The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and an enormous number of those intentions currently arrive in inboxes as newsletters. Get the timing wrong and they stop being information and start feeling like an invasion of someone's evening. Another item on the to do list, another thing to triage before bed. And then, inevitably, you become desensitised to the sender entirely and hit unsubscribe, not because the content was bad, but because the relationship with your inbox had already broken down long before this particular email arrived.
Here's the bit that actually annoys me. We spend a huge amount of energy worrying about deepfakes and AI-generated influence campaigns, and rightly so, but the way commercial organisations communicate with human beings was broken long before generative AI turned up to make it worse. Marketing blurbs, sales bullshit, the LinkedIn post written in the voice of nobody who has ever actually spoken aloud. We lost the human register in commercial communication years ago, and AI has simply given that existing rot a faster delivery mechanism. You don't need a large language model to write something hollow. People have been doing it unaided for decades.
So here's my own small, mildly self-destructive experiment. My target is zero unwanted AI-360 newsletters by the time England get knocked out of this World Cup, which gives me, historically speaking, a fairly generous window. I would rather lose 4%* of a database outright than continue operating on the basis that consent given once means consent forever. You give consent at a point in time, not in perpetuity, and if that costs us a slice of the list, so be it. Roughly 137 trillion emails get sent globally every year. I have no illusions about how many meaningful messages get lost somewhere in that mire. I'm doing my own small bit to stop adding to it.
The publisher trusts me to run this thing the way I see fit, which is either a sound editorial decision or an unsupervised man with an unsubscribe button and a grudge. I'll take the risk, because here's the thing about AI-360 that I don't say often enough. So far, we've had the genuine pleasure of around fifty professionals sharing honest views on subjects they actually wanted to talk about, not a disguised sales pitch wearing the costume of thought leadership, just an adult conversation with the occasional childish interjection from me. If that counts as the foundation of something, it's because the subjects matter, not just to the security and governance crowd, but to department after department inside global organisations trying to work out what any of this means for them.
That community is built entirely on people turning up and talking honestly, which is also where I'd like more of you to come in. This isn't a call to read more of our stuff, though you're welcome to. It's a call to be part of making it: submit an article, sit down for an interview, or take a seat on a webinar panel. If one of those conversations has changed how a single lawyer, a single cyber security professional, a single governance lead thinks about a colleague's point of view, that's a fair bit of the job done, and the next voice in that room could just as easily be yours.
You're very likely reading this because you've already watched one of our interviews or webinars on the Brighttalk channel. It's 41 pieces of individual original content and counting. Five and a half hours on deepfake detection alone, a couple more on legal, and over a day and a half of continuous viewing on security and governance if you sat through the lot back to back, all of it unsponsored, unfiltered, and built by people who simply wanted to say something honest on a subject they cared about. There's room for one more voice. Possibly yours.
I'm lazy, or efficient, depending on how generous you're feeling, so this also doubles as that call to arms. The overwhelming majority of you reading this are directly affected by the AI governance and security issues we cover. Your voice matters here, properly, not as a turn of phrase.
No one else is doing this quite the way we are. Not close. Nobody else has a Stew asking the occasionally stupid question in the middle of a serious conversation, which, depending on your tolerance for me, is either our unique selling point or the one thing holding the format back.
We like money. We just do things rather differently to begin with.
*lies, damned lies, and statistics as the saying goes. 4% read better than 'as long as a piece of string'