Snowed under by spam

[igenlode]

Since uploading Chapter 1 of "Ashes" to fanfiction.net I have received a flood of *nineteen* new spam PMs offering to sell me 'artwork' for it, and two spam reviews on the story, one of which is evidently AI-generated:

Wow, this story is absolutely captivating! The blend of rich historical detail, romance, and intrigue makes it feel like stepping into a lost era—Roland and Marthe's dynamic is just delightful.

**Tip:** You could enhance the emotional stakes even more by diving deeper into Roland's internal conflict about his identity and past, letting readers feel his turmoil firsthand. Fantastic storytelling!

Also a little ironic given how much trouble I've been to in *removing* the 'deep dive' into "Roland's internal conflict about his identity and his past", which is not actually the subject of the story...

Comments

[watervole]

Blimey!

All spam, and no real readers....

AI can be a real pain sometimes.

[igenlode]

It occurs to me that AI would probably be the solution to this particular problem -- the FFNet admins have been unable to filter out the spam PMs using keywords, etc., without producing far too many false positives, since although they are obviously all recognisable to the human eye as coming from the same spamhouse (a couple have slipped through that are clearly instructions to the minions who are doing the actual sending and were not intended to be forwarded to the victims by mistake!) there is no clear identifying stamp that can be used to identify and delete the offending accounts, which now number in the hundreds.

But one thing that AI is very good at is identifying patterns, so if you fed a sample of a few thousand of the spam messages ("I have read your stories that you have shared on Fanfiction they are too good the way you write it the way you explain each and everything is too good. So i am here to give you an idea I hope you will like it and if you are interested we will discuss about it", "I hope you're doing well. I'm a concept artist and I really like your writing. You're great at creating immersive scenes, and I'm following you to see what you do next. I'd love to help with your projects by creating book covers, character art, or other illustrations","As I was going through your work, I started imagining what some of the scenes or characters might look like as artwork. I'm an artist who loves fanfiction, and your story has really inspired me. If you're open to it, I'd love to collaborate and bring some of it to life with character art, scene illustrations, or even a cover design", "Your writing has a cinematic quality to it, I felt like I was watching your story unfold rather than just reading it. Have you ever considered getting custom artwork for it?", "When I read your book, I was captivated. Would there be any possibility that I may do character illustrations for your book in the future?" -- to quote a few of those sent to me in the last couple of days) into an AI analysing system, along with a corresponding sample of 'real' PMs, then it ought to be able to identify the common factors that mark out the spam output and filter intelligently for them in future...