Beware The Scammer

Especially in this time of AI slop

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Some of you are writing for personal development, satisfaction, compulsion, or a wealth of other fascinating reasons. Some are writing with the aim of some form of publication. There is a downside to being published: you attract scammers!

I used to just get random emails trying to sell scam marketing services, or offering to promote books the sender obviously hadn’t read. But they are getting more canny, and more convincing.

The latest move is scammers using AI slop chatbots to make it look like they know you and your books.

I have included a number of examples at the end of this post, but I know a lot of authors have started getting these. At first glance it can seem like they are really from fans, to encourage interaction (and once you do that, you’ll get even more spam). But it is just AIs ingesting book blurbs, blog posts, website text etc, and outputting it to rough templates with a tone of voice applied.