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.
But I don’t think it’s a grift! It’s far too messy and personal to be a grift. She seems far too invested.
She made shirts. She has created a “community” for her readers. She paid a publicist, or at least some kind of service, to submit a fake press release about her book to various local newspapers. The press release is AI-generated, but, incredibly, contains less AI-generated verbiage than the book. She created or purchased a web of fake Goodreads accounts with AI-generated names and profile photos to give her book five-star reviews. The reviews are AI-generated, too.
There’s an ancillary YouTube channel filled with “fan-made” AI-generated videos. Tucked away on that same channel was an AI “Santa Claus” holding photos of her children, giving away the identity of the account holder. And then, the other day, just when I thought it couldn’t escalate any further, I saw that she’d posted photos of the notes for her book. You guessed it: the photos are AI-generated, as is the caption describing what they are.
I don’t really want to litigate whether or not her book is actually a book. What’s interesting to me is the whole dynamic – the whole fantasy. First of all, this performance – or whatever it is – can’t possibly be that rare. Second, how are we supposed to think about what she’s doing? Should I be disturbed by it?
Lying is wrong, but it’s also contextual. We lie to people every day about all sorts of things. I’m not so autistic that I can’t wrap my mind around lies that are told for good reasons. I’m also probably more compassionate than most about people who nurture delusions. I’m not going to tell the 25-year-old who needs to believe she’s a human-alien hybrid that she isn’t one, and I’m not going to tell the kid who dresses up and pretends he’s Spider-Man for longer than is developmentally appropriate that he’s not Spider-Man. Maybe it expresses a type of truth. Maybe it’s therapeutic. Maybe they’re just role-playing because they need to right now, and they’ll eventually grow out of it.
There’s a part of me that really wants to ask: who is Teresa really harming with this journey as a fake author besides herself? And that’s assuming her peers even see her as dishonest or foolish. They might be indifferent, or they might not realize what’s going on. They might think she actually wrote a book.
My husband thinks the stakes are low, that I’m overthinking it. Worst case, she loses a few bucks on these fake press releases and her ChatGPT subscription; best case, she makes a few bucks on Amazon. Psychologically, worst case, she convinces herself she’s an author when she’s not and then somebody comes around and rains on her parade. Best case, nobody disabuses her of her delusion and she continues playing dolls on Facebook thinking it is real life, totally unabated.
Some part of Teresa must know, deep down, that she didn’t write a book and that it’s all pretend
Would I feel so conflicted if she were simply overconfident about a book she had actually written? If her web of catfish profiles were not AI, but were made up of photos stolen from someone else instead of generated? If she truly believed she was the greatest writer ever to have lived, but she actually wrote – even if the writing was preposterously bad? Would that somehow be worse? Would it be, in its own way, better? Would it be a disservice then to allow her to keep believing she’s Spider-Man long after she’s outgrown the costume?
She just wants to feel special and logging on to Facebook to post about her fake book makes her feel that way. Is it my business? Perhaps it is antisocial to act like it isn’t? Is it any less antisocial to treat her as someone who needs compassion, when that compassion may secretly be little more than pity?
Some part of her must know, deep down, that she didn’t really write a book and that it’s all pretend. That she won’t get a million fans, a million readers, a million people who love it – love her.
I’ve always thought it was more humane to let people like that do what they need to do. After all, I know my dad can’t see the pictures of my girls. But it makes me feel better to post them nonetheless. And I hate it when people see those posts and ask me if I’m OK or if I want to talk. I would prefer they just like the pictures and move on.
Maybe that’s what Teresa wants, too. Not that we believe her, exactly, not that we enable her – but that we don’t break the spell.
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