I’m used to getting solicitation emails praising one of my books and offering to talk to me about a book club appearance, book festival, marketing program, or what have you. But this morning’s email reached a new low—or maybe a new high point, depending on how you look at it.
You see, “Deniz” from “What’s the future — Book Club Meetup Group” wrote to say how much they liked my book “A Light Formed by Time.” Now, the email, as much as I even bothered to read of it, had all the trappings of this kind of solicitation. The message was sent from a weird-looking Gmail account. “Daniz” (no last name) had come across my poetry collection and loved its “nuanced exploration of memory, landscape, historical resonance.” Besides the fact that no one would write like that, especially not in an email, and AI could probably scrape some words like that from my website, Amazon, or reviews, there was the simple, glaring fact that I have never written a poetry collection with a title even remotely like “A Light Formed by Time.” What does that title even mean?
I promise, I will never write a book with a title like that, though I have written a poetry collection titled Time Capsules. but that’s about as close as you can get. The unrecognizable title made me wonder whether AI got me confused with another writer somehow or if the spammers had just given up and sent out the same email to a million of us with the same text. But a quick search told me there is no book with this title, so it is clearly an AI hallucination.
Do they hope I’ll write them back and correct their mistake? Is there even a ‘they’ behind this email or has an AI chatbot gone rogue and started making up phishing emails and sending them to random people? At least it knows I’m a poet and write poetry collections. What if it starts sending me raves about the cookbook I’ve never written? Will I be tempted to inquire about its fake cooking show? (Disclaimer: I have written about cooking on this blog, but have no aspirations to be a cookbook author.) What if it thinks I write thrillers or romance or porn?
I can’t wait to see what dim-witted scammers will come up with next with the help of hallucinating AI. At best, it’s good for a laugh on a Monday morning and then it goes straight into the trash.
And it’s great to see how useful AI can be. Why put in any effort to writing your phishing emails after all. Humans must be stupid and gullible and will fall for whatever slop you throw at them, at least that’s what it seems like AI or these scammers must believe. Or the scammers and AI chatbots are just too lazy to even care whether their hallucinated messaging even works. No wonder AI stocks are tanking. Maybe nobody will want the garbage it spits out.
Anyway, that’s my Monday morning rant. Have a lovely week everyone! And if anyone wants to write a book titled A Light Formed by Time, have at it. I hearby renounce any claim I might have to that title and give it back to oblivion. You’re welcome.
