Five lines. Two bots. Zero shame.
Generative AI has made scam emails smarter, more personal, and more dangerous for creative professionals. Vasicek's answer is to fight verse with verse, transforming two complete scam email threads into a limerick-fueled comedy chapbook in which the author plays willing mark, relentless provocateur, and satirist all at once. The full email exchanges are reproduced here, including a bot impersonating a famous children's author and another hawking a two-hundred-dollar author spotlight for a book literally titled Scam Poetry. Together they form a pointed, hilarious meditation on AI imitation, human gullibility, and the unexpected dignity of a well-crafted five-line poem.
Five lines. Two bots. Zero shame.
With the rise of AI, scam emails have gotten disturbingly good. Joe Vasicek knows this firsthand, because his spam folder has been full of them. But instead of hitting delete, he started hitting reply. In limericks.
In this third volume of the Scam Poetry series, Vasicek reproduces two complete, unedited email exchanges in all their ridiculous glory. In the first, a chatbot impersonating Julia Donaldson reaches out to gush about a dark fantasy novel featuring a grisly murder in its opening chapter, which seems like an odd choice for a Gruffalo enthusiast. In the second, a bot offers Joe a coveted Berlin Book Club spotlight for none other than Scam Poetry: HAIku, his previous Scam Poetry book. Joe meets both of them in verse, prompting each scambot to oblige with surprising enthusiasm and zero self-awareness.
What begins as an exercise in trolling ends as something funnier and more thought-provoking. The result is absurdist comedy with a genuine undercurrent: a meditation on AI imitation, the ethics of digital deception, and the strange dignity that even a spam-generating algorithm can stumble into when forced to write verse.
