Personalized phishing has always been the most effective kind, and the most expensive to produce. Spear phishing increases link click rates by a factor of 2.4Conventional phishing is often recognizable to trained eyes due to its impersonal wording. Automated personalization costs just around $0.03 per emailIn a controlled field experiment with 7,741 participants, the researchers compared four attack variants: manually created versus AI-generated and generic versus personalized phishing emails. The result: personalized, AI-generated phishing achieved 2.4 times the click rate of generic phishing. Finally, existing security measures for containment should be applied more rigorously, on the assumption that some accounts will eventually be compromised via personalized phishing.