Happy October! This is the month where I finally feel like I start to come alive after the endless slog that is summer in the Midwest. Let’s hope the temperatures keep falling.
My stuff
Subscribers to this newsletter used to receive a free ebook of stories I’d previously published titled Lies I Tell Myself. Now, new subscribers get an ebook of different stories, The Trouble with Billy (shoot me an email if you never got one! I’ll be happy to send it your way). But if you want to see what you missed, you can download Lies I Tell Myself for free over at ko-fi.com. (Ko-fi = coffee, get it?)
My conversation with an AI scambot
I was really drawn into this Patreon post by Jason Sanford about AI book club scams because in the past couple weeks I’ve received at least five different solicitations from different parties—on their face, at least—offering to promote my books. I deleted them unread, but if I’d followed them down the rabbit hole like Jason did, I’m betting I would have reached a similar result. They spoke about my books in glowing but generic terms that meant practically nothing, promising a lot but specifying very little. I sent them to the junk mail folder and didn’t think much else about them—until I read Jason’s post, and it reminded me of something.
Recently I had a conversation on Bluesky with someone who said they were an author. I don’t get a lot of direct messages, so it stood out to me. It was prompted by something I’d posted elsewhere, and as I recall they asked a fairly straightforward question about inspiration or genres that I liked to write in, which I answered and then asked a question of my own.
We proceeded like this for a little bit, asking questions back and forth and discussing our particular writing habits. There was something familiar about their name but I couldn’t place it. When I googled it, though, I realized I’d read their debut novel a few years ago, a psychological suspense, and loved it. So, of course I mentioned this in my next message.
Oddly, they never acknowledged that. I thought, well, that’s peculiar. Most people are at least willing to talk about their own work, right? (Honestly, get a writer going, and good luck trying to get them to shut up about process or inspiration.)
This wasn’t the first thing that struck me as odd about the conversation. There was something about it that approached obsequiousness but was also generic and insubstantial. Kind of like the emails offering to promote my books. It felt… artificial.
I decided to let some time pass between their last direct message and my next answer, and by the time I got around to replying, they were gone. The account had been deleted and my messages from them vanished.
Why would someone create a bot to impersonate this person? Yes, they’re a successful writer, but I don’t think they’re a household name, even though their debut novel was on the New York Times bestseller list. At the same time, as soon as I realized who it was supposed to be, it immediately seemed suspect, because why would this writer be wasting their time on a social media platform?
And yet, before I knew who it was, I suppose I was fished in for a little while, yeah? I was talking to this thing as if there were a human on the other end, even though their answers to my questions struck me as being pulled from the same database as marketing copy: Looks promising, means little.
I don’t know that I have any great insight into this at the moment, other than the constant generation of AI slop is disheartening to anyone who spends time trying to make something using their own imagination and creativity. Don’t fall for it.
What I’m Reading
I just finished reading The Two Roberts by Damian Barr, about Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, Scottish artists from working-class backgrounds who met in the 1930s at the Glasgow School of Art, fell in love, and were inseparable for the rest of their tumultuous lives. It’s a beautiful and devastating story about two spectacular talents who proved that the brightest stars burn the fastest. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
And that’s it for now. See you in November!
