Val Town calls out startup's fake AI persona in cold outreach
Val Town's Charlie got a cold email from a startup with a link to a video the sender called a "personalised" pitch. The 90 second video showed a guy named "Chase" scrolling around Val Town's landing page and pitching his own product, a tool that generates launch videos for startups: "Hey Charlie, it's Chase from Represent Studio. I was just on your website, and what you guys are building is super exciting." Chase was not a real person. He was synthetic, either fabricated outright or a clone of the human who built him. The tells were there if you looked: his eyes darted in a not-quite-human way, the pitch was pointedly casual, and he claimed Represent Studio had "had some of the biggest launches in the Silicon Valley," phrasing an actual Silicon Valley native would not use.
Charlie asked directly: "Hi. Was this an AI video?" The reply came back at once: "Yes, this is a video generated by an AI system we built internally. Curious, did it resonate with you?"
The post's author, a Val Town team member, frames the episode through Robin Sloan's newsletter, quoted at length. Sloan calls it "plainly unethical to use robots to perform simulated human marketing outreach," a judgment he says predates LLMs. His proposed alternative is a flatly disclosed template: "Hello, this is an automated message from Robot Corporation. We think you're a potential customer, so we'd like to give you some information." That, he says, is still annoying but ethically fine. What is not fine, in his words, is AI-generated cold email that is "subtler than a one-size-fits-all promo blast, but it sucks way worse, because it's fundamentally dishonest," and that such messages "pee in the pool" of internet communication, raising the "noise floor" for everyone else's sincere outreach. Sloan warns of a broader "scenario in which AI systems pollute human communication channels to the degree that they're no longer reliable or even usable," which he calls "a profound digital-ecological crisis."
The author sets this against Val Town's own practice. Steve and Charlie sell the product themselves, talking to customers to sell or to gather feedback, and the author says it shows because they genuinely use and like the product. Almost four years in, Val Town has paying customers and calls that a form of startup success, short of an outsized outcome like an IPO. The company does use AI in its own go to market templates, for tasks like qualifying leads or enriching signups, and the author is explicit that this is not the objection: "It's the pretending that's bad." The post closes with a direct appeal to stop faking humanity in outreach, followed by a hiring note for infrastructure engineers.
Key facts
- Val Town's Charlie received a 90 second AI-generated cold-outreach video from a persona named "Chase" at startup Represent Studio, pitching a launch-video generation product.
- Tells that the persona was synthetic included unnaturally darting eyes and an odd claim about "the biggest launches in the Silicon Valley."
- Asked directly whether the video was AI, the sender confirmed: "Yes, this is a video generated by an AI system we built internally."
- Quoting Robin Sloan's newsletter, the post argues disclosed automated outreach ("this is an automated message from Robot Corporation") is ethically fine, while an AI impersonating a human is not.
- Val Town, almost four years old with paying customers, says it uses AI for tasks like lead qualification but objects specifically to pretending the outreach is human.
Why it matters
AI video generation is now good enough to front a cold-sales pitch as a specific named person, complete with a fabricated backstory and workplace, and to hold up under casual scrutiny until someone asks directly. The post treats this as a symptom of a wider problem Robin Sloan calls a "digital-ecological crisis": as synthetic outreach spreads, recipients have to spend more effort just verifying that any given message came from a human, which taxes sincere senders along with dishonest ones.
Who it affects
Startups running outbound sales and marketing, who now have an AI tool available to impersonate a salesperson on video; the businesses and individuals who receive such pitches and have to work out whether they're talking to a person or a script; and, by Sloan's argument, anyone using email or messaging, since each undisclosed AI persona raises the baseline suspicion applied to every other message.
How to use it
The essay draws a specific line rather than rejecting AI in outreach outright. Using AI internally for go-to-market tasks such as qualifying leads or enriching signups is fine by the author's own account, and Val Town does it. Sending an AI-generated message is also fine if it discloses itself plainly, as in Sloan's suggested template: "Hello, this is an automated message from Robot Corporation." What crosses the line is presenting an AI-generated persona, complete with a name and a fabricated on-camera presence, as a real person reaching out personally.
How solid is it
This is a first-person account from one Val Town team member, published on the company blog, with the key claim, that the video was AI-generated, confirmed directly by the outreach sender itself when Charlie asked. The ethical argument leans heavily on quoting Robin Sloan's newsletter rather than presenting new evidence. There is no independent verification of Represent Studio beyond the video and the exchange described, and no data on how common this practice is.
Risks and caveats
The post is explicit that it does not know whether "Chase" was a wholly fabricated persona or an AI clone of a real Represent Studio employee. No further detail on Represent Studio, such as its size, funding, or founding date, is given. The account is a single anecdote plus one writer's opinion piece, not a survey or study, so it supports a claim about a real incident and a real ethical argument, not a claim about how widespread synthetic cold-outreach personas are.
“It’s plainly unethical to use robots to perform simulated human marketing outreach. I know people were doing that long before the arrival of LLMs; it was unethical then, too.”
— Robin Sloan, quoted in the Val Town blog post