LLMs in Your DMs

LLMs are now in your DMs.

Cold outreach is nothing new. It predates LinkedIn, email and the internet.

If you’re like me, you’re on LinkedIn to expand your knowledge and network and perhaps even be entertained a bit. Most of us willfully accept a volume of cold-outreach in service of this goal. We easily ignore cold, unpersonalised connection requests and messages while giving more consideration to those showing more effort and relevance.

I believe this balance is delicate and LLMs could upset it.

There had been an inverse relationship between the scalability of the outreach and the personalization it could offer.

On LinkedIn, those who use LLM tools hide the provenance of their outreach - it shows up as coming from their account and signed with their name. The message text has the appearance of being highly relevant to your profile details or a recent post or comment. It often misses the mark - especially if you’re already writing nuanced takes on the use of AI, like me.

I’d rather get a cold outreach that’s truly personalised by a human, or not personalised at all. The middleground is dishonest at best. I don’t want to spend time figuring out if something which has the right keywords at first skim actually makes sense and if it was written by the person who is presenting it as theirs.

Cold outreach is the first step to engage in a business relationship. If you’re using LLMs to do this on your behalf, you are starting on the wrong foot.