Recently I started logging in to Facebook again, mostly to do the depressing thing of posting photos of my children to my late father’s wall. One of the interesting things about Facebook is that it forces me to exit my bubble of people who work in tech and media, and thus are very tech and media literate. The people I see on Facebook inhabit a completely different universe than those I see on X or Substack or even TikTok. I don’t love referring to the people I grew up with as “normies,” but, you know, many of them are normies.

Anyway, I log in and suddenly I’m surrounded by normies and I stumble across something that forces me to reconsider some things.

A girl I went to high school with – let’s call her Teresa – has written a book and self-published it on Amazon. The book is completely AI-generated. It’s not just that the book is AI-generated: all the posts leading up to it are AI-generated, the marketing collateral is AI-generated and the woman has even AI-generated an image of herself and her late father with a lengthy, saccharine “We did it!” caption. All of this is, I guess, not that big of a deal. My husband suggested that maybe it’s a moneymaking grift, if a misguided one. All of this is maybe an afternoon’s worth of work, he says.

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But I don’t think it’s a grift! It’s far too messy and personal to be a grift. She seems........

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