alt Hacker NewsSounds like an excuse to me. It’s easy enough to recognise ai spam. Unless he is saying ai can replicate human writing?
To be clear, if he wanted to accept a book club invite every month or so, that would be quite easy to achieve. I doubt AI is the issue here
'Bluntly, I can spend my days sorting “book club” spam, or I can write books. One pays me money. The other does not. '
erm, doing the actual book club doesn't pay either and is going to take a lot more energy than selecting a genuine invite from the slush pile.
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AI can trivially replicate average-ish and somewhat above human writing if given a tone sample to copy. Getting to replicate the quality of writing output of a decent author, probably not without a lot of effort, but the threshold here is to sound like a plausible e-mail from a book club or similar group, not to write the Great American Novel.
I think you underestimate how much mail famous people get.
> Unless he is saying ai can replicate human writing?
It can definitely replicate a human-written email.
This isn't his first time posting about being inundated with AI spam. I suspect that, being a moderately famous writer, the level of spam he's receiving is a wee bit more than a normal person is used to. And I get a _lot_ of nonsensical AI spam myself.
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/22/yes-all-those-author-...