The novelist receives passionate AI-written emails almost every day – but when he decided to take up one sender’s offer to find him new readers, the story took a darker turn

There’s no humble way to say it: I get a lot of fan mail. Almost every day, multi-paragraph emails arrive from passionate and well-informed readers in Barcelona and Frankfurt, Chicago and Warsaw. They have appealing names like Bella Monroe, Thalina Rose and Tricia Claxton. Some of them are straightforward enthusiasts while others are more irreverent, like the one who signs off her messages “warm chaos”. Some love the “deadpan genius” of my novels while others admire my nonfiction’s “moral courage”. What they all have in common, though, is that they are entirely fake and trying to con me out of money. They promise to promote my work at their city-wide book clubs or spread the word among their reading communities, if only I transfer a few hundred dollars to cover costs.

In the age of generative AI, scam emails have achieved a new level of personalisation. Most writers I know are receiving a steady stream of emails like this. The messages are often sophisticated enough to bypass a spam filter and reach our inboxes, leaving us no option but to read them and ask the painful question: would any real, living person feel this strongly about my work? Or, as one writer friend put it, the reason I know they’re fake is because they’ve actually read all my books.

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