The discussion around the robo-penning of a song in the style of Nick Cave, which led to Nick Cave publishing a response on his blog, The Red Hand Files,
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/’
has created considerable interest, some of which conveys a sense of concern.
As the publisher of the Almanac website, I receive many, many unsolicited emails from organisations looking to post a piece on our website (on a wide variety of topics). The content creators are willing to pay a small amount of money to have the piece published – as long as we allow any links in the piece to be active. Often they are links to gaming sites. We have never accepted these stories, although one did sneak through some time ago.
Dozens of these content creators register on our site every month, and sometimes overnight we will get a surge of 100+ regos. Once we got a rego every minute or so for ten hours.
It’s usually easy enough to pick the dodgy ones, which can just be binned. But not always. We don’t want to bin writers and readers who have registered in good faith and intend to engage in the site so every new subscriber who looks legitimate is contacted so I can establish whether they are actually real. When they respond to my email their status is changed to ‘contributor’. [I’ve just checked and there are only seven dodgy registrations since I last cleaned out the ‘New Subscribers’ folder about a week ago.]
I also receive many emails through our ‘Contact Us’ function. In recent months I have received more and more along the lines of this one:
Hello, footyalmanac.com.au
I hope you are doing well with managing your website
And I Know How it is time-consuming to write a good blog post for your website
But Did you know you can automate your website with a robot?
You can write a blog post automatically without writing a single paragraph.
For example, let’s say you want to write a blog about Dentist.
In the software write ( write me content about What are 5 ways to take care of your teeth)
Done, the robot gives you an entire blog post, and it is plagiarism-free
and SEO Assistant
And you can try it here: [I have not included the link]
I hope you enjoy it, have a nice day.
It’s going to happen more and more.
I thought this might be of interest to readers.
Read more from John Harms HERE
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About John Harms
JTH is a writer, publisher, speaker, historian. He is publisher and contributing editor of The Footy Almanac and footyalmanac.com.au. He has written columns and features for numerous publications. His books include Confessions of a Thirteenth Man, Memoirs of a Mug Punter, Loose Men Everywhere, Play On, The Pearl: Steve Renouf's Story and Life As I Know It (with Michelle Payne). He appears (appeared?) on ABCTV's Offsiders. He can be contacted [email protected] He is married to The Handicapper and has three school-age kids - Theo, Anna, Evie. He might not be the worst putter in the world but he's in the worst four. His ambition was to lunch for Australia but it clashed with his other ambition - to shoot his age.
Just amazing.
This world in which we live, eh?
Notice the punctuation in the email.
The dodgy registrations are evident from the email address. often .ru (I assume Russia) Often a run of similarly spelt usernames eg Berlynn Berlyth Berlook Berlypt and so on. And then there’s the crazy usernames hgytfrzxz etc
An email just arrived:
Hi Team,
It’s Angel again. You’re probably busy, but I just wanted to make sure you received my email. What are your thoughts about our possible collaboration? Or do you have ideas you’d love to share? Please let me know.
I’ll be waiting for your response.
Thank you and have a great day!
All The Best,
ANGEL
Nick Cave’s response, which I’d already read before your piece, JTH, is an eloquent response to the issue concerned, as one would expect. Of course, in essence I agree with him, my personal feeling being that, at bottom, robo-penned efforts are a parasitic, plagiaristic load of bollocks.
Robots/machines are fine to wash our clothes or dishes and do our lawns etc…
The creative process is sacrosanct – from the heart and head.
Nothing can replace our emotions or thought patterns as we create.
Let our creativity be AI free…
Well this has come as a major shock and embarrassment to me: I’ve been collaborating with Angel for some time now, not having any suspicions about her true insidious Robo-author identity. But no need to harp on about the bleeding obvious…. I guess most people who’ve read my lousy crap had already made that assumption eh?
I get them a few times a week JLH. I block them every time but they just keep coming. They are often followed by offers to increase SEO etc which I don’t understand and why I don’t make any money from my website!
My quirky reaction is a little different.
I probably won’t sleep well tonight as I shall be trying to find an angle on a “dentist” story.
Thank you so bloody much JTH.
RDL
Bloody amateurs. I had one of the interns fix me up an AI writing program years ago and you never noticed a thing.