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.