Holy molly, look at this! The great Susanna Clarke, my favorite author, has reached out to congratulate me on my unpublished novel.
The shoddiness of this (doubtless AI-generated) scam is both hilarious and DEEPLY infuriating. While I’ve mentioned both my love for Susanna Clarke and my prospects of publication online, I’ve never talked about them in the same breath, I don’t believe. Someone’s used AI to skim my online presence and draw connections between things I’m passionate about. Hoping, no doubt, that this will give them an opening to scam me.
It’s easy to spot at this level, but it feels like an omen of worse things to come. It infuriates me that strangers online try to twist the things people consider sacred to earn an easy buck. And it also fascinates me: I read quite a bit of literature on manipulation and salesmanship while writing my fantasy novel about con-artists who use those very strategies.
You can see the attempts to forge an emotional connection; to inspire a sense of gratitude that will lead to a debt of reciprocity; to play on the habitual insecurity and desperation for validation that every artist feels. It’s crude, and I’m professionally offended that the human scammer didn’t proof the Chatbot’s output, but the technique is sound.
The only way to be entirely safe is not to feel things.
As humans who feel things, we’re in trouble, folks.
Luke Wildman 