This is one of my bigger issues with generative AI.

It used to be easy to spot effort: a cool logo on a business card, an interesting website design, a recruiter email that speaks to a specific experience I have on my LinkedIn profile. This used to indicate that someone was willing to do a bit more than the bare minimum and gave them some legitimacy.

Now I see any of these things and I have to do the extra work to try to figure out if it was AI generated.

Sharing a trick I learned here on HN: I prefix my first name on LinkedIn with an emoji (green check box).

Whenever a message starts with “Hi (emoji) (first name)” it’s 100% spam.

So far they are not training to fix this (all they have to do is drop the prefix), which is somewhat surprising. Zero messages that address me correctly seem automated. Maybe because in today’s day people can legitimately have emoji in their names?

You can still easily spot actual work, whether in website design or recruiter messages. Isn't that the whole schtick of the article?

But low-effort spam will always dominate, that's just the nature of it. You will always receive 10 times more messages that were only 1/10th of the work on the other side. How could it ever be otherwise?