I feel like I finally achieved fame and glory! I got targeted by an art scammer on AO3! :D
To be entirely fair, it's not actually a scam. The person is legitimately trying to get you to commission them to produce art, and that's not a scam. The scam-y part is that they leave a comment pretending that they enjoyed your story, and when you reply to thank them, they then say that they "have some great ideas" and ask you to talk to them about it. "Great ideas", of course, means what they want to draw for you. So they aren't really scamming you -- "scam" implies that they get you to pay them and you don't receive anything -- but they are leaving you a comment to make you feel good, only to reveal that they were lying.
This one was on my most recent fic, the stupid one about Fifteen meeting Tadge the engineer working on the Dalek ship. I "fell" for this scammer partly because her username was very similar to that of someone else who has commented frequently on my other fics, so I didn't realize it was a new person. She'd left a short comment about the story, as opposed to the long AI-generated comments most art scammers leave (I've seen tons of them on the AO3 sub, so I know what they look like), and when I replied that I'm starting to think about how a Dalek-run company might operate, she said something to the effect of "You should totally write more about it! I have some ideas for characters if you'd like to chat about it."
I should have been tipped off by the word "ideas", as that's what the art scammers tend to say, that they have "ideas" they'd like to tell you about, but as I thought she was my other commenter, who I'd chatted with previously, it didn't seem sus to me. So, we got on Discord and after some small talk, she said she'd send me her character ideas.
What followed were the following two paragraphs, behind the cut, in case you don't care to read them.
( Read more... )My first thought was, "Who in the world needs to describe the Doctor?" The second thought was, "Why is she describing my own characters to me? Oh, of course, she wants me to buy a drawing of them." When a writer has "ideas for characters", they're talking about the personality and backstory. When an artist has "ideas for characters", they're talking about how they look.
And then I laughed at how both paragraphs were obviously generated by AI. No real person would describe a person in a drawing with "carries a playful smile that can quickly shift into confusion or amazement" -- obviously the prompt she used was, "Describe the Fifteenth Doctor", and since she didn't tell the AI that it's a single shot of the character, the AI responded with his look on film and in motion. And Fifteen has "messy black hair"? She didn't even read what it spit out.
Tadge, on the other hand, had little physical description in the story except for the jumpsuit and utility belt, and so his description was made up out of whole cloth, and honestly doesn't match the personality I intended for him at all, which, I suppose, is my fault -- obviously I didn't write him well enough so the AI just made stuff up.
But most of all, though she was trying to sell me on a drawing of these two characters (and I have to wonder, why Tadge? I'd think she'd be more likely to get a sale if she aimed at two popular characters, like Fifteen and Ruby or Fourteen and Donna. But it's probably because this story just got posted.), she didn't actually tell me about the drawing itself. She just blathered in extremely general terms about the characters.
That's the biggest indication this was written by AI. A real artist would say, "I'd love to draw the moment where the Doctor runs around the corner into Tadge," which tells me what image they're picturing. Yes, I've worked with real artists before, and that's how they speak when they're trying to tell you what they want to make. They tell you about the image, not about the characters' personalities.
And of course, if she's going to use AI to describe what she's going to make, I can only assume she's going to use AI to make it as well.
But that's all beside the point. As soon as I read those paragraphs and realized what she was really after, I told her that I'm happy to talk about the characters, though what she wrote about Tadge wasn't correct at all, but "I should note before you spend any more time on this, I'm not looking for art and will not order or pay for any."
She responded with a sentence about how she hopes that I'll write more for this idea, then "So should we go with the Tadge's idea doe the illustrations?" I guess she figured that 1) she could just ignore what I'd just said and if she kept on me, I'd finally acquiesce, and 2) though I'd said that she got Tadge wrong, it'd be fine to draw him the way she sees him, not the way I see him. I also guess that she uses AI to write because she doesn't know how to write or type correctly herself.
I replied, "No. No illustrations. I do not want art," to which she replied, "Alright alright just calm down," which made me laugh again.
You, lady, are the one who's trying to scam
me, and
you're the one getting offended when I say no?
But that was the end of it. I still have the conversation open in Discord, to save it for posterity, because there are actual
real art scammers on AO3 who, after talking to you once, will come back months later claiming that they sent you what you ordered and demanding payment or else they'll take you to court. It's not that I'll need the discussion transcript to prove anything (these scammers never actually take you to court; they are just hoping you'll get scared and send money), but it'll be nice to have it to remind me what had actually happened.
Anyway, yay! Someone's seen my writing and tried to scam me with it! I'm famous!
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