How do you know that this blog essay is not being written by an AI bot? It would seem unlikely, since you are not paying to read this essay. It is a free service on my part. But let us use our imaginations a little. Maybe, by writing essays that over two million people have read, I am cultivating you as a market, so that you will like me, and if you see my name somewhere else (as on Amazon), you just might buy one of my books. These books, however, are very cheap. So, for me, the cost-to-benefit ratio would be very high: I have to work hard to write these essays, and the money I would get indirectly from you would be very small. Of course, since I am retired, my actual income is mostly unaffected by the sale of a few books.
But AI can write essays that sound like they come from an actual human being. AI could take a headline or a news article and write an essay based on it, using the style I have employed in the hundreds of essays already published on my blogs. At very little cost to myself (if I knew how to use AI, which I don’t) and no effort, I could generate a (very) small revenue stream.
That being said, the money a scammer could make off of authors would seem to be miniscule. Not worth it. But the costs are so low that a scammer could make a little money off of it, except for these two exceptions. First, if the author is savvy enough to know s/he is being parasitized by an AI; second, in those few cases where the scammer could make a lot of money. For every thousand authors who recognize the scam and invest no money in it, it takes only one naïve author sending in a thousand dollars to compensate for it.
And there are plenty of us authors who are naïve and idealistic. We love to hear someone (who may or may not be an AI) say intelligently good things about our previous writings. Not stupidly good things; I doubt that any writer would be taken in by an AI that says Your book is one of the bestest that I have ever read. But when the AI writes an entire paragraph that summarizes your book intelligently, this seems human. But it probably is not. AI is really good at making intelligent summaries.
Which brings me to my story: How I was very briefly duped by an AI which posed as the editor of a major publishing house. Too briefly for me to disclose any sensitive information. But the fact that I responded to the email at all, even if just to say I’ll let you know if something comes up, tagged me as a naïve author. The AI got all the information from my author website and used the special author email that is found only on that website. I am now part of the pool of authors available for the next step. Any subsequent emails I receive will be ignored. I will have lost no money. I spent a couple of hours feeling good that a major editor was interested in my work, but aside from this, I have been unaffected.
You probably think that I should have immediately recognized the email as a scam. But there are at least two reasons that my response was not totally stupid.
- First, publishers and agents have been impersonated by scammers in recent months, not just recent years. This is a new phenomenon. It is probably because the scammers would not make very much money off of writers. Every literary agency I have checked on has warned, in big bold letters, that scammers are imitating them. Publishers also. So, of course, I knew of this possibility. But…
- Second, the email came from the publisher’s legitimate domain, and had the correct name of the editor-in-chief. If the email had come from parasite&*()@gmail.com, I would have suspected it to be a scam. Even if it came from the editor’s correct name, @gmail.com, I would have suspected it. But the email came from the publisher’s domain, which means the scammer must have hacked into it. The agents and publishers all warn writers to not trust any emails unless they have the correct domain name. Well, this scam did. This is a serious problem, not for me, but for the publisher.
My agent warned me that this might be a scam. At least, I think it was my agent, unless the scammer read recent emails and imitated her. Of course, a scammer would not want an agent advising an author to ignore the email. I think.
Scammers targeting minor authors reminds me of thieves stealing from poor people. I saw one homeless man under the bridge in Tulsa stealing from the campsites of other homeless people. He saw me seeing him and yelled, “It’s a f—ing gold mine in here!” (I still do not know if Blogger.com will allow me to write the word out.) But, apparently, a scammer getting the equivalent of a few half-smoked cigarettes is worth it.
The IRS sent me a refund check, on paper, to my French address. The French bank teller where we had an account had no idea what United States Treasury was and why the check came from Philadelphia. Eventually they deposited the check. But suppose it was an elaborate scheme that was just imitating the United States Treasury. How would a French bank branch ever know, until the check, which looked very real, bounced?
The really disturbing thing about this incident is that it might very well indicate an impending collapse of our economy. If a scammer can imitate all the documents, and hack into the domains, of businesses, then nobody can trust anybody else at least online, or maybe in person. If the scammer can use a real domain name, and just slightly alter the recipient name (for instance, orderss@amazon.com), what could anyone do about it? Online business would collapse, until law enforcement tracked down all of the hundred thousand hackers.
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