In my last email, I revealed that I'd start sharing the bigger picture of what I've been building towards in my business...

And what I think is broken in our industry right now.

But before I do that, here's a quick thought experiment:

Think back to the last time Claude or ChatGPT went down for a few hours.

(Which happens like clockwork these days... every other week or so)

Now pull up any marketing community you're in...

Scroll back to that day...

And watch what happened:

Mass Panic 😱

Ad campaigns paused.

Sales pages broken.

Content calendars frozen.

Full-blown launches stalling out because the one-click prompt template someone paid $97 for last month suddenly stopped producing the same output it used to!

People posting in genuine crisis mode:

Meanwhile...

The last time Claude went down -- which was two days ago, I think -- I just... keep working.

Not because I'm some genius (I'm not).

But because AI isn't my foundation...

It's the layer on TOP of my foundation.

And that's a BIG difference right there.

Because here's the thing...

When I sit down to write an email or build a sales page or design a campaign...

The actual strategy comes from 100+ years of tested direct response principles I've spent over a decade studying.

(Eugene Schwartz. Gary Halbert. Gary Bencivenga. Clayton Makepeace... and so on. The masters most "marketers" today have never even heard about!)

The AI just helps me execute faster.

So if Claude or ChatGPT goes down?

Okay.... I pull out my notes and do it the "old-fashioned" way.

The work still gets done.

But here's what I've noticed about a LOT of people in our space right now:

They DO NOT have a marketing system.

Quite the contrary... they have a dependency problem.

And it gets even worse when you look at what these people are actually putting OUT into the world

Slop slop sloppity slop!

And this goes up to the highest echelons of business, too.

Case in point:

A few weeks ago, even one of the US's most respected law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell, got busted.

If you don't know them, they're a 140-year-old Wall Street law firm with 900+ attorneys.

They literally advise OpenAI -- yes, that OpenAI -- on AI governance and "safe deployment"

So you'd think they'd know better...

But guess what?

They got caught submitting hallucinated case citations to a federal judge in a bankruptcy filing.

Made-up cases...

Fictional legal sources. ..

Fabricated quotes...

...by the very firm that counsels OpenAI on responsible AI use 😂😂😂

(Looord have mercy!)

And in Q1 of 2026 alone, U.S. courts have already handed out MILLIONS of $$$ in AI hallucination sanctions across the legal industry.

So this isn't just a few sloppy lawyers...

This is a pattern.

And it's the EXACT same pattern I see across our world

Just with lower stakes (so far)

Marketers, copywriters, course creators, agency owners...

All racing to "AI everything" right now.

But the truth is...

Most of them are building on NOTHING.

No foundation.

No principles.

No proven frameworks.

No deep understanding of WHY a piece of copy actually persuades someone to buy.

It's just... vibes-based prompting.

(Okay, maybe at this point they're a bit more sophisticated... but you get the point)

And then they ship whatever falls out of the slot machine.

I've started calling these folks...

The "Slop Factory"

Not as an insult...but more as an observation lol.

Because the output looks the same wherever you go:

Emails that nobody opens...

Sales pages that nobody reads...

Ads that nobody clicks...

And content that nobody remembers 5 minutes after they scroll past it.

And the worst part?

Most of them don't even realize how much damage this is causing others (as well as them).

They think they're being "efficient".

They think speed = success.

They think prompts = principles.

But in reality...

Paper houses, all of 'em!

Pretty enough to take a photo of (usually with some shiny "I made $10k with AI in 30 days" claim attached)...

But the second the wind picks up...

Or the AI tool changes its model behind the scenes (which happens more often than people realize)...

The whole thing collapses.

Now...

Before someone replies saying something like:

That's NOT the answer either.

Refusing AI right now is like refusing the printing press in 1450.

You're going to get OBLITERATED by the people who use it well.

So the trick isn't to avoid AI...

The trick is to use it on top of real principles.

Look...

AI is one of the biggest gifts our industry has ever been given.

Sooooo many things that used to take days now take 30 minutes.

That's not a bad thing...

That's a massively GOOD thing (or at least it can be).

But it *only* works if the foundation underneath is solid

If you're using AI tools built by people who actually understand the principles of persuasion...

If you're using tools that encode decades of tested direct response wisdom into the prompts and frameworks themselves...

(Even better, they add a guided step-by-step component to make everything more user-friendly... which I started doing more and more of in my newer tools)

Then yeah, you get the gift.

You go from 30/100 quality output...

...to 90/100 quality output with your AI, in a fraction of the time.

BUT...

If you're using generic prompts you found on Twitter...

Or one of the 47 new "AI copy tools" that launched this month...

Or if you're just throwing your sales page into ChatGPT and hoping it spits out something usable...

Then I'm sorry, my friend...

But you're building a "paper house"

And no amount of "but it's faster!" is going to save you when it collapses.

Anyway...

That's the rant for today 😃

I'll keep going with this thread over the next few emails...

Because there's a LOT more to say...

And I haven't even gotten to the part where I tell you what I'm actually building in response to all of this.

In the meantime:

Hit reply and tell me -- what's the worst AI marketing thing you've seen lately?

A bad email?

A weird sales page?

A guru pitch that made you side-eye?

I read every reply, and your examples often end up making it into future emails.

Cheers,

-Csaba

P.S. -- The Conversion Operating System (COS) is one of the tools I've built specifically to solve this paper-house problem.

It encodes decades of tested direct response wisdom into a system you can use with any AI tool you want.

It's NOT a prompt pack... but a true foundation.

You can grab it above, if you'd like.

(I rebuilt it from scratch on April 1st... but that's a story for another email)