More than a decade ago, I co-wrote a Chinese cookbook. It was an unusual work: The Cultural Revolution Cookbook presented recipes from the Chinese countryside that urban youth learned from the peasants when they were “sent down” by Mao during that tumultuous era in modern Chinese history. The volume has sold briskly over the years, so much so that, on this past October 16th, the publisher devoted a Substack post to a retrospective on its making.

Not 24 hours after the blog was published, I received an email from a man I’ve never met who’d clearly seen the post and who proceeded to heap praise on the book. Marco really laid it on thick. “The Cultural Revolution Cookbook doesn’t just offer recipes — it plates history, struggle, resilience, and flavor in one breathtakingly authentic serving,” he wrote, studding his text with a few too many emojis. “Each page whispers stories of adaptation, courage and the human ability to find joy even when the world feels upside down.”

The book got good reviews when it first came out in 2011, but nothing as gushy as this. I especially enjoyed the part where he called me “not just an author, but a walking encyclopedia with flair…armed with a resumé that makes the rest of us question our life choices.”  

I confess to rereading it to savor the flattery a second time, but it was on that second pass that it hit me: The author wasn’t so much questioning his life choices as he was trying to sell me PR services. And this was no handcrafted proposal. Whoever — or, more accurately, whatever — drafted it had clearly done a sweep of all the online reviews of the book, not to mention my own website and the YouTube videos of my book talks. The whole thing virtually screamed ChatGPT or Perplexity.

I didn’t think all that much about it until, a few days later, I heard from Darlene, who gushed about “the rigor, humanity and historical insight” of The Third Degree, a book I published in 2018 about a triple murder of Chinese diplomats in Washington, DC, in 1919. Darlene generously offered to discuss how, working together, “we could elevate its profile across educational channels, independent book communities and media spaces.” This for a title already seven years old.

But the best was yet to come. That same week, I received two solicitations heaping praise on The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906, a book about an early Jewish protest of religion in the public schools that someone named Lydia assured me “invites reflection, understanding and hope, something our society still deeply needs.” And a guy named Bennett, who’d apparently braced himself for “another dry ‘religion-in-schools’ chronicle,” wanted me to know how pleasantly surprised he’d been to find instead a work that “felt less like old history and more like a mirror we’re still holding up today.”

What inspired Lydia’s understanding and hope and what Bennett saw reflected in his mirror are puzzles to me because The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906 doesn’t hit shelves until next month. It hasn’t had a single review yet. If either of them managed to wheedle an advance copy out of the publisher, I certainly haven’t heard anything about it.

Lydia went on to assure me that her email was written from the heart. “I’m not after your money or anything of that sort. My only goal is to see your work shine brighter, to help more readers discover its value, and to stand beside you as someone who believes in what you’ve created.”

I’m not sure whether it would be Lydia or Microsoft Copilot standing beside me, or, for that matter, if an AI app can even have a heart. Hell, I’m not even sure if there is a Marco, a Darlene, a Lydia, or a Bennett. None provided a mailing address, and only Lydia and Darlene provided surnames. Unsurprisingly, neither Perplexity, ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, nor Gemini has ever heard of either of them.  

What I do know is that at a time when authors and publishers are debating how, and even whether, to deal with AI as they research and write their books, scammers posing as publicists are already a jump ahead. We have, alas, entered the brave new world of the obsequious, AI-generated pitch. One thing I can say with certainty: It’ll be a cold day in hell before I Venmo a cent to any of them.   

Scott D. Seligman is the author of a dozen books, most of which fall into the category of historic narrative nonfiction. He has a special interest in the history of hyphenated Americans.