Greetings!
Those of you in the U.S., I hope you had a nice long weekend. Those of you elsewhere, I hope you had a nice Monday.
My son turned 13 a few days ago. This means I’m officially now the mother of a teenager. It also means I spent the weekend playing video games, watching Lego movies, and eating my body weight in chocolate cake. (Not a terrible way to spend a few days, to be honest.)
In addition to watching The Lego Movie and The Lego Batman Movie (neither of which are my favorites—I’m more of a Lego Ninjago girl), my son and I went to see Weapons, which is bizarre and entertaining and funny and also somewhat gross. And my husband and I watched Unknown Number on Netflix, which I randomly stumbled upon and knew nothing about but couldn’t turn off. It’s such a bonkers story.
What I didn’t realize until the end credits rolled was that the film was directed by Skye Borgman, who I interviewed last year. Small world.
Beyond that, the past week has been fairly quiet. Next Avenue published my recent interview with Heart’s Nancy Wilson, and PBS later shared it on their Facebook page, which was nice. I’ve slowly deleted more old emails—I’m down to about 600 unread emails right now, most of which are just reminders I’ve sent to myself. (And then promptly forgot about. Ironic!)
Another thing that continues to jam up my In Box lately is spammy AI-written junk designed to look like marketing support. They’re always from a generic gmail account and they usually say things like, “Your work as a freelance writer with articles and essays in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Shondaland, Writer’s Digest Magazine, and more showcases your versatile voice and ability to engage audiences across arts & entertainment, health & wellness, parenting, and product journalism.” And then they go on to tell me how they can help me market my work to larger audiences.
But lately they’ve been pulling from my Insta account and crediting me with writing other authors’ books. After I shared a photo of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, I got this gem:
And then when I shared that I’d read Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability, I got this:
It’s creepy. It’s weird. It’s laughably wrong. But it’s also a sign of what’s to come. As AI gets smarter and humans get dumber, we’re going to see a lot more of these emails targeting every facet of our lives and I’m sure many, many people will fall for them.
I should also add that when I had an out of office message on my email a few weeks back, the AI responded to say it would follow up with me when I was back at my desk. And it did. Like I said, creepy and weird.
Anyway, I hope you had a chance to check out my 60th (!!) Creative Reverberations interview last week—a chat with Donita Sparks about L7’s 40th anniversary.
Later this week you’ll get my chat with graphic designer Karmann Sloane, who has worked with Heart, Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains, and Billy Idol, to name a few. Keep an eye out for that on Friday.
That’s it for now. Wishing you a wonderful, art-filled, spam-free week!