How Those Personalized Generative AI Scam Emails Are Built

One of the things I often hear from writers whose inboxes are crammed with incredibly personalized marketing or book club or editor impersonation emails–you know, the ones that make it seem the sender has first-hand knowledge of your book and your bio, and is really impressed with both–is “How are these things created? How do they get so many of the details right?” The answer, of course, is generative AI, which makes it possible to scrape authors’ data from the internet and regurgitate it in response to prompts fed into a chatbot. Mostly the chatbots get it right. But if you’ve gotten more than a few of these solicitations, it won’t be news to you that they do make mistakes: someone else’s name, wrong or nonexistent book title, hallucinated bio details. Occasionally, those mistakes provide a little insight into how the solicitations are built and targeted. Email 1: Just Plug in the Details This email is part of the incredibly prolific editor impersonation scam that is responsible for…