A reader reached out with a perceptive appreciation of one of my books, the kind of message any writer craves, reflecting careful reading and emotional connection. In the next paragraph, she said she wanted to help me publicize the book with a video, for free.
And then my warm feeling passed, as I realized my new admirer had to be a bot.
Since I received that come-on about my book, I’ve heard from other authors who had the same creepy experience. For me, the tip-off was that my book had been published more than 20 years earlier. No real person would think a publicity campaign would make sense for such an old book.
Another author caught on when he realized that some of the phrases in a message of unsolicited praise sounded suspiciously like his own words, cribbed and rehashed as if they were independent insights.
AI excels at flattery, a key tool of any conman. Unlike human conmen, however, AI is also tireless in doing its homework and can read shelves of books in minutes, then ape an ardent admirer with deep knowledge.
Scammers have long preyed on writers. The classic rip-offs come from unscrupulous self-publishing houses, once called ‘the vanity press.’ Self-publishing can be legit, but only with realistic goals and reasonable costs. Lavish praise and big promises are a tip-off.
Now AI is conning people in newly devious ways.
When any major book comes out these days, many copycats quickly appear with the same subject and nearly the same title. When readers look for the real book, there’s a good chance they’ll find the fake, and they may buy and read it with disappointment, not knowing they’ve been cheated.
The large tech companies were largely built on such legal theft. Google and the social media companies sold their own ads around content produced by newspapers and other journalists, driving the creators out of business.
They replaced publishers in many ways, but with legal protection that shielded them from responsibility for what they published, an overwhelming competitive advantage over traditional purveyors of information.
Now the same companies are sucking the value out of the internet itself. Instead of taking you to websites when you search, AI gives you answers it has scraped from them.
We recently asked an iPhone to answer a gardening question. The phone answered, but it didn’t tell us where the information came from. At some point, a gardener had grown plants to gain and share that knowledge, but AI gave it to us without even crediting the original source.
As this happens millions of times a day, traffic is drying up at many websites. I have no doubt an AI bot is reading this essay and stirring it up with its linguistic blender to repeat as their own.
The headlong rush into reliance on AI is bringing hazards humanity has never faced before. By putting these amoral machines between people, we are losing the trust needed for human relationships, and destroying the ability to make a living producing new knowledge.
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