I am the sort of person who makes scammers\u2019 lives worthwhile. I\u2019ve been done by all of them: fake banks, fake charities, fake relatives, even a fake tree surgeon. Never thought I\u2019d get done by a fake book.<\/p>\n
But I was looking at the bestseller list on Sunday and noticed one called Tart by \u201cSlutty Cheff\u201d<\/a>. I\u2019d never heard of it, or her, but she sounded like my sort of gal. And also she was a chef. \u201cAn anonymous London chef,\u201d to be precise, \u201cwho knows what it\u2019s really like to work in the capital\u2019s hectic restaurant scene.\u201d So, just in case she had anything to say that I didn\u2019t know already, I grabbed my Kindle, poked up the shopping page and typed \u201cslutty cheff\u201d.<\/p>\n The first thing it offered was \u201cslutty chef yes please daddy sex costume \u00a39.99\u201d, which was an odd offer to see on a reading device and not what I was looking for at all. Although I did buy one, because you never know.<\/p>\n Then it offered Slutty Chef \u2014 The Untold Story of an Anonymous London-based Chef and Food Writer, so I bought that too. For \u00a38.99. I didn\u2019t notice that it wasn\u2019t called Tart. Nor did I mind much that it was bylined \u201cJohn Snow\u201d. I just assumed that was a bland copyright name they use when the author is anonymous. Then I flicked past the contents pages to the start and found, weirdly, that I was already 12 per cent in. Then I noticed it was all in the third person, very repetitive, mostly speculating about what might be in Tart, and read like AI copy. Then it ended, 3,000 words at most. Many of them the same.<\/p>\n So I googled \u201cJohn Snow Slutty Cheff author\u201d and he doesn\u2019t exist. Although the book does. It comes up on Amazon just below Tart (which hadn\u2019t come up on Kindle at all), and you can even buy it in paperback for \u00a316.99. All 55 pages of it. Which I imagine are computer chunked on demand. It also exists on goodreads.com, which has the author as \u201cJohn Snow, 1813-1858, English physician who was a leader in the development of anaesthesia\u201d.<\/p>\n My \u201cSlutty Cheff\u201d book, then, is AI-generated (very lazily), entirely piratical and had been \u201cpublished\u201d four days after Tart, to do exactly what it did, which is trap sorry old fools into buying it by mistake. Although who is to say the real thing isn\u2019t AI-generated too, and equally rubbish? I\u2019m definitely not buying two books in one week about a slutty chef, so I\u2019ll never know.<\/p>\n Which means, in the end, that it\u2019s the \u201creal\u201d Slutty C who\u2019s been conned, whoever she is, not me. I think she should have a word with Amazon; they famously care deeply about rights and fairness and all that stuff.<\/p>\n Royal with cheese<\/p>\n