I sent over 10k personal thank you videos to my customers
This seems at least a little unethical.  At the very least, I would think worse of a company that sent a video to me that seemed personalized, but later turned out to be mass-produced.  He has an ethics section in the article, but doesn&#x27;t doesn&#x27;t go very deep and (unsurprisingly) concludes that his own actions were perfectly fine.<p>The root of the problem is <i>why</i> customers respond well to these videos: they&#x27;re surprised and impressed that the CEO of the company would take time out of his day to record a thank you video just for them.  And the fact is: the CEO did not.  It&#x27;s deception, plain and simple.  Not big, evil, Theranos-level deception, but deception still.<p>To put it another way, how do you think customers would respond if, along with each email, you included some text saying &quot;this video was automatically generated&quot;?  I&#x27;d assume pretty poorly.  The difference between that response and the actual response is the value of the deception here.  I think that &quot;if we were honest about this, customers wouldn&#x27;t like it&quot; is a good litmus test for whether you&#x27;re doing an ethical thing or not.<p>Really, I think this is doing a sort of trust arbitrage.  The tech exists to fake personal videos now, but customers aren&#x27;t widely aware of it.  You can take advantage of that difference with stunts like this.  In a few years, people will know this can easily be done and the value of personal videos will drop.  At some point it&#x27;ll be no different to the average customer than an email with &quot;Hi &lt;name here&gt;!&quot; or a letter with faux-handwriting on it.