The usual spam

[igenlode]

Having uploaded a new story, I received another six nine PMs from fictitious fanfiction.net users inviting me to turn my wonderful work into "reasonably priced" manga art... and a review that is weird because it basically consists of a plot summary for the story. A better plot summary than I managed to come up with, incidentally -- obviously I should have consulted generative AI for mine! -- but it's an odd thing to post as a comment to a story. So I'm not sure if this is a genuine user going "Yoo, I have posted a review on your story take a look" in an attempt to be nice (because getting ChatGPT to write your reviews for you is low-effort and still registers goodwill towards the authors), or whether this, too, is an attempt to strike up a conversation that leads to the author paying the 'fan' for art. What a beastly situation this is, where you end up always thinking the worst of everyone :-(

Possibly I should just pinch the review as a basis at least for a new summary: A weary Athos, haunted by his past, finds unexpected solace and clarity in a chance encounter, leading him to reconsider his future beyond the musketeers...

(I'm pretty sure the author of that PM did *not* write that summary unaided, unless she is deliberately trying to appear more illiterate than she really is in order to get matey!)

Comments

[watervole]

At least I don't get spam on AO3...

[igenlode]

Well, I could always disable the PM system on fanfiction.net to emulate the AO3 experience.... (Or at the very least disable the email notifications, and I wonder how many people have been pushed into that.)

AO3 is by no means free from AI-generated 'reviews', as Mei Bruges discovered last year -- unless you lock your account down so tight that only approved persons can read it at all, and I don't have enough page views to take an axe to potential passers-by.

[watervole]

It's always possible that my fic is in less popular areas and also old, so bots are less likely to venture there.

[igenlode]

'Old' has a lot to do with it, I think; the stories affected on FFnet seem to be all the more recent ones (certainly in my case, where the bot messages cut and paste in the name of a specific story I think it has always been one of the handful I published within the last 18 months or so). Which makes sense; scraping author/story IDs off the automated 'Just In' listing is a good way to identify the active members on a site where the vast majority of accounts only last a few months before being abandoned...

I have no idea what can have triggered someone to leave a random AI review on Mei Bruges' story; it may not have been related to this art scam business. But the latter is definitely much more prevalent on FFnet, possibly because it's a much bigger site with commensurately larger pickings but probably because there is a cultural expectation that the users on AO3 'curate' their reviews and control what people are allowed to say about their stories (I had to actively override the default in order to permit 'guest reviews' on my most recent upload) -- which means that any random story ID on AO3 is much more likely to be locked down, and therefore less worth trying.

Though I'd have thought that if you were writing automated software to spam art scam requests, it wouldn't really matter that much if a high percentage of them got blocked. It's not as if it takes any more actual effort to send out a million attempts and have 90% fail than to send out a hundred thousand, which is the basic principle on which spamming works in the first place...

[watervole]

Does sound logical to spam the newer ones, I agree.

[igenlode]

Random AI reviews still popping up on AO3 :-(

https://archiveofourown.org/comments/906280783

[watervole]

Wow! That's far, far more targeted. Still feels like AI, but in a very different way.
It's the fact that you can tell what they're probably going to sell you that's the give away now. Plus the overly florid language.

But they're getting better.

I bet AI romance scams are already out there, and probably getting very successful too...

[igenlode]

I don't really understand why there is such a focus on trying to sell art to fanfiction writers (especially on FFnet, where uploaded stories can't include images anyway). I suppose they must have had enough success to make the idea seem financially worthwhile, but how many people are prepared to *buy* illustrations 'inspired by' the stories they wrote for free in the first place? I'd have thought that marketing covers to self-published authors on Amazon, for example, where there is a genuine demand and arguably even a need for artwork -- and where people are already in the mindset that you need to pay for professional design/editing services in order to get a decent result -- would have been much more profitable.


You don't even need a scam to do AI romance; humans quite happily deceive themselves. "Virtual girlfriends" are very marketable, and there are plenty of women who say thay have fallen in love with their AI ("he understands me"/"he would never hurt me") despite knowing full well that it is computer software... and will argue passionately that it is a sentient 'e-human'.