In a development that will surprise absolutely no one who has checked their inbox lately, novelists are being inundated with fan mail written by artificial intelligence - emails so passionate, so well-informed, and so entirely fake that they make the average Nigerian prince scam look like a handwritten love letter.

The Guardian reports that one novelist receives multi-paragraph emails almost every day from "passionate and well-informed readers" in Barcelona and Frankfurt, Chicago and Warsaw. The senders have appealing names like Bella Monroe, Thalina Rose, and Tricia Claxton. Some are straightforward enthusiasts; others are more irreverent, like the one who signs off "warm chaos." Some praise the "deadpan genius" of his novels, others admire the "moral courage" of his nonfiction. What they all have in common, of course, is that they are entirely fake and trying to con him out of money.

The pitch is always the same: the "reader" promises to promote the author's work at their city-wide book clubs or spread the word among their reading communities - if only the author transfers a few hundred dollars to cover costs. In the age of generative AI, scam emails have achieved a new level of personalisation, and most writers the novelist knows are receiving a steady stream of them. The messages are often sophisticated enough to bypass spam filters and reach inboxes, leaving authors no option but to read them and ask the painful question: would any real, living person feel this strongly about my work? Or, as one writer friend put it, the reason I know they're fake is because they've actually read all my books.

And when the novelist decided to take up one sender's offer to find him new readers, the story took a darker turn - proving that even the most cynical among us can still be surprised by the depths of AI-enabled grift.