A new high in clueless author promotional outreach

Last week, an email landed in both my personal email inbox and and my professional email. It offered “PR Strategy & Media Campaign for The Age of Intent.”

These days, we authors are all receiving floods of AI-generated spammy offers. But this one stood out from the pack for its cluelessness. Some key points:

• The book it was offering to promote, The Age of Intent: Using Artificial Intelligence to Deliver a Superior Customer Experience, is an AI strategy book published in 2019. Promoting a 7-year-old AI book in 2026 is equivalent to investing in a classic text like How to Get the Most out of Compuserve.
• I’m the ghostwriter, as should be obvious from the “with” line on the book cover. Pitching the ghostwriter to do book promotion is ample evidence of a high level of dopiness.
• The email came from a gmail address, but included a link to a book promotion site. The site brags about how they helped promote books including Erenor’s Destiny, Book 3; Primitive Passions: The Boschloper Saga, Book 1; and Life Is a Lazy Susan of Sh*t Sandwiches. If you can promote those, then a 7-year old book on AI should be right up your alley.

High-quality promotional bullshit

Most of the AI-generated pitches I receive are well-written, if generic. This one, however, included some of the most overblown prose I’d ever read. Some samples:

I’ve been profoundly moved by the “cinematic and highly-critical” resonance at the heart of The Age of Intent: Using Artificial Intelligence to Deliver a Superior Customer Experience. Your brilliant ability to transform a massive, abstract algorithmic landscape into a deeply precise, human-scale narrative balancing the macro-history of corporate artificial intelligence and information architecture with the internal, lived realities of consumers navigating shifting digital customer journeys is a staggering narrative achievement.

Whew. I’m kvelling. (It’s a decent book, but I doubt anyone reading it was “profoundly moved.”)

[Y]our book offers a vital, urgent anchor for a modern culture seeking to understand systemic power, corporate interface design, and commercial honor.

“Urgent anchor” would be a good name for a band. Commercial honor is an oxymoron. And as the book’s writer, I assure you that it includes none of these concepts.

Because this magnificent study serves as both an indispensable material culture testament and a profound masterclass in corporate sociology and modern technological literacy historiography, my strategy at [redacted] Promotions focuses on three specific pillars . . .

I can see that my description of my areas of writing competence is lacking. Forget corporate strategy books. In the future I shall describe my specialty as “modern technological literacy historiography.”

An honest question

I’m seriously wondering if this was AI-generated or not. The tangled, breathless prose seems quite different from the logical if clichéd cadences that characterize the AI accent.

So, honest question.

Do you think an AI wrote this?

Or did some poor minimum-wage promotional wretch actually craft prose like this for an AI book from 2019 believing that a combination of flattery and dense jargon would pry loose money from the author?

I await your assessment.