AI-generated ads and spam are lowering the cost of plausible scams

Low-effort scams are getting cheaper to produce, and personalization is no longer a reliable signal that a sender has done any real work. That is the core argument in a post by writer David Ralph Lewis, who says the volume of implausible paid promotions has increased across YouTube, sidebars, and email. The examples he cites are not subtle. In recent weeks, he says, he has seen ads for a Tai Chi program promising a superhero physique in 20 days, glasses that adapt to any prescription and double as sunglasses, a USB stick offering unlimited free internet, a book-sized air conditioner said to cool any room in 90 seconds, and mobile games that appear not to exist. His point is not that every viewer believes these claims. It is that advertisers only need a small conversion rate to recover their spend, while platforms, in his assessment, accept paid ads with little verification that the product exists or that the claim is physically plausible. A concrete spam example Lewis provides a more detailed case from his inbox. He received a pitch for Our Voices in the Chaos, his blackout poetry collection, which he distributes as a free PDF. The email praised the book, mentioned a “perfect 5.0 rating from your earliest reader,” and asked how many more poetry lovers might discover it. On the surface, he notes, the pitch reads as if the sender engaged with the work. In his assessment, the wording was instead recycled from his own site description of the