Guy de la Bédoyère
Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with many books to his credit.
AI is everywhere now. We all know that, and we also know that it has the power to do remarkable good, for example in medical diagnoses. But have we really registered the extent to which it is destroying our ability to distinguish between true and false?
The Telegraph has a timely piece called ‘AI is ruining the internet’. The focus is on the increasing number of tests being imposed on users to try and fool the chatbots whose traffic now outnumbers human traffic on the web. It concludes:
Humans are now a minority on the web. Proving that you are one of them is going to get harder.
Even harder is trying to prove whether the person who seems to have contacted you is real.
I’ve been writing books since the mid-1980s, though thanks to the prospect of Making Tax Digital I’ve wound that up now. Nevertheless, anyone who has published a book is liable to be subjected to a whole new type of AI-aided scam.
Several months ago, I had an email forwarded to me by one of my publishers. It included the following:
One of your authors, Guy de la Bedoyere, has kindly agreed to talk to Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution about his book Populus, published by Abacus, on October 20th.
We have recently had some difficulty in communicating with him, and I would be grateful if you could confirm that this is his correct email address.
It then gave an entirely spurious email address. I smelled a rat immediately because I knew I’d made no such arrangement, nor ever even heard of it before. As it turned out, this opened the door to an extraordinary new phenomenon proliferating in the publishing world. In this instance the organisation is (or appears to be) a real one but I could find no trace of the sender, whose own email address had no connection to the domain he purported to be connected to. Naturally, I didn’t follow it up.
Only a few days later, another email popped into my inbox, this time forwarded by a relative who runs a small publishing house. Bizarrely, they’d been sent a request to contact me by a supposedly Liverpool-based association called “The North West Writing Club”, allegedly made up of 3,000 “active readers”, despite having never published any of my books. The email purported to be from someone called “Taylor Wright” and was blatantly lifted from AI content. I’ve left in its grammatical and punctuation errors:
We are considering The Fall of Egypt and the Rise of Rome Your meticulous account of the Ptolemies and the inexorable rise of Rome masterfully captures the intersection of dynastic collapse and imperial ambition. I was particularly struck by your focus on the “despots and dreamers” who defined this era, providing our readers a profound lens through which to discuss the enduring mechanics of power and the weight of historical legacy.. as it stands out as a highly insightful and engaging work.The New Deala depth of perspective that strongly aligns with the thoughtful, discussion-driven engagement our readers value, making it a natural fit for our upcoming event.
What makes our community unique is its reader-led format. Rather than assigning a single title, each member brings a book they’ve read and shares their genuine experience, what drew them in, what stood out, and how it shaped their thinking. This approach consistently creates authentic conversations, allowing books like The Fall of Egypt and the Rise of Rome to gain visibility through real reader advocacy and sustained word-of-mouth beyond the session itself.
There wasn’t any attempt, apparently, to try and get money out of me but it was apparent from the rest of the email that the sender wanted to involve me in further correspondence about featuring my book and what I could expect from the ‘experience’. It was obvious that it was designed to flatter my vanity and draw me in.
I forwarded it to both my real publishers. The managing director at one came straight back with this:
There has been a huge increase in this kind of activity from bogus marketing/publicity scams, looking especially at authors and promising increased platform etc.
By this stage I’d established that author friends had been on the receiving end of similar enquiries. Since then, I and they have had more. Even those that look genuine are still written in AI-English. One came in from a TV company last week. The company is real and the sender apparently a real person, but the whole enquiry was pinned on a book I wrote 23 years ago, making it unlikely the enquiry was genuine. I didn’t follow it up. Years of taking part in real TV have already taught me that even most genuine TV people are liars in some shape or form.
All this led me to the Bookseller and a page alerting authors called ‘Society of Authors and Writers’ Guild issue ‘urgent’ author guidance after ‘explosion’ of AI scams’:
The unions said the rise of AI means scams are taking “more sophisticated and convincing forms”, with fraudsters impersonating agents, publishers, big-name authors, publicists and marketing providers, and using AI to scrape online reviews and book summaries to give the impression that they have read an author’s work. Other tactics flagged in the guidance include AI-generated fake company websites with staff profiles and testimonials, pressurising sales tactics, urgent deadlines and upselling.
The guidance also warns that fraudsters have become sophisticated enough to change the telephone number that appears when a call is made, with caller ID matching, for example, an author’s bank name or number.
Anna Ganley, Chief Executive of the Society of Authors, said: “We are seeing an alarming increase in instances of scam emails directed at authors – our advisory team receives at least a dozen reports of scams each week – there is a clear correlation between the emergence of mainstream AI technology and this spike in scam emails.”
She added: “The scams take various forms and can be very sophisticated and convincing. We are doing everything we can to advise authors and to ensure that they do not become the victim of a scam.”
Ellie Peers, general secretary of the WGGB, said: “Scammers are getting ever more ingenious in targeting our author members, aided by AI and engaging in increasingly manipulative practices including impersonation, flattery and upselling. Their aim is simple – to use these sophisticated tactics to get writers to part with their money or their rights, on the promise of an agent’s contract, publication, publicity, acclaim, future earnings or connections that might help them in their career.
Quite where these emails are originating from isn’t immediately apparent but the Writer Beware website has linked many of the scams to Nigeria:
Using highly personalised (AI-generated) email solicitations that make it seem the sender (always with a Gmail address, always presenting as a marketing or PR expert) has really read the book, the scammer offers marketing services of various kinds, usually for a not-exorbitant fee of a few hundred dollars. If the author bites, they’re referred to a Nigerian “assistant” or “payment processor” on Upwork or Fiverr for payment. The scammer then demands access to the author’s KDP account.
An author friend received yet another of these approaches last week. It came from the She Writes Press, which in this case appears to be a US-based organisation, with the email emanating from one of the editors listed on the site. Nevertheless, the email was full of AI-generated flattery but no mention of money. However, a quick glance at the website took me to the page where it turned out the author is expected to pay $12,000 to cover the publishing costs of any future book. At least they’re a bit more upfront, though frankly it’s almost impossible to know how real the organisation is, or the email and the person purporting to have sent it.
It’s become almost impossible to distinguish the real approaches from the scams. I’ve taken the simple precaution of not responding to any of them. I might be throwing the baby out with the bath water, but I’m prepared to take the risk. Fortunately, I don’t have a website and that means there’s no direct route to me, which helps limit the problem.
The AI-aided scams even extend to impersonating real editors at various major UK publishing houses, says the Bookseller:
The emails share similarities in wording, with iterations on the phrase “I would be very interested to learn about your current or forthcoming projects, as well as whether you are represented by a literary agent”. Names used include Alessandra Baizer and Rosemary Brosnan of HarperCollins Publishers, Kevin Downing of Bloomsbury Publishing, Kinza Azira of Pan Fiction and Mantle, and more.
The point of writing about all this for Daily Sceptic is not to have a navel-gazing whinge about an author’s life. Instead, it’s to highlight the degree to which AI is invading every walk of life and how trusting or believing anything in electronic form is evolving into an insurmountable challenge.
We really have opened Pandora’s Box.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
