Reclaiming flattery; publishers' take on AI; grift proliferates: Newsletter 21 October 2026

Newsletter 173. AI excels at superficial flattery; let’s make compliments human again. Plus, Elizabeth Holmes as a modern-day role model, Tesla/SpaceX merger, three people to follow, and three books to read.

Beyond superficial flattery

AI has enabled a flood of formulaic and fawning flattery. It’s an AI tell far more dependable than em dashes. And it’s giving flattery a bad name.

I get several emails and DMs a day that purport to praise how great I am or how great my books are. Some samples:

Your work at WOBS LLC and your nearly 20 years at Forrester Research caught my attention, particularly your experience developing business ideas and helping authors communicate complex concepts clearly.

Congratulations on your ability to read a LinkedIn employment history.

Hi Josh, I came across your profile and was impressed by your experience in technology, consumer research, and nonfiction publishing. Your work helping authors develop ideas and your insights into AI and the writing profession also stood out to me.

I blog every weekday. Mining that is trivial.

Marketing to the Entitled Consumer tackles a problem marketers increasingly face: consumers expect brands to understand them personally while simultaneously becoming more resistant to the endless stream of advertising and generic outreach. The book’s emphasis on consumer-first marketing, especially reciprocal value, relevance, and respectful empathy, gives readers a framework for thinking differently about that tension.

Great. You can read an Amazon book summary, too. Or more likely, you are illiterate and can ask an AI to do it for you.

As one of my followers recently mentioned, a great rule of thumb is that any unsolicited email or DM that starts with flattery is a scam.

We are all programmed since childhood to love a compliment. It’s a natural reaction that these scammers are exploiting. Flattery is a way to create an instant connection, after which the scammer can attempt to inveigle you into paying for something worthless. This is especially dangerous for authors, who by their nature are needfully hoping you’ll say something nice about their book.

But my main complaint is that the flattery is so transparently shallow. Any bozo can compliment you on things that are obvious based on online content.

It’s equivalent to complimenting someone on being tall or on the size of their breasts. Those visible characteristics are not accomplishments. The recipient of such a compliment naturally wonders if you are just a garden variety idiot, or if you are trying to get something out of them.

The true shame here is that sincere compliments are the most valuable part of the social experience that is work. Heartfelt flattery based on actual observation of your behavior is a wonderful thing.

Try this: Use the AI feature of your email and ask it to find the most notable compliments you have received. I did this and found a few:

I wrote the best email of my life after I read your book.

I purchased your audiobook and the physical book. It helped me get published. . . . I would not have got my book published without you.”

I knew in the beginning that I had found a special [editorial] consultant to help me with my dream — but as I got deeper into this crazy industry, I learned even more about just how respected you are.

Receiving those notes made me happy.

The point of this post is not to toot my own horn; the content of these little notes doesn’t really matter. The point is that even mild flattery that comes from the heart is a thousand times more valuable than the superficial obsequiousness that comes from AI.

Compliments, like apologies, should never be written by AI. If you think somebody is doing a good and valuable job — whether that’s part of your work together or just something you’ve noticed — then by all means send them a note or post a comment. And don’t immediately follow it up with a request for help.

People complimenting people, including the give-and-take of social media comments, is perhaps the nicest part of working together. It’s time to take flattery back from the machines. It doesn’t just feel good to receive it. It feels good to give it, too.

News for writers and others who think

In The Atlantic, Idrees Kahloon suggests that Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced scam-artist behind Theranos, is something of a role model for the endless parade of lying grifters that followed her in both business and politics (gift link).

In Futurism, a compilation of all the corporate statements from senior managers who’ve realized they created incentives for their workers to spend AI tokens to create slop that makes their other workers even less efficient.

An engineering leader at a $7 billion AI startup banned AI use for writing. Her policy is catching on across the company . . . and ought to be standard everywhere.

The New Yorker profiled Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt, who suggests a new age of reading is upon us (subscriber link).

Today is the last chance to participate in the AI and the Writing Profession survey. Tell us your experience and you’ll get a summary of the results, a chance to win a Bookshop.org gift certificate, and your best chance to tell the industry what you think.

Eighty prominent publishers including The New York Times and The Economist formed a coalition to stop AI from scraping their content. They’ll need more than a coalition — it’s going to take legislation to change this behavior, and that legislation won’t pass easily.

The Conference on College Composition and Communication, a group for teachers of English composition, published guidelines on AI use by students. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has called for dechartering the group. While this infighting continues among academics, AI is rapidly undermining the teaching of writing.

Tesla and SpaceX are talking merger. Because multi-trillion-dollar entities in different industries obviously belong together even if all they share is the ketamine-addled mind of Elon Musk. By all means, let’s repeat the mistakes of the 1960s “diversified’ megaconglomerates.