brendan halpin

If you’ve ever published a book, you’ve probably gotten one of these AI-generated emails all “I love your book [insert AI slop summary here] would you like me to work on publicizing it for you?”

I now get at least five of these a week. I’ve gotten them for Shutout, Losing My Faculties, It Takes a Worried Man, Donorboy, and Forever Changes. So all books that are in the neighborhood of 2 decades old. I wonder if I’m being targeted because they think I’m old and will fall for scams more easily.

In any case, these have recently started to get better. I got one asking if they could add my book to a Goodreads list, which, like, they don’t need my permission for, but I could see someone engaging, going “well, sure, knock yourself out,” and then presumably they come back and say “here’s all the other stuff I can do for you, send me some money.”

But today I got one pretending to be from Kate Tuttle, who writes about books for the Boston Globe. The email address it came from was info.kate.tuttle@gmail.com. Which is kind of weird but at least semi plausible as a real email. The email asks if I’d be interested in having a feature written about me, includes some AI-generated pap about Losing My Faculties, and does not ask for money. Presumably that comes with the next email.

I know enough about how books and book publicity works to know that writers do not just randomly reach out to authors asking if they could write a feature because the author wrote a book 20 years ago. I’m sure the real Kate Tuttle is inundated with requests from actual book publicists and has no need to be cold emailing obscure authors. But, again, I can imagine someone falling for this.

So, PSA. Don’t fall for this.

Also: this shit is exhausting. You just have to be constantly on guard for scams, which are coming at you through every communication method you ever use. AI didn’t create scamming, but it does seem to be facilitating it. One more reason to close the data centers.