Authors Electric

 I am the husband of Elizabeth Kay, of this parish. Her blog post the other day was about an attempt to scam her with promises of a film adaptation of one of her books. That book was, incidentally, a fairly unlikely choice from among her oeuvre, though admittedly it had the distinction that it was the only one to have been translated into Irish!   Elizabeth promised a follow-up post from me, focusing on the AI aspects, so here we are.   Before we get on to the AI, a couple of other related matters. First, the email address used by the supposed bigshot film producer, who we are calling Sheldon, didn’t look right. It was an ordinary AOL address, and we would have expected a major film producer like him to have been using something more corporate-looking. And the name of the account began with “official_” – which was perhaps protesting a little too much? He also gave us the URL for the website of his production company, which was superficially impressive – convincingly sw...

 And no, for once I don't mean Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. (Although he is one.) The Swan Inn, Newport, Shropshire - for credit, follow link.     In my blog last month , I told of jaw-dropping deceptions. My latest book, Bad Girl, features just such a conscience-free liar and I wanted to demonstrate that I wasn’t, entirely, making it up. (Though, obviously, some of it...) Bad Girl by Susan Price People fall for these enormous lies precisely because they can't believe them. They think, 'No one could expect to get away with a lie as unlikely, brazen and ridiculous as that. So it must be true.'  If you want a lie to be believed, make it a big one. This month’s despicable scammer was born Robert Freegard but adopted the posh double-barrelled surname ‘Hendy-Freegard’, as becomes a con-artist. I’m not going to pander to his pretensions, so I shall refer to him as ‘Freegard.’ In 1992, Freegard worked in Newport, Shropshire, as a barman in The Swan. Three st...