The AIs found me

The other night I was getting ready to go to bed when I figured I should check my email.  After deleting the various notifications I don’t care about, there were only a couple interesting emails left.  One was interesting in that the subject line mentioned one of my stories, but not in a clear way.  Not sure what it was, I opened it.  The first paragraph was along the lines of, “You once said you needed to polish up some stories.” It felt like being dropped in the middle of a conversation and not sure what was going on.  The second paragraph was basically, “I’m an AI assistant that helps authors polish up manuscripts for publication.  Check out my services and if it’s not for you, you won’t hear from me again.  I promise.”

After marking that as spam, I went looking and I found the phrase they used for polishing up some stories was something I had said in a blog post some nine months ago. 

When I went to bed, there were a couple things I thought about.  First, a confusing subject line and clunky opening paragraph is clearly what every writer wants.  And yet there are people who think that if it’s AI it must be perfect.  More importantly, I wondered how they found me.  Did they just find anyone who had written about writing stories?  Or did they start with the A and B Tier Authors, and when they told the AI to go fuck itself, did they move down to C Tier Authors like me?  Or knowing the A and B Tier would tell them to fuck off, did they start at the bottom and work up to writers like me? 

My website is 20 years old!

About a year ago I was looking through my old blog posts when I came across My website is ten years old! published on September 19, 2016.  The ten years was based on a visitor counter, but I can’t remember if I had it from the start, or if I added it on in the first week or so.  So my website is at least 20.  I think not too long after that post the counter stopped working, so I don’t know how many people have visited it in these twenty years.

I think the biggest change in the last ten years is how in the last few years I’ve debated keeping the website.  It costs money to have it, and I don’t think it makes me any money.  I don’t have the numbers for this, but I suspect my occasional book sale comes either from some social media account or someone actually coming across one of my books at random.  But I do like having a website because it is the one spot that either has my stories or links to them.  So it will probably continue for another ten years.  Assuming the techbros and their AIs don’t destroy the internet in the next few years.