Almost every day, multi-paragraph emails arrive from passionate and well-informed readers in Barcelona and Frankfurt, Chicago and Warsaw. They have appealing names like Bella Monroe, Thalina Rose and Tricia Claxton. Some of them are straightforward enthusiasts while others are more irreverent, like the one who signs off her messages “warm chaos”.
Some love the “deadpan genius” of my novels while others admire my nonfiction’s “moral courage”. What they all have in common, though, is that they are entirely fake and trying to con me out of money. They promise to promote my work at their city-wide book clubs or spread the word among their reading communities, if only I transfer a few hundred dollars to cover costs.
In the age of generative AI, scam emails have achieved a new level of personalisation. Most writers I know are receiving a steady stream of emails like this. The messages are often sophisticated enough to bypass a spam filter and reach our inboxes, leaving us no option but to read them and ask the painful question: would any real, living person feel this strongly about my work?
Or, as one writer friend put it, the reason I know they’re fake is because they’ve actually read all my books. What makes it worse is that the AIs that help write these scams really have read all our books. Last year, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5bn in compensation to the thousands of authors whose copyrighted work they’d used to train their AI, Claude.
In July, a group of publishers filed a lawsuit against Google for utilising “one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history” in order to train their AI, Gemini. So when writers receive these AI-assisted scam messages, we know we are being manipulated by a version of ourselves. A few months ago, for example, I received a gushing email from Ottessa Moshfegh.
The bestselling, Booker-shortlisted author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation – to my mind one of the most potent voices in contemporary fiction – was taking time away from producing her inimitable prose to write me a fan letter. I thanked her for getting in touch. We got chatting and I asked about her work-in-progress.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
