nature and do not care about Google.
They look at ChatGPT, think about the millions of articles they could generate instantly, and conclude: "Who cares? If I publish a thousand articles, even if they're all the same, I'll still get results. A thousand articles is a lot, and I'll cover an enormous number of SEO keywords!"
No, it does not work that way.
And, as always, reality is the best proof, as the Fortune article we discussed today clearly demonstrates.
When people sense that a piece of content could have been produced by anyone, for anyone, in a matter of seconds, its value immediately collapses because that content, although grammatically flawless, contains information that can be found anywhere with virtually no effort.
Quantity may increase visibility in the short term, but it does not build trust, and without trust, meaningful relationships never develop.
That is why publishing a thousand articles identical to millions of others is simply a way to generate more noise without getting results.
The companies and brands that succeed are still the ones that make people feel understood.
Technology can accelerate the process, but it cannot replace the human connection people are looking for.