AI Spam

A not very interesting development this summer is the advent of AI-generated spam sent via the SF Encyclopedia feedback form, addressed not to the editors but to authors who have SFE entries. For example, Guy N Smith (“Hi Smith”) is praised for the superb cover of one of his least-known books, before an attempt to sell him promotional videos crammed with “scroll-stopping, emotion-grabbing, goosebump-giving moments”. These are also offered to a undetermined author (“Hi Sydney”) whose cited book (“whoever designed it deserves a standing ovation”) we are unable to trace. David A Drake (“Hi David”) is favoured with a rave review of his Crisis of Empire series instalment For Reasons of State – not in fact a Drake title but a phrase scraped along with much else from Goodreads coverage of the actual novel The War Machine. This one comes from a supposed “Book Club Placement Specialist” who promises to “make For Reasons of State the book clubs’ next unforgettable battlefield”. Though generating a reasonable quality of wordwooze (see Wordmills), it seems that current Large Language Models are not yet capable of inferring from the dates in SFE entries that Guy N Smith and David Drake are no longer with us. Likewise the target of a later fulsome missive, John M Ford.

Later: the passionate personal appeals to deceased authors still continue, a particularly egregious example being George Griffith (1857-1906): "I will transform your Amazon detail page into a high converting sales tool using Amazon's A+ Content modules ... I will create short, engaging, visually rich videos designed for TikTok and Instagram Reels (also shareable on classic sci-fi, literary history, and bookish channels)." Other targets have included Barry N Malzberg.