> having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle
because of AI slop is new benefit of sticking to older texts that I hadn't anticipated.
> having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle
because of AI slop is new benefit of sticking to older texts that I hadn't anticipated.
I've found myself applying this rule, sometimes unintentionally, to almost all media I consume. It's now a very rare occasion that there's something new that I want to read, watch, or listen to. It just isn't that good, tbh. My music library is full of music from ~2018 and older, most books I enjoy are even older than that, and I can't remember the last time a movie came out that I was dying to see since about 2016-ish.
It's not like I'm intentionally filtering out for old stuff, my own tastes just seem to prefer it. Not sure if its due to my own age (I'm not that old, mid thirties), or if we've just so over optimized media for revenue extraction that its become too formulaic and boring.
However, while I mostly agree with the sentiment, in my opinion there is some new good stuff (books, music, movies, etc.) still being created, even if it's harder to find in the sea of mediocrity.
Obviously if one doesn't read these genres, this is a whole foreign world, but it is increasingly the state of mainstream fiction reading, and AI slop is a problem for them that you may be asked to help avoid if you are the nerdy loved one of such a reader.
Or, you know, you've just read the old books already because they came out 10 years ago and that's a lot of time to read.
I doubt it has anything to do with "romantasy" as a genre, anything that has people actually reading books, on a regular basis (as opposed to the people who mean reading as consuming one "notable" novel a year).
In any case, epublishing has made a lot more books available and filtering through them was a difficult task even before AI increased the output dramatically.
I've been saying for a while now there's a large untapped market for actually effective recommendation systems (almost certainly human driven given the demonstrated limitations of computer systems so far), as mentioned it was a problem to find "the good stuff" even among just self-published pre-ai books, now it's way beyond that.
I guess to some degree it's the same basic problem as spam filtering, but considerably more nuanced and difficult.
It's big business and is really not that deep. For someone who isn't part of that world(which is big business) to judge what is good or not is hard.
And now it's cheap to produce that "pulp romance" novels en masse. So people who have little clue about this genre can produce something that seems good, but doesn't appeal to the reader.
My favorite implementation of this is talking to the clerks at my neighborhood bookstore. But the New York Review of Books is an alternative that’s easier to enjoy from home. For romance novels I like the blog Smart Bitches Trashy Books. Also this is kind of cheating but I have a family member who reviews books for a library journal so a lot of the time I just let her tell me what to read.