“Write entire emails with just one line”

The rise of UFTaaS (Useless Filler Text as a Service)

in Software — 347 words — 1 min read — 1 comment

Email platform Superhuman1 has this blurb on their landing page:

Introducing Superhuman AI
Write entire emails with just one line

They then show an example of using their AI service to generate an email. The prompt ask the team to upvote the new launch on producthunt is shown, followed by this email (the ...’s denote the edge of the visible portion of the email in the image):

Hi team,

I am thrilled about our recent product launch! 🎉 …
ProductHunt is a great platform for tapping into …
and gaining exposure for our product. However, …
That’s why I’m reaching out to ask you for your help …
please take a moment to upvote our product …
…

In my mind, there’s a big hole in this value proposition: nobody wants to read this kind of email. Only a masochist would prefer reading a fluffy, corporate-speak email over “hey team please upvote the new launch on producthunt.”2 Do you really need an AI to give you hundreds of extra words to use instead of “hey team please”?

The value prop of “Write entire emails with just one line” has always been true. You could always write your emails in the same amount of words it would take to describe to an AI: just use those words as the email itself.

Words are free-as-in-speech, but they aren’t free-as-in-beer. In this case, they are free-as-in-mattress: it’s free, but no one wants it. Each unnecessary word is just additional cognitive overhead for your readers.

Richard Lanham, creator of the Paramedic Method for editing writing, refers to these useless words as “lard.” So many new AI-powered products seem to be commoditized lard-generators.

Someone should go the other way: build an AI service that takes a big fluffy corporate-speak email and boils it down to one concise line. That would be nice.

Footnotes

  1. Superhuman apparently receives rave reviews from its customers. I can’t make any claims about its overall usefulness, having never used it. This article is just addressing the AI feature described on the landing page. ↩

  2. Superhuman claims to match your voice, but still. ↩

Comments

1 comment
  • Matthew Williams

    This outlines a funny paradigm that is unfortunately probably already happening in some large corporate office:

    Step 1. Person A writes a large email from one line with AI help
    Step 2. Person A emails the message to Person B
    Step 3. Person B condenses the fluff into a one-liner with AI help
    Step 4. Person B gains the original value Person A could have just sent, but slower 'via AI help'.


    1 reply