“Apologies for not responding, I thought it was spam.”

That response caught my attention.

A long-time client had referred me to someone in their organization, asking me to introduce myself and arrange an urgent meeting to discuss software for their budget planning. So I sent the email, CCed my client, and waited. Nothing. A few days later, I followed up, explaining we needed to schedule the meeting that week. Still nothing.

My client eventually followed up directly and got a reply: “Apologies for not responding, I thought it was spam.”

There’s a lot of talk about the inconvenience of spam making it through filters, but the opposite—legitimate emails being mistaken for spam by humans—can have more serious consequences.

Something similar happened to me on LinkedIn. I sent a quick message to someone I’ve worked with before, and they responded with a bright positive message, with the hopeful disclaimer that my message was genuine and not some “AI-generated outreach app”.

And this morning, Dianna Huff sent me an article from Search Engine Land about this exact issue. Even AI-checker tools are flagging human-written content as AI-generated.

It’s hard enough for us to tell what’s a bot, but now the bots are struggling to tell what’s human.

This is where we are people.

I don’t think it’s going to get any easier.

So do we need to be more weird, quirky, silly, funny,… human?