I quite often receive emails via the contact form on this website. About half of these are from readers who have enjoyed something I’ve written. These mean a lot to me, and I’m very grateful for them, as I also am for the comments that people make on my blog posts, including when they disagree with me.
It’s human to want to communicate, isn’t it, to tell other people what’s inside us? That’s why lonely people, when they get the chance, often talk and talk and talk, like starving people presented with a meal. And I think I write because my need to communicate is greater than most people’s. I’m prone to talk too much as well, if I don’t watch myself.
I was an isolated kid, and an isolated young man. There were times in my younger days when I felt like a castaway on a desert island, sticking messages into bottles and throwing them into the sea. And, though I’m no longer isolated in that way (the word ‘isolated’ actually derives from the Latin word for ‘island’!) it’s still a lovely thing to get a message back, in the same way as, I’m sure, most people find it lovely to meet and talk with people who really relate to what they want to say.
(Some writers claim they write only for themselves, they’d write even if there was no prospect at all of anyone reading what they came up with. I don’t think I would. It’s hard to imagine a situation in which there wasn’t at least some possibility of a reader in the future, so it’s a bit of an academic question, but I do sometimes have ideas that couldn’t be published without causing hurt or embarrassment to people I care about – and I never bother to write them.)
The other half of the messages I get come in various categories:
Some people write because they want to ask me to do something for them -write a story for an anthology, give a talk, do an interview, be a guest at a convention – and all of that’s great too, of course. It’s lovely to be wanted! (If that sounds needy, well, I am!)
Quite often people write to invite me to hire them as publicists, which is fair enough, though I’m not interested.
Sometimes (and this usually takes the form of comments on my blog), I receive a kind a spam which is just gibberish – random blocks of irrelevant text, sometimes in a foreign alphabet. I don’t know what purpose this serves, but obviously I just delete it.
But lately I’ve starting receiving, via the contact form, a new kind of spam, consisting of detailed and florid appreciations of my books, which sometimes peter out in the middle of saying something, as if there was more, but it didn’t fit into the word limit of the contact form.
The first one of these I received, I did briefly think came from a real reader with an unusually flowery style of writing, but I’ve learnt to recognise these things as AI-generated. They are detailed and yet generic. Even the florid praise is generic, and so lavish that it’s almost hectoring.
‘I salute you. You have written a rare masterpiece…’ That kind of thing.
So they’re a kind of bait, which human users cast out into the sea of writers in the hope that someone will bite and buy their services. (Or at least pay for services, even if those services don’t exist). A couple of times, they’ve been offers to interview me, for which, it turns out, I’m expected to pay a ‘contribution’.
It’s rather depressing, being flattered by a machine, and of course the thing about AIs is that they are still at an early stage, and will soon get better at sounding human. (Quite possibly AIs will scoop up this post and use it as feedback.) They are no particular threat to me because I won’t feel tempted to pay for any service that they might offer.
But it’s sad to think a time might come when I really won’t be able to tell whether the emails I receive are messages put in bottles by other humans on other islands or simply slabs of that weird new stuff that seems like communication but isn’t.
