Writers and Scams in the Era of AI

(My first-ever AI-generated image, courtesy of Gemini 3. Why do all these AI tech products sound like space missions, or satellites? The image shows a robot typing a manuscript, which was my prompt. Rather worryingly accurate.)

If I were to launch a profitable and efficient scam, which is beyond both my capacity and my interests, the last people I would target would be writers whose books have sold less well than they would have liked.

(And that’s probably most writers, although I imagine that Rachel Reid and Margaret Atwood are pretty happy with their sales.)

But for some months, now, I’ve been reading cautions by memoirists as well as by novelists like Rebecca Makkai and even poets that a game is afoot to part them from their hard-earned income.

The scam involves an appeal to the author’s ego, via a claim that a book club would like to read and discuss their work, with a personal appearance by the author as the capstone.

And then the requests for money begin, to assist with marketing and publicity costs, ostensibly. It spirals. The requests redouble.

In today’s New York Times, Dan Barry describes how he was contacted about his 20-year-old literary memoir.

The book club organizer offered effusive praise–and support: “Joel said that if I could use some ‘complimentary’ help in presenting my out-of-print book to a broader audience, he’d be more than happy to share his thoughts.”

You can see where this is going.

And “Joel’s” note was merely “… one of dozens I was suddenly receiving about my books from various corners of publishing, all reaching out to commiserate on my underappreciated literary genius and to offer their services. Either I had finally been recognized as the Proust of my generation, or this frenzied attention was part of some insistent scam.”

The upside is that when Barry received a note from “Margaret Atwood” and contacted her office to let them know her name was being used, he heard back from both Atwood’s assistant and from Atwood herself, who offered warm sympathy.

So why target writers, of all people?

Barry’s analysis is worth reading. I’ll include just one more quotation:

“A cursory check of a name or address will often reveal no there there. Other telltale tips can slip past the A.I. mask; for example, that fraudulent National Book Foundation website offering proofreading services included the encouragement to “Unlock You Literary Succes Today.”

Perhaps the biggest flaw is the sheer relentlessness of the emails. The bombardment betrays the lie.”

But I want to connect this predatory scam to two other things that are taking place simultaneously: the depressing phenomenon of AI-training jobs for desperate new university and college graduates (I’ve been trying to steer my own kid away from these), and American publishers’ decision to stop printing mass-market paperbacks.

I think the publishing market is contracting. It’s what I hear about crime writing and memoir, the two genres I’m working in, alongside literary criticism (for which the market has almost always been tiny and academic).

At the same time, all of the writing in the world (no hyperbole) is being gobbled up voraciously by AI to improve large-language training models.

So where do we go from here? What do I advise my creative writing students, who celebrate human-authored literary works and want to share their own?

Don’t fall for scams, first of all.

(Although there may be an “eye of the beholder” issue here: is a literary magazine’s contest that requires a steep entry fee an opportunity–or a minor-league scam? These are lucrative and help sustain a number of Canadian journals, but they make me uneasy, and I’ve advised my own students to seek out opportunities that don’t require a credit card).

And have faith that beyond all this, your words matter.

The Rise of the Machines is proving to be far less dramatic but just as culturally unsettling as we were promised by the Terminator movies.