I get a lot of publishing scam emails targeted toward publication-hungry academics. Most of them are not worthy of discussion. This one, though, was precious. I reproduce it here, slightly truncated, to avoid posting a link to the business.
Hi Mike Duncan;
I have a number of questions about your paper ‘Expanding Ethical Pedagogy in Technical Communication: Learning from Killer Nanobots’ that I’d be grateful if you could answer for REDACTED. You can find them below, use the link to answer as an audio or in text.
The questions are as follows:
Corporate professionals
How can TPC instructors help corporate professionals navigate ethical challenges when dealing with new emerging technologies?
Technology industry leaders
What are the methods suggested for TPC instructors to critically question the limits of corporate structure when it comes to ethical considerations in new emerging technologies?
Professional communication trainers
How can TPC instructors demonstrate to students that they have a variety of options for responding to assignments beyond what their employers may offer them?
Please provide your answers on this link… REDACTED
While this is a spam email in the same genre as the ones that insert “author name” and “paper title” to fish on profit for pay-to-play journals, this example also used some form of AI to generate “questions” from the article’s text – each one “question” is a garbled and out-of-context version of content from the “Expanding Ethical Pedagogy” article itself.
I can’t emphasize enough that this is a near-perfect example of how shallow the AI parlor trick remains. Why? Because the entire article is a warning against mindlessly doing the act that the email constitutes, and the email does not betray the slightest awareness of this irony. Someone decided it was a good idea to target journals with an AI scripting emails to push money toward their suspicious startup… that does not actually have the intention of helping poor academics like me to spread awareness and understanding of our work, because the script isn’t actually capable of understanding the content (let alone the abstract!) in the first place. It only does what it is told. And its masters are not intent on the good.
And if I am wrong and a human actually wrote that email? As Yoda once said, “now matters are worse.”
The ouroboros has reached its own tail, and rather than spit it out, its jaws stretch wider.