“Some stories punch you right in the gut, then hand you a tissue and say, good luck, kid. That’s what Her Beautiful Brain feels like,” began the email that landed in my inbox as my husband and I were making dinner. The writer of the email went on to summarize Her Beautiful Brain, my memoir which was published eleven years ago, using lavish phrases like, “the way you weave copper mines, Seattle classrooms, Haiti, and a geropsychiatric ward into one narrative… that’s not just writing, that’s emotional cardio.” (Heart emoji, bicep emoji).

Is that a compliment? I think so. And what writer doesn’t enjoy receiving compliments from a stranger on a random Thursday evening after a long day? What writer isn’t touched to learn that her book is still reaching people, more than a decade after its publication date?

However. A human person did not write this email. AI wrote this email. And I happened to receive it exactly four days after my publisher alerted her authors that many of us may be eligible to join the class-action lawsuit against Anthropic, one of the AI companies that allegedly pirated hundreds of thousands of books to train its large language model (LLM). A $1.5 billion dollar settlement had just been reached. We might all receive a payout of about three thousand dollars.

She sent us a link, so we could confirm whether our books were pirated by LibGen (Library Genesis), the source allegedly used by Anthropic. Her Beautiful Brain popped right up. There were other parameters: published before 2022? Check. Copyright correctly registered? Check. My husband’s book on documentary filmmaking, published by Oxford University Press, also turned up.

A few days later, I received a link from the firm handling the lawsuit, so that I could send them my contact information, which I did. A judge has now stalled the settlement, requesting more details from both parties. The next hearing is September 25.

Meanwhile, I received that other email, the one with the flowery prose, the point of which, it turns out, was to get me to sign on for some professional marketing help. Because, as the writer put it, “you already climbed Everest with no oxygen; let me at least carry the backpack on the way down.”

How do I know this email was generated by AI? Technically, I do not. But everything about it screams fake. The sender’s name, which I think is safest not to reveal, is outlandish. The fawning prose is both formulaic and grammatically odd. Here’s more: “Five spinal taps? Seriously? I struggle to give blood without fainting, you’re basically a superhero in disguise, except your cape is probably hanging over an editing bay somewhere.”

For me, these two emails—one from my publisher and one from a marketer I’ll just call Outlandish—mark the end of a delusion to which I had been mulishly clinging: my belief that somehow, my own humble life would not be ambushed by AI. Sure, I can’t help but scan those “AI overviews” now provided by Google in response to any and all of my search queries. But this is personal. Some actual person somewhere in the world asked AI to “read” my book and then “write” an email to me in an attempt to scam me into spending money on “honest (hah!) reviews that build trust and visibility” and “actual reader (hah!) engagement.”

I’m grateful to authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who filed the Anthropic lawsuit, for waking me up. I’m grateful to my publisher, She Writes Press founder Brooke Warner, who has been warning her authors about scam-mails like the one I got. And I’m especially grateful that I was lucky enough to write and publish Her Beautiful Brain long before AI was a household acronym. But I’m angry that the AI overlords had no moral problem with stealing the writing of hundreds of thousands of authors, big and small, to power up their grand experiment.

Her Beautiful Brain is a book about just that: a beautiful, real, human brain. My mother’s brain, hijacked far too early by Alzheimer’s disease. She had been an English teacher and a lover of literature. When I was writing about her, I sometimes felt her looking over my shoulder, demanding a better, more exacting word or turn of phrase. Demanding honesty. Clarity. My real voice, not some fake voice. I’m sure she would’ve found Outlandish’s email hysterically funny.

When Her Beautiful Brain was published in 2014, I urged people to buy it anywhere but Amazon, because I wanted to support independent bookstores. I ignored all the advice about getting lots of Amazon reviews. That wasn’t smart, in the long run, but I understand why I felt that way a decade ago. I was furious with Amazon because its lust for market domination had put one of my best friends, who worked in publishing, out of a job. Since then, I’ve had to accept that Amazon won that fight, and authors do need reviews, and there are few books in this world that can survive without a presence on Amazon.

But must I accept that my book, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of others, can be casually pillaged and plagiarized by nonhuman “writers?” And that deploying nonhuman “reviewers” is the only sure way to boost sales?

Just before I got the Anthropic email from Brooke, I checked out a book called Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, by Vauhini Vara. At the time, I was deep into The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan’s gorgeously written, agonizing, Man-Booker-prize-winning novel about Australian POWs in World War II. Vara’s book would have to wait until I finished The Narrow Road.

But as I began reading Searches, it was the beauty of Flanagan’s book that made Vara’s painstaking analysis of the history of AI all the more powerful to read. The very idea that all the sweat and emotion and exquisite detail that went into Flanagan’s prose could be swept up—scraped, as people say, like fish in the teeth of a bottom trawler—and tossed into some LLM Mixmaster was underscored by Vara’s account of her own poignant writing experiment, in which she used Chat GPT to “help” her write an essay about her sister’s death from cancer at the age of 20.

Vara covered Silicon Valley for The Wall Street Journal. She has also been a reporter and editor for The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. If you, like me, learn better from an engaging non-fiction book than you do from academic papers, I urge you to read Searches.

I’ll leave you with Vara’s quotes from a speech by speculative fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin, who wrote this in 2014: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.” And this: “Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

The art of words. Not emotional cardio, not Everest without oxygen. The art of words. Also known as writing. By humans.