My latest book had been out for less than a month when the emails started to arrive.<\/p>\n
One came from \u201cElena\u201d, with the tantalising subject line, \u201cWhen history flutters its wings and reveals a crime too beautiful to ignore.\u201d Then followed a long, florid message about how it was \u201cone of those rare true stories that makes you question everything you thought you knew about history, museums, and human obsession\u201d.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, she said I had written with \u201cprose that feels like chasing a butterfly through time graceful, deliberate, and a little dangerous\u201d.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know what it says about me that my gut reaction to such gushing praise is suspicion.<\/p>\n
There were other red flags. A reverse image search of Elena\u2019s profile picture revealed that this smiling woman dressed in white, raising a coffee cup to the camera, was in fact a widely circulated stock image.<\/p>\n
Elena wasn\u2019t my only new fan. \u201cMary\u201d soon appeared in my inbox, saying that \u201cfew projects encapsulate intellectual intrigue, archival richness, and cinematic pacing the way yours does\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cLauren\u201d, on the other hand, wanted to discuss my first book, which she said \u201cturned what could\u2019ve been a dry biography into a living, breathing narrative of media warfare\u201d.<\/p>\n
But Lauren also brought a veiled warning: \u201cThe irony is wild, a journalist whose own book, brimming with truth, power and insight, isn\u2019t echoing loudly enough across readers\u2019 shelves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brutal. I thought Young Rupert<\/a> had done OK since its publication in 2023. Heck, it had even been pirated by the LibGen online database \u2013 the same dataset infamously used by Meta<\/a> to train its AI program on millions of authors\u2019 work without permission or compensation. But sure, point taken.<\/p>\n As a journalist I\u2019m used to an inbox filled with spam and cold-call pitches. But these emails seemed tailored to me and my work, despite their language and tone bearing the je-ne-sais-quoi-fakeness of a learning language model.<\/p>\n Authors like me are being targeted<\/a> by AI-powered accounts promising exposure and fake reviews \u2013 even though my book is about theft and fraud.<\/p>\n Lauren even spun a story about a man named \u201cMarcus Hale\u201d, who \u201clived many years ago and loved inventing things in his little workshop\u201d. Hale, Lauren said, built intricate musical clocks but was outsold by another clockmaker who made louder ones.<\/p>\n