Scammers and Schemers

Driverless Waymo

I recently read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time and was somewhat horrified by what passed for humor in Mark Twain’s work. Huck and Jim are glad when they think they have seen the last of the “King” and the “Duke,” who have been traveling up and down the Mississippi, making Huck and Jim serve them, and duping the residents of small towns with bogus entertainment. But Huck feels sad for them when, in the end, he sees that they have been tarred and feathered and are leaving town on a rail.

Tom Sawyer’s cruelty is even worse when he insists on making an adventure out of freeing Jim from captivity, based on the romantic literature he has read. He fills the small cabin where Jim is chained with snakes, spiders and rats and when the rats bite him, gets Jim to write characters in his blood on a shirt Tom has stolen off his aunt’s clothesline. He makes a rope ladder out of a sheet and serves it in a pie, though there is no need for it. He, Huck and Jim go in and out of a hole they have dug under the cabin wall. Huck, and especially Jim, endure Tom’s foolishness with more grace than he deserves. Throughout this “adventure,” Tom knows that Jim was freed by his owner in her will!

It all has a very 19th Century sensibility to it. And yet, and yet. Here we are, at the affect of an ailing, tipsy “king,” who has lost any sense of fidelity to truth and whose only ambition is to keep himself in the spotlight at all times.

And then there are the scammers I run into! As a self-published author, I am prey to the hundreds of small presses spawned when a few iUniverse employees decided they could run their own company and took their show to the Philippines. For years, I have gotten phone calls claiming that my book, Friends and Magicians, has been chosen to be republished and distributed globally by some small press. 

Writers have banded together to protect themselves against these scammers. It was my ex-journalist husband who discovered the iUniverse connection. Indeed the above-named book was my first foray into self-publishing. It appeared under the iUniverse imprint in 2008.

I have occasionally returned the call of these people to see what they are offering. I finally blocked the guy who wanted to get me a $300,000 movie deal. Really? Who even talks to a guy like that?

Recently I have noticed that I get more reasonable offers. Help with the keywords pointing to my books on Amazon. Or an offer to be interviewed on the Spotlight Network, which also turns out to be something of a scam. No, these things will not necessarily result in sales of your book. Yes, they do require your “investment.”

Luckily I have little or no money to “invest.” As I told someone recently, “Line, Marty and Paul Mikkelson are on their own,” as they have always been. I know that some of these deals are genuine attempts by the person who offers to make a job for themselves in the world. Things are not easy out there.

At the bottom of these “better” offers is artificial intelligence. It is now much easier to collect from on-line data notes about you and your work. You have put the information on the internet yourself in order to sell your work. We should not be too surprised how it is used.

I am not afraid of the dreaded AI. I am not in the working world any more, for one thing. And, at the macro level, I trust that somehow the financial institutions and infrastructure which underpin our lives will have checks and balances to protect them.

I wouldn’t think of using an AI program as a writing aid because the reason I write has no particular object. But I do ask silly questions of Google search, and I take the AI answers with the appropriate amount of salt.

Don and I recently enjoyed taking a Waymo from downtown LA up into Hollywood. Sitting in the back seat of the sleek Jaguar, we had a quiet conversation without worry. We could see on a screen what the car, with its phalanx of cameras, was noting on the street around it. This seems a good use of AI.

So how did we get from Huckleberry Finn, with its outdated and indefensible language to a luxurious Waymo on the streets of Los Angeles? Don’t ask me! My intelligence is far from artificial, generally approaching insouciance. And if you are a scammer, don’t think you are going to put one over on me. Indeed, I wish us all luck.