A rant about AI (written by a human)

It seems to be a feature of today’s world that new inventions that ought to, used properly, make everyday life easier, quickly get used improperly by bad actors. There are times when I wonder if the harm inflicted by new technology is worth the benefits.

Where AI intersects with the publishing industry, we’re already familiar with AI-written slop flooding the book market, making it ever more difficult for genuine authors to gain any kind of visibility. But now I’ve seen several examples of AI being used trying to separate those same authors from their dwindling reserves of cash.

The contact form on my website has always attracted a steady flow of spam (thankfully mostly filtered out by WordPress) trying to sell me services for marketing, editing, website optimization etc. Up until recently, these have been cut-and-paste generic pitches easy to ignore. But there’s a growing trend of messages that look human-written and which make it through the spam filter.

What makes them different is the level of personalization involved. The typical pitch mentions one of my books, and then proceeds to elaborate in very specific detail what impressed the sender and why they so badly want to work with me and help my writing succeed. “Wow!” is the immediate reaction. “This person must have read the book!”

Right.

It’s only on much closer examination that I realize the specific details (moral conflicts, the dangers of revenge, shaken assumptions etc.) were all extrapolated from the book blurb, and padded out with waffle and fulsome praise designed to lull the reader. Clearly someone is throwing the publicly-available book description at an AI and asking it to flatter the author.

Some of these scams are offering the usual marketing services. More ominously, I’ve had several offers to be a featured author at a book club or book fair. These organizations are always genuine clubs, but I’m sure the offer isn’t. I assume the angle will be to demand an appearance fee, hoping to entrap authors who don’t know that event organizers should be paying guest authors, not the other way around.

So this is what all those energy- and water-hungry datacenters are being used for. Great!

Large parts of the internet have already become a toxic waste ground. Throw AI into the mix, and what malignant genie have we let out of the bottle?