Speaking of fake things, the proliferation of fakeness makes it next to impossible to read genre fiction. I enjoy the mystery genre, courtroom dramas, and mommy lit. The authors I know and trust to be actual human beings get older and sometimes retire from writing. The roster of authors whose work I follow in genre reading is thinning out. I am not managing to add new names to my list because the mechanisms of finding them are broken.
Amazon reviews are increasingly fake. In the past two days alone I have come across about a dozen books with a solid number of reviews, each of which consists of one or two words only:
– Excellent!
– Fantastic!
– Wonderful!
These are clearly bot-generated. After two decades of building a solid base of reviews, Amazon abandoned that model and started aggressively deleting negative reviews and allowing these fake ultra-positive ones. I now go for weeks without even glancing at the reviews of anything I buy or explore because I know that they are now completely fake.
Previously I could rely on the algorithm to give me suggestions based on my history of readings but the algorithm doesn’t distinguish between real and fake. Two of the five recent suggestions that I received were written by AI and recorded on Audible with a fake AI voice. I’m not out any money because these books were available for free through Audible but I wasted time and feel reluctant to repeat the experiment.
At this point, I have no idea how to discover new authors in genre fiction. My window of possibilities has shrunk dramatically.
Clarissa's Blog 