My latest book had been out for less than a month when the emails started to arrive.
One came from “Elena”, with the tantalising subject line, “When history flutters its wings and reveals a crime too beautiful to ignore.” Then followed a long, florid message about how it was “one of those rare true stories that makes you question everything you thought you knew about history, museums, and human obsession”.
What’s more, she said I had written with “prose that feels like chasing a butterfly through time graceful, deliberate, and a little dangerous”.
I don’t know what it says about me that my gut reaction to such gushing praise is suspicion.
There were other red flags. A reverse image search of Elena’s 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.
Elena wasn’t my only new fan. “Mary” soon appeared in my inbox, saying that “few projects encapsulate intellectual intrigue, archival richness, and cinematic pacing the way yours does”.
“Lauren”, on the other hand, wanted to discuss my first book, which she said “turned what could’ve been a dry biography into a living, breathing narrative of media warfare”.
But Lauren also brought a veiled warning: “The irony is wild, a journalist whose own book, brimming with truth, power and insight, isn’t echoing loudly enough across readers’ shelves.”
Brutal. I thought Young Rupert had done OK since its publication in 2023. Heck, it had even been pirated by the LibGen online database – the same dataset infamously used by Meta to train its AI program on millions of authors’ work without permission or compensation. But sure, point taken.
As a journalist I’m 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.
Authors like me are being targeted by AI-powered accounts promising exposure and fake reviews – even though my book is about theft and fraud.
Lauren even spun a story about a man named “Marcus Hale”, who “lived many years ago and loved inventing things in his little workshop”. Hale, Lauren said, built intricate musical clocks but was outsold by another clockmaker who made louder ones.
Curiously, a few weeks after Lauren and her clunky clock parable, I read a story by my Guardian Australia colleague Kelly Burke about how the indie publishing house Melbourne Books had received calls from authors who had been in contact with an executive named Marcus Hale, from the similarly titled “Melbourne Book Publisher”. But Hale the executive – and, it seems, the clockmaker – don’t appear to exist.
Like the executive Hale, the fake names in my inbox didn’t just come to shower me in praise – they also had a variety of pitches.
Elena claimed to run a 1,200-strong community of “teachers, students and working…
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