New AI scam on Medium

Have you been getting more subscribers than usual?

Timothy James Lambert

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More subscribers than usual? (Image by author and AI)

Someone subscribed to me!

I was excited. I don’t get many subscribers. I have plenty of followers, but subscribers, that’s a whole different level. Subscribers get emails when I publish a new article. That’s a real fan.

When I get a new subscriber I like to check and see who is subscribing. I’ll check out what they write and who else they are following—the usual stuff.

But when I checked out their account what I found was more than a dozen stories published on a single day, and all with the same featured image. The text of all of the stories had clearly been created with AI.

Still, who was I to judge? I have been over-reliant on AI for an article or two. Of course, I’ve never engaged in this level of misuse, but it isn’t my responsibility to police those abusing AI on Medium.

I did however unfollow them as I tend to automatically follow back anyone who follows or subscribes to my account.

And that was that. Then I got several more subscribers which is way more than usual. And each of these accounts was filled with dozens of AI-generated articles with identical featured images.

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