Why I won't compete with AI on flattery

The weird tension between Wonderlandscape and its biggest fans

On Saturday night, another email arrived extolling my book. “The question you opened with in Wonderlandscape is deceptively simple. Why is Yellowstone famous?... That is a genuinely original framing.” The reader spelled out why she loved both the question and how I’d answered it, concluding that with Yellowstone, I’d “taken a place everyone thinks they understand and shown them that what they understood was the projection, not the place.”

I felt flattered, of course. This person had grasped my ambitions, and told me that my writerly talents had achieved those ambitions. The book’s structure “does two things simultaneously: it gives the reader a sequence of genuinely fascinating individual narratives, and it builds, chapter by chapter, toward an argument about the relationship between a culture and its most significant landscape that the reader does not realize they are receiving until they have already received it,” she wrote. “That is craft. It is not common.”

It’s not the only unsolicited rave I’ve received recently. “Somewhere between geysers erupting and Roosevelt flexing his wilderness masculinity, your book quietly convinced me that Yellowstone is not just a place… it’s a personality with a long memory and strong opinions,” another reader wrote earlier this month. “Wonderlandscape doesn’t read like standard nonfiction. It feels more like watching America argue with itself through landscapes, wildlife, and the people who tried to define both.”

My correspondents supported their arguments for my brilliance with terrific detail. They cited specific chapters, summarized reviews, and contextualized blurbs. The resulting conclusions were so laudatory that the writers might have been channeling my mother. One quoted what she’d posted to Goodreads: “Clayton writes with the authority of a historian and the grace of a literary journalist. The prose is clean, the pacing expert, and the research evident without being obtrusive.”

What could account for this sudden increase in incredibly perceptive readers?

The answer, of course, is artificial intelligence (AI). In each of these emails, after hundreds of words commending my talent, the correspondent tries to subtly build resentment against my publisher for the way it handled my book. She (always a ‘she’) usually then identifies “gaps” in market strategies and unfulfilled “paths” to eager readers. If I will just respond, she will show me how to convert them.

In other words, this is spam. Even in the unlikely event that it’s not a full-on scam, it would be at best an inexperienced marketing consultant charging a gullible author a lot of money for an ineffective Google Ad campaign. My correspondent is always writing from a Gmail address, never an established publicity firm. She never cites any work she’s done for other authors. She never discusses ROAS, ROMI, or any other business metrics. I’m supposed to hire her simply because she understands and loves my book.

It’s a powerful approach. The second-person intimacy combined with the level of detail make me unbelievably tempted to respond. The scammer seems to have particular insight into a writer’s psychology: rather than a typical con targeting a mark’s greed for money, she’s targeting my greed to be understood. What a delight it would be to work with someone who truly gets me and my work, who’s truly on board with the mission, who sees (maybe even better than I do!) how I deserve greater success than I’ve achieved.

Except, of course, that it’s all a lie. Would all these correspondents really put this much effort into a cold approach? No: it’s just AI. All the actual information in these emails—the reviews, the blurbs, the book summaries, the sample chapter material—is available on the Web. (Indeed, most of it’s on my own website.) She has merely asked an AI to remix it with the flattery turned up to 11.

Still, I found myself continually rereading the emails. At first it just felt good to have my ambitions reflected back to me as if I’d achieved them. Later, I started noticing what was missing.

The humanity. The creativity. The relationships.

I wrote Wonderlandscape after decades of living near Yellowstone and entertaining family and friends who were dead-set on visiting the national park. I started asking them why. What made Yellowstone important to them? As I tracked their varied responses (grizzlies, geysers, wolves, an ecosystem, the world’s first national park, Yogi Bear…), I realized that this was a historical tale.

It’s a tale that hadn’t been told before, as one of the scammers pointed out. But where did it come from? An AI has to assume that it came from consuming all the Yellowstone content on the Internet and remixing it. But to me it came from being human. Having family and friends. Being curious about their lives and goals. And then thinking about how to tell a story that met their needs while affirming their humanity.

On June 9, Pegasus will reissue Wonderlandscape in paperback. As I pondered how to promote it, I wondered how could I incorporate the emails’ compliments into my own promotional strategy. Then I realized: that would be trying to imitate an AI at a task it can do better than me.

Furthermore, I have already completed that task. Back when I first built the website for the hardcover release, I’d articulated the ambitions that the AI was now flattering me with. I’d found the emails so effective because the scammers had created “fans” who mirrored my previous promotional strategy.

If Wonderlandscape’s biggest fans are AIs, my goal can’t be to imitate them. Instead I must lead them. I need to show them: I am a human being. On a tactical level, I can do this with author appearances, interactive conversations, and heartfelt essays like this one. But on the level of promotional strategy, I need to lead with my humanity.

So let me take this opportunity to declare: I wrote a book based on my human experience. It contains plenty of personally-researched facts (no hallucinations) set down in a structure that I learned from years of apprenticeship. The book means a lot to me as an expression of creativity. But its greatest potential meaning to me comes through relationships—if people will buy it, identify with it, and maybe even use it to help come to a new appreciation of one of the most wondrous places in the world.

End notes:

• Because Wonderlandscape was among the books pirated to train AI databases, it’s possible that the scammers are using an AI that illegally acquired the text of the entire book to thwart my efforts to convince people to legally acquire that same book. Although I’ve opted into a settlement with Anthropic, other cases, including Apple, are still tied up in court.

• Julian Sancton followed up with some of the scammers—it’s a depressing tale.