Last Friday I woke up to a LinkedIn message from a founder claiming that I'd stolen his business.

He said that SoPhy - the networking intelligence engine I've been working on since last year - was apparently created as a result of me learning about his solution through his LinkedIn post.

Quick spoiler: no, I didn't steal anything (and yes, I'm aware that's exactly what someone who had stolen something would also say 😜). I didn't know he existed, let alone that he'd posted about anything. He's one of my 12,000+ LinkedIn connections. I couldn't pick him out of a lineup.

But forget about that little drama for a moment.

The Common Thread

This week alone, I spoke to three founders who'd built investor-and-founder matching tools powered by AI agents with outreach functionality. I also spoke to two Series B companies who'd just set up their own AI agents. And then there was the gentleman accusing me of intellectual theft, who - surprise - was also building something with AI.

Six conversations. One common thread. Drumroll please… AI.

(What a shocker, I know.)

AI has dropped the bar so low that everyone is building something. Everyone is automating something. A bit of common sense and a few decent prompts is all that's needed to ship something technical now. Which, depending on where you sit, is either the greatest democratisation in tech history - or the start of a problem nobody is taking seriously enough.

I want to talk about why I increasingly think it's the second one.

See below to continue…

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Continue…

The internet era already shoved us into a world where being alone with your own thoughts, in actual silence, is rarer than unicorns. We've been drowning in noise for years. The rates of loneliness, depression, suicide, and general unhappiness in big cities like London and New York have been climbing in a way that researchers keep trying to untangle. It's not a clean direct correlation - many factors are at play - but it's all connected. The world is evolving, and so are we.

But what's happening now, with AI agents becoming easier and easier to spin up and deploy, is that we're moving into a brand new era of discomfort as human beings. And honestly? It scares me.

In the nature of my business I speak to a lot of founders and see a lot of businesses. And what I'm noticing - week after week - is that fewer and fewer of them stand out. Everything is starting to blur into the same shape.

Which brings me to the three things I think are about to get materially worse, fast.

Anyone using AI properly should understand the law of big data: it averages everything. That's the whole mechanic of how these models work - they're trained on enormous amounts of existing material, and what they produce is a statistical best-guess of what "good" looks like across all of that material. Which is the average.

That's why AI can't really come up with original ideas, original designs, or original solutions. It can give you an edge in an area where you're weak - lifting you up to the median is a real upgrade if you were below it. But if you're an expert at something, using AI will most likely produce worse results than what you could do yourself. You're being smoothed out toward the same middle as everyone else.

So here's the prediction. Very soon, a huge number of products and services are going to look and sound interchangeable. Same landing pages. Same buzzword-laden copy. Same "AI-powered" hero animations. Same investor decks. Same cold emails. Same product positioning. And there will be a lot of them, because the cost of producing one has collapsed.

The winners over the next few years won't be the ones who used AI the most. They'll be the ones who figured out which parts of their work to protect from it.

Look at your inbox right now. Look at your LinkedIn messages. Look at your social feeds. The whole thing is screaming "please shoot me, I can't cope with this spam anymore."

Just sit with this for a second: we are now using AI to clean up the noise that AI created.

And the response of the market? Build more AI tools that create more noise. Investor and founder matching agents. Outreach automation tools. Lead-gen agents. Content generators. Cold-email scrapers. Comment-bots. Every founder, every salesperson, every recruiter, every marketer is being pitched a new AI tool every single week - and each one promises to help them get through to the people they want to reach.

But those people are getting hit by everyone else's tools too. So the bar to cut through keeps rising, and the response is to deploy more aggressive automation, which raises the bar even further. It's an arms race where everyone is the loser.

Every investor I know is now drowning. Every decision-maker I know is filtering harder than they ever did. And the spam that's flooding them all looks and sounds identical, because - see issue one - it's all coming from the same handful of models.

The third thing I'm watching, and this is the one that worries me most on a personal level, is the imposter syndrome epidemic that's coming.

It's incredibly easy to look smart online right now. We all sound articulate. We all know how to handle any dispute (it feels like we've got a lawyer in our pocket). We all write thoughtful, considered posts. We all have receipts ready.

But try moving any of that to the real world. Try having the same conversation face-to-face, in real time, without ChatGPT open in another tab. Try negotiating live. Try giving a presentation off the cuff. Try writing an honest email in the moment without sanding it down through Claude first.

Longer term, this gap between our online selves and our actual selves will bring nothing but anxiety. And I think it's already happening - quietly, in lots of people - but nobody's naming it yet.

The progression is predictable. First you use AI to clean up your emails. Then to write them entirely. Then to handle the whole conversation. Then you start to forget how to do it yourself. Imagine the collective withdrawal if AI stopped working tomorrow.

So yeah. It's scary. The AI train is moving at the speed of light, and it's carrying all the good and all the ugly with it. Nothing can keep up with it. Not legislation. Not the companies building the technology. And most definitely not us - the humans expected to absorb it all and adapt in real time.

Honestly, I think we're digging our own grave with a golden shovel. And true to form, this grave will also end up looking and smelling exactly average - just like everything else AI produces. 😂

I just watched the season 3 finale of Euphoria, and there's a line in it that's been stuck in my head all week. The character says:

That line is what made me write this post. Because the more founders I talk to and the more products I see, the harder it's becoming to believe that AI, in its current trajectory, is making the world a better place. The benefits are real, but the price we're going to pay for them might end up dwarfing them. And in this race we're all running, we keep forgetting the simplest thing of all: we're not robots. We're talking monkeys.

I know the train is moving and I'm on it with all of you. We can't stop what's coming. But what we can do is be more responsible about how we use AI when we're building something new.

Be properly honest with yourself before you ship the next thing: will it make the world even noisier and contribute to the future I'm describing? Or will it genuinely change things for the better? Because right now, by sheer weight of numbers, far too many of us are building tools that fall into the first category and telling ourselves they fall into the second.

And before anyone fires up the comments to tell me I'm spreading negativity and uncertainty - I'm not the only one saying this. There's a quietly growing list of former AI engineers from OpenAI and Anthropic who have left their jobs, posting on X and TikTok about why they're stepping off the train to watch from the side and see how it all unfolds. I suspect they've seen enough on the inside to struggle to sleep properly at night. 😜

The simple test, before you build the next thing: better or worse? There isn't an in between.

✅ Know a founder racing to ship the next AI tool? Forward this their way. The sooner more of us start asking better or worse before we build, the less of this mess we'll have to clean up later.

(👉 Vote now — we’ll share the results in next week’s issue. All votes are anonymous.)

(Last week’s poll results)

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