Categorising all the emails is not the challenge. The author needs to extract a very small number of genuine requests from the slush pile. which is a different problem, and much easier to set expectations in the community for.

I can completely understand not wanting to deal with the hassle, but pretending it's all about AI is disingenuous in my view.

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vidarh 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The author needs to avoid a sufficient number of false positives for the time investment not to be prohibitive, and that is what he is arguing is becoming a hard problem. I have problems believing that given some of the e-mail I receive. I have no problem trusting Scalzi on this.

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dubeye 4 hours ago | parent [-]

In my real world experience it's easy to fix. Most spam is generic. Publish a blog post asking applicants to include a specific keyword in the subject line. That sorts out 80% of the spam. (probably all of it)

Asking for a cover letter in docx format, requesting info on the format of the book group, and what other authors they have discussed recently, sorts out another 99%.

Filter both these out and you are left with a small number of applicants. If someone is a tailoring an AI to defeat this, then author has a very high value event on his hands that he should hire someone to help organise.

If applicants are not willing to do this, then they clearly are not offering a high-value opportunity in the first place. His excuse obviously fools most people, hence your reply, but it's very unlikely to be the big picture in my view. He just doesn't want to do the book group. Not enough to set up some simple filters anyway.

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vidarh 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Or you have someone running an AI bot that does research on your target automatically. Ironically, one of regular features of spam I'm getting semi-regularly now is for "marketing" services" that provide OpenClaw instances to research and individualise messaging.

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dubeye 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Author states it's a volume problem. Examples show no individualisation beyond the book content. My suggestions would be quite effective.

This isn't a new phenomena in the author world, it's been plagued by 'you have won 1st prize in a poetry competition' for decades.

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vidarh 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Author states it's a volume problem.

How is that relevant? The entire point of using a bot is to be able to achieve volume while including customisation and the ability to hold a conversation if you reply. There are major providers offering to do this at volume for pennies.

> Examples show no individualisation beyond the book content.

The post has no examples. Where have you found examples? And why do you presume adding hurdles will stop things for more than a day or two before the campaigns are more effective?

EDIT: If the examples you're referring to are on his post from November, consider that he didn't change anything despite those. It is logical to assume things have gotten worse since. And it's not unreasonable to think part of this is related to how at least 3 mass-email providers having launched AI bot-driven campaigns in the last couple of months, including at least one of them integrating OpenClaw - I'm sure there are many more, those are just the ones I've casually spotted.

> My suggestions would be quite effective.

Your suggestions are based on you presuming an outdated spray and pray approach that is increasingly being replaced by far more sophisticated campaigns. I'm not Scalzi, but I regularly get approaches that include far more customization than what you propose, including e.g. full-on web pages customized for my business.

> This isn't a new phenomena in the author world, it's been plagued by 'you have won 1st prize in a poetry competition' for decades.

I know. It's been decades since I got my first one. That is also a good reason to think that something has changed for Scalzi to decide this now after he's for years been above average accessible.

	▲	dubeye an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know what to tell you. It still works. Personally, I get about 30 job applicants a day, about 2 of which are from real people, which are consistently filtered into my inbox by the subject line keyword I state clearly in the online job description. The spam content is ever improving in terms of relevance. But it's success rate of beating this filter hasn't changed at all. AI bots are designed to pray and spray, essentially. Customizing the message doesn't change the fact. They're not designed to scan a job spec or article, look for a secret keyword and insert it into the subject line. They could do that, of course, but they don't. Not in March 2026, at least. If the author wanted to only receive emails from real people, I would bet a lot of money that this trick would be very effective. Whether those real humans are also on the scam is a different question, but they would be humans who had taken the time to read the blog, that's for sure. which, based on the evidence presented, are not the problem. So yeah, I don't really care if you ignore me or believe me or not, but if anyone is suffering from a similar problem, a simple request to insert a secret into the subject is very effective at proving you are human. I'd recommend giving it a try. anyway, got to go read a book!