AI is a teenager who didn’t read the assigned text and is just bullshitting and brown nosing in order to meet a word count for a book report. The AI book scammer is like a student who is helping his classmate bribe a teacher for a better grade. It’s dishonest.
Below I am excerpting an AI generated email I received. In bold are the outright false statements. The email author, Caroline who claims to live in California has a phone number registered in Delaware. She claims to have read “all 15” of my books, and provides analysis which upon close inspection shows me that she hasn’t read a single one. (Plus, I have 18 books or 21 if you count anthologies I compiled.) She also supposedly analyzed my review totals on Goodreads.
This is a fifteen-book poetry series, and that alone tells me something important. You didn’t write one collection and stop. You built a body of work, book after book, spanning years. The titles alone tell a story. Threads of Hope, Bruised Reeds, Resilient Sparks, Reflections of a Wildflower Child, Sacred Remnants, Midnight Strike, The Festival of Dreams. That’s not a series. That’s a life, written down and shared.
While complimenting my prolific output is nice, it’s disingenuous since a human didn’t write it after actually reading my entire catalogue of poetry. How do I know? The first four book titles listed are not my books. Midnight Strike and This Festival of Dreams are actual poetry books that I authored. The rest are hallucinations.
Yes, the term sparks does appear in one of my book titles, Abundant Sparks, but I don’t understand the logic in replacing words in book titles. Resilient is not a synonym for abundant (which means “a lot” in plain English). Wild Inner Child appears in one of my e-book subtitles for Id Biscuits, but Wildflower Child?
What stands out most is your range. Some of these collections are autobiographical, tracing a fifteen-year journey through heartbreak, healing, and renewal. Others are rooted in place, in Vallejo, in Solano County, in the communities you’ve served. And some, like Dragonfly Tomorrows, move into fantasy and science fiction themes while still carrying that same poetic voice. You’ve built a series that can be read in any order, but that rewards readers who go through all of it.
I do have quite a variety of subjects across 18 books. I’d argue that all of my collections are partially autobiographical, depending on the specific poem. However, Dragonfly Tomorrows & Dog-eared Yesterdays is not a sci-fi fantasy fiction book by any means. Whomever or whatever composed this email by “Caroline” has not actually read its contents, nor the blurb that is available freely online. That book was the last book I released before officially becoming poet laureate. Which brings us to the final paragraph…
What also stands out is your background. Poet Laureate of Vallejo, California from 2017 to 2019. Two hundred poems for the City of Vallejo. Performances at the Vallejo Museum, the Jewish Community Center, the Vallejo Peace Project. That’s not a hobby. That’s a career, and it shows in the work.
I first read this paragraph thinking I’d never performed at a JCC, since no JCC has ever had me as a featured author in the way that I’ve seen so many others, but then I remembered in December 2022 Shabbat services were being held at the Marin JCC while the synagogue was being rebuilt. At the invitation of clergy I read “American Dream” in a call-and-response style. In March 2025 that poem traveled through space to be archived on the moon with the Lunar Codex.
While Resting on my Laurels (86), The Cafe of Dreams (41), Midnight Strike (70), and This Festival of Dreams (72) add up to 269 poems, the statement that I wrote 200 poems for the City is inaccurate. The position of poet laureate is honorary, and none of my poems were written by request of the City itself. The closest examples would be that I did write poems celebrating Vallejo, and at the request of a friend I wrote one encouraging the public to vote for projects in the participatory budgeting project to improve our community.
Only a small percentage of the poetry I’ve written has been occasional poetry. That is, poetry written specifically to be performed at a special occasion such as a holiday celebration, vigil, or demonstration. The way being poet laureate is structured in Vallejo is independent. Unlike the British poet laureate, we are not writing poems for the government. Most often requests are made by local non-profit organizations who hold community events year round.
The main tell beyond the factual blunders is the use of the format “That’s not a this. It’s a that” which appears in two out of three paragraphs. I see this phrasing constantly in AI generated text. “Not a hobby, but a career,” and “not a series, but a life.” “Caroline” also tries to sell me on her book club with this same phrasing: “And with fifteen books in the series, a reader who discovers one has fourteen more waiting. That’s not a single sale, that’s a reading relationship.”
I would argue that yes, for me poetry is a hobby because I do not make a living at it. A career would provide stability, consistent income, and security. Hobbies provide joy, purpose, and an escape from having to turn everything into a money making scheme.
Even more telling is that when you look up this Goodreads book club, which is intended to help people be reunited with a book title based on plot summaries, out of the 186 Carolines listed in the group, none of moderators are named Caroline. They have plentiful discussions about non-fiction, young adult, and adult romance titles. None of the suggested thread groupings are about poetry books, so I doubt “A series like yours is a natural fit.” It’s the same reason why I don’t use many of the legitimate popular e-book promotional services, poetry isn’t even a category.
Even the review numbers that Caroline cites for my books are false statistics:
Across the series, your ratings are strong. Books 1, 3, and 4 sit at 4.7. Books 2, 5, 6, and 7 hold 4.7 as well. Book 8 is at 4.2, and Book 12 sits at 4.7. Across a fifteen-book series, that kind of consistency is rare. It tells me your readers know what they’re getting, and they keep coming back for it.
My early books like Tea & Sprockets and Abundant Sparks have an average rating of 3.5 stars each, not 4.7. In general my average ranking for all my books on Goodreads is 4.08 from 60 people out of 184 users who have added my books to their lists. Goodreads also includes many anthologies where I was a contributor in that list, and has duplicate listings for several books.
I have no time nor desire to game the system for more rankings, and Goodreads requires disclosure for paid reviews in their TOS: “Undisclosed commercial or paid reviews. If you receive a free copy of a book in exchange for a review, you are required to disclose that in your review.”
Most importantly, I am not currently active on Goodreads. Three years ago a conservative man, hiding behind an anonymous handle online, read my name on a petition that I signed on a different website, looked me and other authors up online, and then used the Q&A feature on the Goodreads author pages to berate us for signing onto something that he disagreed with. I sign countless petitions. You’re allowed to disagree. This doesn’t give you the right to harass strangers online. I don’t owe you a response.