How I Stopped Sounding Like a Robot in Cold Emails (ChatGPT, Used Wrong on Purpose)
The AI draft is the starting point, not the send button. Here is the three-pass routine that keeps it human.
Everyone's cold email fails for the same reason: they paste the AI draft straight into the send box. The model writes the average of every cold email ever written, which is exactly what makes it land in spam, the mental kind.
I treat the first draft as raw material, not copy. Pass 1: give it the recipient, what you actually want, and one specific thing you read or noticed about them. The specificity is what the model can't invent, so you have to supply it.
Pass 2 is where the voice comes back. I delete every sentence that could be from anyone, the 'I hope this finds you well,' the 'quick note,' the three em-dashes. If a line would read fine signed by a competitor, cut it. What's left should sound like a person who did their homework.
Pass 3 is the constraint most people skip: shorten until it's uncomfortable. A cold email that respects the reader's time is under 90 words. If it runs long, you're writing for yourself, not them.
The result still used AI, but the AI did the boring assembly, not the relationship. That's the whole trick: let it draft, never let it speak for you.