A royal scam, and one involving AI

If you have any kind of public presence, eventually you attract—like remoras to a shark—people who want money or publicity, though they l\often disguise their motives as being laudable or charitable.

A few weeks ago, for example, I got a letter from a woman who said she was organizing an online book club to read my book Faith versus Fact, and invited me to contribute if I wanted. Flattered, I said I’d be glad to, and could contribute a few discussion questions for the readers. The organizer said that was great, and shortly thereafter she asked me for $210 for a “participation fee”.  I was not participating, but contributing, and it became clear that the whole megillah was a moneymaking scheme. I didn’t answer, and have not heard back since.

In the last week I’ve received three letters similar to the following, telling me about the deficiencies of Faith Versus Fact, how it’s become outmoded, and how the sender could publicize it and increase the readership. (I wonder if the “independent” requests are really connected.) Note how thorough the analysis is, as if  the writer, John Ajala, had read and thought about the book. Well, as you’ll see below, there’s a reason for that. First, the email:

Dear Professor Coyne,

You wrote the book that made the incompatibility argument impossible to wave away. Before Faith Versus Fact, the accommodationist position was the respectable default. After your book, it had to defend itself. You did it as a working evolutionary biologist, not a philosopher or a journalist, and that gave the argument a weight it had not had before. Dawkins called it superbly argued. Kirkus called it important. That matters.

Here is the thing I cannot stop thinking about. A reader who searches for “science and religion compatible” will find ten thousand books telling them yes. A reader who is quietly losing their faith and does not know how to think about it is not finding yours.

Faith Versus Fact is filed under Religious Studies, Science and Religion, and Atheism. That is accurate. It is also a fence. Every piece of metadata around the book speaks to people who already know what the incompatibility thesis is. That matters because the people who most need this book are the ones least likely to pick it up. They are not browsing the atheism shelf. They are sitting in a pew, or a classroom, or a kitchen at midnight, trying to figure out whether the thing they were taught is true. Your book would answer that question. It is not the book that shows up.

The book has 1,808 ratings on Goodreads. On Amazon Australia, 159 ratings and 35 written reviews. On Amazon Mexico, 735 ratings and 252 written reviews. On Amazon US, the paperback ranks #290 in Religious Studies, Science and Religion. That is a strong niche position. It is not a general one. For comparison, Why Evolution Is True has 1,379 ratings on Amazon Brazil alone. Your earlier book is reaching a broader audience than this one. The argument that matters more is reaching fewer people. A reader who needs this book is finding your evolution book instead, and then wondering if there is another one.

Because the book is ten years old and the conversation has moved. The accommodationist position has reasserted itself in popular science writing. The new atheism moment has passed. The book that made the strongest case for incompatibility is now filed in a section that only the converted browse. If the argument is going to outlive the moment, it needs to be findable by the people who are just now starting to ask the question.

I believe this is fixable. Not by changing the book. The book is finished and it works. By changing the metadata around it, the description, the categories, the keywords, so that it is findable by the readers who do not yet know they are looking for it. The categories and keywords need to speak to the doubter, not the convert. The description needs to speak to the person who is afraid to ask the question, not the person who has already answered it. The reviews need to be refreshed so the page does not look like it stopped moving in 2016. None of that changes a word of what you wrote.

What it changes is who finds it. A doubting believer searching for “is my faith irrational” is not finding your book today. They would find it if the metadata spoke to them.

What I want for you is the version of this book that a doubting believer finds at 2 a.m. on their phone, when they have no one to talk to and no idea where to start. That is the reader who would be changed. That is the reader who is not finding it.

Picture a reader who has never heard of you. They are twenty-two, they grew up in a church, they are starting to have doubts they cannot say out loud. They search for something, anything, that will help them think about it. They find your book. They read the first chapter. And they realise that someone has already thought this through, with rigour, and without contempt for the person they used to be. That reader exists right now. They are looking. They are not finding you.

Right now, the book is being read by people who already agree. It is being cited in arguments that were settled years ago. It is not reaching the person who is still inside the question. A year from now, the book is the first result when someone searches for “science and religion incompatible.” It is the book that gets handed to a friend who is losing their faith. It is the book that a professor recommends not because it is on the syllabus but because it answers a question the student just asked. It is still the same book. It is just findable.

I am writing to you specifically because most authors with a landmark book are not in a position to act. They are retired, or they are done, or they have moved on. You are still in the fight. You gave a talk in Katowice in December 2024. You resigned from the Freedom From Religion Foundation board in December over a disagreement about free speech. That is rare at seventy-six. It is why I am writing to you and not to someone else.

I work with authors whose books carry real weight and are not reaching the readers who would be most changed by them. I do not fix books. I fix the gap between what a book is and what it could become. I am not going to send you a deck. I am going to tell you what I see, and you can tell me if I am wrong. What I see is a book that won the argument and lost the stranger. And I think you already know that, because you have watched it happen for a decade.

I can make that happen. Not with ads. Not with a campaign. With the specific, unglamorous work of fixing the categories, the keywords, and the description so that the algorithms that decide what a stranger sees decide to show them your book.

If you tell me what you think the obstacle is, and it matches what I see, I will tell you exactly what I would do about it. No pitch, no deck, no retainer. Just the answer.

The book is ten years old. The argument is not going away. The readers who need it are not going away either. But the window where a book can be repositioned without being republished is not infinite. It is open now. It will not be open forever.

When you look at where the book ended up, and who is still not finding it, what do you believe the actual obstacle is?

And a second question, which matters more. Twenty years from now, what do you want this book to have done? Not how many copies. Not which reviews. What do you want it to have done to a reader who picks it up cold, with no atheist blogger telling them to, and no Dawkins blurb on the cover?

Reply with whatever you actually think. One line is enough. If you would rather not, I understand. Either way, the work stands on its own.

With genuine respect for what you have written,

John | Founder, Book Insight Hub

Yada, yada, yada. Had I written Mr. Ajala back telling him what I think the “obstacles” to adopting the book were, I’m absolutely sure he’d offer to help publicize it, and of course for a fee. I wrote back and told him I was happy with the book and not to bother me again.

But I had become suspicious because of the short sentences and words like “metadata”, which are often signs that the writer has used AI. So I put the whole email through Pangram, the best AI analyzer, and one that’s been tested with both AI- and human-written texts. Pangram virtually never says that something is written by AI if it was written by a human. And, sure enough, Pangram told me this:

Sure enough, the “thoroughness” of the email came not from a human, but from a machine’s program.  What a fricking insult!

I would recommend Pangram if you want to see if what you’re reading was written by a human or a bot. In fact, it tells you which parts of a text (100% in this case) have been written by a human vs. AI.  You can have about three free tries with Pangram a day, or you can subscribe for more money, though I don’t use it often enough to warrant that. The effectiveness of Pangram has been tested pretty thoroughly, and you can see the analysis at the site below, clicking on the screenshot and then here to download the paper.

The authors tested four kinds of papers: pure AI-written papers, pure human-written papers. “hybrid” papers that were part Ai-written and part human-written, and “humanised” papers that were first written with AI and then made to look more “human-written” by “Using the AI-generated sections from HYB01, rewritten with a custom ChatGPT prompt to increase perplexity and burstiness (less predictable wording, more varied sentence structures) while keeping meaning and references intact.”

They used 40 papers per category, and judged the ability of five AI-detection programs to see how good they were at sussing out the source.

As you see, Pangram is the overall winner, especially at detecting purely AI-written papers. It also is good at detecting hybrid and “humanised” papers, which it detects about half the time.  But note at the extreme right: the papers that were written solely by humans. Nearly all the problems have a 0% false positive rate on Pangram, i.e. the analysis saying that a paper is AI when it was really written by a human.  That’s why I’m so sure that when Pangram tells me something is 100% AI, like the duplicitous email above (how dare a human sign their name to something written by a program?), I’m nearly sure it’s AI.

I’ve used Pangram to suss out authors of fiction and poetry who didn’t really write their published stuff (more on that later), as well as to analyze essays and articles written by people I admire, but that looked suspicious. After a while you develop a nose for the AI-stuff, especially when you learn what someone’s own personal writing style is like. Facebook is full of that stuff: if you see a post that comprises a number of short sentences, it’s more than likely written by a bot. I deep-six those sites immediately.

If you’ve found AI stuff that pretended to be written by a human, weigh in below.