Author of novels fantastical & historical, avid gardener, co-founder of SFWA's pub industry watchdog Writer Beware. Casting a small light in a wilderness of writing scams (plus an occasional cat pic)
https://writerbeware.blog
https://victoriastrauss.com
Victoria Strauss
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Annals of AI fuckups: an author forwarded me the email below, in which the book club scammer mistakenly sent the AI output instead of the intended email pitch.
Note the "strategic analysis", which illustrates the scammers' boiled-frog approach
Yup
Survey commissioned by @authorsguild.org charts continued decline in authors' income, in part due to declining book buying (only 25% of print and ebooks read in past month were purchased) www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...
I hope this really is a trend. I've several times heard from writers whose banks intervened before they could transfer $$ to a publishing scammer (sometimes because they wanted to try again and contacted me to double check). www.nytimes.com/2026/06/07/y...
The detector from Sidekicker.ai, the consistently inaccurate one, is free, but also offers an "AI humanizer" function you have to sign up--and pay--to access. I can't help wondering if the inaccuracy is a strategy to steer people to the humanizer and incentivize signups 2/2
Interesting experiment re: reliability of AI detectors (some pretty good, one consistently inaccurate). I was able to duplicate the results using Writer Beware blog posts from 2018 authorsguild.org/news/can-ai-...
I love our water feature (created by my hubby w/ help from me) for many reasons but one of the main ones is that critters use it (squirrels and chipmunks and the neighbors’ cats too). This robin was bathing and grooming for more than 5 minutes
Enlight Women's Magazine, which charges a "nominal fee" of $900 for an article and a "tailored promotional package", is soliciting again
Victoria Strauss
Not a new problem, but getting harder and harder to police www.vulture.com/article/lite...
Setback for plaintiffs in another lawsuit re: use of pirated materal for AI training (actually a group of individual suits, a novel approach promoted by ClaimsHero, which got in trouble for deceptive pitches to members of Anthropic copyright settlement) chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2026/06/08/j...
Victoria Strauss
Victoria Strauss
Victoria Strauss
Victoria Strauss
Victoria Strauss
Victoria Strauss
Victoria Strauss
In Carreyrou v. Anthropic, the once omnibus copyright lawsuit against 8 AI companies, Judge Pitts issued his written order, severing the suits against the defendants and dismissing all but the laws…
A survey commissioned by the Guild found that only 25% of print books and e-books read in the past month were bought new or through a paid subscription, with readers increasingly turning to low- or no...
As AI use by authors has expanded from research and brainstorming to generating entire books, publishers, agents, and readers are growing suspicious of AI-generated content—and online markets are alre...
authorsguild.org
Interesting experiment re: reliability of AI detectors (some pretty good, one consistently inaccurate). I was able to duplicate the results using Writer Beware blog posts from 2018 authorsguild.org/news/can-ai-...
As AI use by authors has expanded from research and brainstorming to generating entire books, publishers, agents, and readers are growing suspicious of AI-generated content—and online markets are alre...
the main problem with video as a format is that it's too slow at dispensing information. I can read much faster than you can talk and there's no way you can address this without becoming incomprehensible to most of the audience.
