Cold emailing profs about PhD positions? Read this [D]

This is the time of year where the cold emails I receive about PhD positions tends to ramp up quite a bit. In many countries, this cold emailing is essentially part of the normal recruitment process, so there is nothing inherently wrong with doing this. However, there are a few things you definitely shouldn't be doing:

• Massive emails. The probability of me reading your email is inversely proportional to its length.
• Emailing everyone. Find supervisors that work in areas you are actually interested in. I do relatively foundational ML research (i.e., not associated with a specific application domain), but the majority of emails I get from prospective students are essentially "I want to apply ML to domain X". In many cases this does not constitute an ML research direction; you'd be better off finding a supervisor with expertise in domain X, which is where most of the impact will be.
• Generic research interests. If the most specific research interests you can give are "Machine Learning, LLMs, and AI" then I assume you only have a surface-level familiarity with the field, and are not ready for a PhD.
• Passing off workshop papers as conference papers. This has become a much more common thing in the last couple of years. It's a big red flag; I am not going to take on someone who is dishonest.
• Excessive AI use. Using them for fixing up grammar is fine, but if you outsource your thinking to LLMs then your research direction will be the same as everyone else who outsources their thinking to LLMs. This tends to result in something that would be an okay bachelor's thesis project, but nothing more than that. I get a lot of LLM emails, so determining if you are in this cluster is very easy.
• Summarise my paper. I already know what's in it, I don't need a summary. I care more about how you think you could build on it, or do something related. Don't use LLMs for this; see above point.
• Ignoring instructions on my website. Check prospective supervisors websites for how you should be getting in contact with them. Often they will ask you to include something in the subject line to make sure your email goes to the right place. Ignoring this will send you straight to spam.