I hope an AI program is saving somebody’s life in a hospital right now, because it’s not doing me any favors.

I’m at the age when you develop a natural suspicion of a new technology, but I’m still young enough to recognize when somebody is using it to try to make a quick buck off me.

I hoped I could live in blissful ignorance of AI until the day when Skynet sends Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to wipe my puny human blot off the face of the Earth.

No such luck.

I’ve begun getting random emails, clearly AI-generated, from fake people extoling the countless virtues of the books I’ve written.

The emails contain more detail about the plots of the novels than a person could glean in a reasonable time from reviews and samples, but less and different details than a real person would mention after having read any of the books.

Also, the flattery is at a superhuman level.

The flattery is important because the purpose of each email is to convince me to pay the bank account behind the machine to help me find the audience my novels so richly deserve.

The “author” of the email claims to be the “curator” of a 2500 highly-motivated readers and reviewers. And how would you like for this “curator” to share your amazing novel with this hungry group?

I don’t normally respond to this type of thing, but one of them was particularly persistent. I let her know that she was free to share the book she loved so well with anyone she thought would be interested.

As you might expect, her reply included the price list for this group of book-lovers. Her voracious readers were on sale for $25 each. Yes, that means I pay people $25 to read my work.

I figure this must be the new math they got in schools now.

In my own way, I told her no thank you.

But she kept sending emails. I should mention that her emails contained a mildly sexy photo of a young woman in the signature. I think that was supposed to make me believe the picture was her, and perhaps I would be more willing to throw money at a mildly sexy young woman and her brothel of literary prostitutes.

I was not.

I did show the picture to my wife, who is mildly concerned that pictures of mildly sexy young women will induce a mildly dangerous heart attack within her mildly aging husband.

The sleuth I married initiated a web search of the alleged mildly sexy woman and came up with nothing. Apparently, the 2500 readers are all curated old school, because it’s not happening online. My wife also noticed that the name in the signature was spelled mildly differently from name in the email address.

I have not responded since. I’ve even stopped looking at the picture of the mildly sexy woman AI scraped off the web. That’s when you know you’ve lost me.

I have every reason to be satisfied with the transaction. At $25 per head, I’ve saved a lot of money on all the people who have never read my books. That’s a small fortune.

Plus, I feel better about our coming war with the machines knowing the cyborgs still haven’t mastered spell check.