From Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris:
We hardly ever write personal stuff here on the blog. I avoid politics and religion in my fiction as well as social media, and I figure nobody needs to hear about my little emotional ups and downs.
But a couple of weeks ago, something unpleasant happened I think my fellow writers need to know about. It could happen to any of us. In fact, I suspect it’s already going on and will escalate.
A Visit from the Book Inquisition
Three weeks ago, I got an email that seemed to be from one of the anti-book extremists who have been making headlines all over the US in the past couple of years. In Alabama, they’re even making it a criminal offence to be a librarian.
This email was sent in response to a little story I wrote for a cozy mystery anthology put out by my publisher, Thalia Press.
The point of the anthology was to introduce the characters featured in each writer’s mystery series. It had a free promotion for two days in March.
My sleuthing duo are a formerly wealthy etiquette columnist-turned bookseller, and her gay best friend. That might sound a little clichéd, since what socialite doesn’t have a gay best friend? But the bad boyfriends, quirky mysteries, and literary satire give the books their own style.
It never occurred to me that a book-banner from the Book Inquisition would read one of my romcom mysteries. Semi-literate thugs are not exactly my target demographic.
The Inquisition’s problem? The gay best friend.
That’s it. The fact I acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ humans got their little control-freak panties in a bunch.
My story has no sex or violence on the page — none of my books do — but yes, Camilla’s best friend Plantagenet Smith is a gay man.
Mr. Inquisition seemed especially verklempt over the fact Plant is married. The phrase “his husband” was what triggered his chilling message.
. . . .
In any case, the sender demanded I stop writing “woke” books and threatened that no one would ever read my books again if I didn’t stop using the offensive phrase “his husband.”
. . . .
The missive arrived on an evening after I’d had an idyllic day here on California’s beautiful Central Coast, listening to music with good friends. Coming home to that email brought me down like a punch in the gut.
I took a few minutes to collect myself, then I made the mistake of firing off a Camilla-like response.
I said I was sorry about his mental health issues and I would pray for him.
Yeah. Just a little bit of Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” came out there.
. . . .
Of course there was a reply. But not to my Church Lady response. It was a meaning-free word salad seemingly accusing me of publishing another book two weeks before that proved I was “woke.” (Alas, my last book was published more than a year ago.)
The “woke” accusations are pretty hilarious, since I’ve often protested the recent excesses of “woke” ideology in the publishing business.
But again the second message repeated the phrase “his husband.” That dreaded phrase had given poor Mr. Book-Banning Thug an attack of the vapors.
I spent way too much time trying to decipher the non-English of the email. But I finally realized the sender had no idea what the phrase “his husband” means. He repeated it the way Harry Potter and his pals repeat Latin phrases — as if the sound of the syllables alone could work dark magic.
It appeared it was on a list of phrases deemed verboten by the Book Inquisition.
There was nothing in either email about my story, my bio, or my Church Lady response. The sender obviously hadn’t read any of them.
Because — I finally realized — he/she/it knows no English at all!
So I Googled the guy’s name. I found nothing but two Facebook pages, almost identical, with the name slightly changed in one. They looked as if they had been put up by remarkably lazy bots in about three seconds. The page “owners” had no friends, and there were no photos of humans — just endless identical photos of cars and guns.
All the posts consisted of Anti-Ukraine and anti-democracy propaganda. Some were in Russian. This “guy” was just a bot. A Russian bot.
. . . .
I realized the threatening emails had probably been written in Russian and translated by a robot. The incomprehensible, fragmented language must have been created by Russian A.I., then run through Google Translate.
. . . .
I fear this is just the beginning. The world is filling up with “Counterfeit People”—A.I. bots that do a good job of imitating real humans.
The late philosopher Daniel C. Dennet wrote in the Atlantic earlier this year:
“Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself.
Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the “passing along” of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.”
Pretty alarmist stuff. But after my encounter with the Russian Trollbot, I have a healthy fear of fake people. This one only frightened me for a day or two, but imagine if you had to deal with them every day, trying to control and censor your writing — and even your thoughts — with threatening messages.
The enemies of freedom are on the march. We know that already. But it looks as if the soldiers who are marching aren’t human.
Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris
On occasion, PG has been the recipient of emails from bots -he’s not certain whether they are A.I. bots or a technologically humbler source – a computer database.
While he can sympathize with Ms. Allen’s response to her bot mail, PG doesn’t think that AI bots are a civilizational threat.
