Joe Dunthorne exposes AI-powered scam fan mail targeting authors
A novelist describes receiving sophisticated AI-written cons exploiting books trained on authors' copyrighted work.
What to know
- AI-powered scam emails targeting authors have reached a new level of sophistication, with fake senders impersonating real bestselling authors and bypassing spam filters with personalized messages.
- The scammers use AI systems trained on copyrighted books without permission—the same material Anthropic paid $1.5bn to settle over and Google is being sued for—creating a direct link between copyright infringement and author victimization.
- Dunthorne frames the scams as an ironic self-infliction: authors are being conned by AI systems that have genuinely read all their books through unauthorized training data.
Authors should never engage with scam emails; it escalates the problem.
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“Never engage the scammers, that's my rule on RedNote. This writer didn't seem to get the memo.”
Brian_Mahoney · Mastodon ↗
“What they all have in common, though, is that they are entirely fake and trying to con me out of money. They promise to promote my work at their city-wide book clubs or spread the word among their reading communities, if only I transfer a few hundred dollars to cover costs.”
Joe Dunthorne, Novelist · The Guardian ↗ · Oct 31
Joe Dunthorne NovelistAnthropic AI companyGoogle Tech company
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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Dunthorne frames AI scams as self-inflicted through training on stolen work
Dunthorne argues the irony that the AIs generating scams have genuinely read all authors' books via training on copyrighted material, making scammers manipulate writers using AI versions trained on their own work.
“What makes it worse is that the AIs that help write these scams really have read all our books. So when writers receive these AI-assisted scam messages, we know we are being manipulated by a version of ourselves.”
— Joe Dunthorne -
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Writer Joe Dunthorne on the ever-growing scams attempted on authors https://www. theguardian.com/books/2026/nov /01/like-many-authors-im-bombarded-by-scam-fan-mail-i-wasnt-prepared-for-what-would-happen-when-i-wrote-back # books # livres # bookstodon
2 more of the top 3 · 9 posts in this stretch
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Nobody really denies that but it’s still real that they basically scam each other knowing they’ll getting that money back invested into themselves. If you got external people shoveling money into the circulation, it’s only logical to completely overprice your own services (or hardware) because it doesn’t matter if you bill them 100€, 50000€ or a…
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"What makes it worse is that the AIs that help write these scams really have read all our books... So when writers receive these AI-assisted scam messages, we know we are being manipulated by a version of ourselves." https://www. theguardian.com/books/2026/nov…
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background
Dunthorne reveals AI-written scam campaigns impersonating real authors — Joe Dunthorne publishes in The Guardian an account of receiving nearly daily AI-generated scam emails from fake senders with appealing names, many impersonating bestselling authors like Ottessa Moshfegh, Donna Tartt, and Sally Rooney. The emails bypass spam filters with sophisticated personalization and promise book promotion for payment.
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Publishers sue Google over Gemini training on copyrighted materials — A group of publishers filed a lawsuit accusing Google of utilizing what they describe as "one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history" to train Gemini.
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background
Anthropic pays $1.5bn settlement to authors over Claude training data — Anthropic agreed to compensate thousands of authors whose copyrighted work was used to train Claude without permission.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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first by Mastodon, 10d ago · also Guardian Books, Guardian Culture
What people are saying 6 voices from 2 sites · best of 9 · verbatim
- Nov 3
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Robin Hobb made an announcement semi-recently that she wouldn’t be responding to fan emails anymore for this reason, when she used to reply to every single one. She said it used to be obvious when an email was fake or hiding a solicitation, but she’s spent too much time responding with a heartfelt email only for it to be followed up with a…
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It’s the same thing that happened with the streaming boom. Everyone is rushing to be the go to provider, knowing that a lot of them will fail or be bought by the competition, but whoever survives will be disgustingly rich.
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That's the neat part, with ai they don't specialize, they just fill every possible space with scams and attacks.
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Actual writers are paid shit but actual writers are, to various degrees, already enmeshed in the publishing system and less likely to fall for this. New, amateur writers, who make enough money in their day jobs (or inheritance or pensions etc) to support enough time off to write will be more naive and lack knowledge of the system while being more…
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Great article about what happens when you reply to scam publishing emails. # writing https://www. theguardian.com/books/2026/nov /01/like-many-authors-im-bombarded-by-scam-fan-mail-i-wasnt-prepared-for-what-would-happen-when-i-wrote-back
- Nov 1
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Never engage the scammers, that's my rule on RedNote. This writer didn't seem to get the memo. https://www. theguardian.com/books/2026/nov /01/like-many-authors-im-bombarded-by-scam-fan-mail-i-wasnt-prepared-for-what-would-happen-when-i-wrote-back