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Thursday, September 28, 2023

Caveat Emptor! Let the Buyer Beware!

 


Just a note to encourage you to be aware that, with Brigit's increasing popularity, she has become a commodity. You will increasingly see items that are basically ripoffs, designed to make someone a quick buck rather than to communicate good information to devotees and scholars.
I just saw a post about the book depicted here and I was of course interested to learn more about it. I’ve never heard of the author, so I looked her up. I can't seem to find anything about her apart from what she's written on her Amazon page.
She's published a whole bunch of books on a whole bunch of deities, which, while not a condemnation in itself, does encourage caution. When a person is not intimate with a deity, when they are not researching in depth but are taking gleanings from everything that's already written about her in the popular sphere, there are likely to be even more inaccuracies than when we devotees write, and we make mistakes all the time.
I did a little more searching and discovered that the links to her website and Facebook profile are duds. She could be an AI. If anyone actually knows Nicole Muir, the author of this book, I would love to know more about her, and that she is a reliable author.
This post is not meant to tell you not to read this book or any other book by someone who's written a lot of books. Morgan Daimler is an example of someone who has written lots of books about different deities but actually does great research. *But* they are also all over the net. It's easy to find out who they are and what people think of them.
The person reading this book was enjoying it. There are exercises or meditations in it to help you connect with the goddess. If she's getting something out of them then that is great. Information does not have to be accurate for us to find benefit from it in our contemplations. But if we are using it to build a picture of the goddess, we're going to want to have solid facts behind it as much as possible and not just hearsay.
Caveat emptor!

Let the buyer beware!


PS: I’m getting very good confirmation of my fears on the original post (my profile page), some of which I am adding below.


 

DR

I too think this is highly suspicious. I keep hearing more and more about AI generated books that are total scams. She has no website, no Amazon reviews, her FB page looks fake with hardly any followers. It has only one review (which also looks suspicious). Her image returned zero hits using TinEye and only two on Google Reverse Image Search (for two similar looking women from a California Psychics website, so not sure if it is her). The length of the books also make me think these are AI, along with their publication dates (and lack of reviews).

 


HW:

Sadly there are a few out there cashing in on the pagan and spiritual community/newly curious with a smorgasbord of AI books on more topics than one human could decently write a book on.

 

BE:

what author? Mari Silva? I bought that one unfortunately

 

MB:

I'm usually very good at being able to find information about people and things online. For this author, I can't find anything. It also doesn't help that the books are independently published, so there's no publisher to check and ask, too. I would also be very wary of this author as well. I know Amazon recently implemented a new policy against AI-generated content, but there's almost no way to tell if something is written by AI. And like John Beckett says: if they publish more books than Morgan Daimler and have no reliable online presence, be wary!


MD:

I took at a look at the free sample on Kindle. I don't think it's AI but more likely content farmed/ghost written.

It's not terribly written but it's devoid of real content - wiki is a better source and that's saying something. 

I also checked "her" book on Freya and it's the same - smooth text that says little to nothing.

 



Images: Book cover and Canva elements combined by Mael Brigde. Images of Nichole Muir found online by DR.