(I Can't Get No) Validation
It's lonesome in the muck.
Or perhaps I should say in the slop as that's the tide indie authors are battling now. It's not exclusively indies, but indie creatives of all types are the Bellwether of Bad News. The ink is barely dry on the Shy Girl AI controversy before a Canadian legislator Bill Oliver decided to not do his own homework before standing up and giving his book report, prompt and all, out loud, before cameras and constituents. Whoopsie.
Full confession, I work in tech for my day job, and I'm using this tech on a daily basis. The standard that I'm holding myself to is to keep it away from "art" and more generally, creativity. I am fine(ish) using the tools to perform grueling scut work and tedious, unrewarding technical chores. If my career placed me in a kitchen, AI would be relegated to the washing-dishes and emptying-the-trash duties, the necessary, messy side-effects of serving humanity. It doesn't get to cook, it doesn't invent the recipes, it doesn't plate the food. Even here, in the heart of tech hype country, there is sizeable and vocal pushback on AI slopifying restaurant menus and flyers. When the chore moves from menial to meaningful is where the moat needs to be dug.
The promise of "passive income" from an AI-prepared coloring book or no-effort, low-content output has plenty of people holding their noses and jumping in the moat, though. Whatever Mia Ballard's original intent, or however the authorship and revisions can be attributed to Shy Girl, the fact that a trad publisher (albeit Hachette) let it slide through shows an incredible lack of attention. They didn't do their homework either, and they performed an Oliver-level cockup by running the thing to press without doing their diligence.
But I'm not here to vent about creators. I'm actually here to rave a little about reviewers, reviews, and the frauds that perpetuate themselves as such. I've documented my encounters with the vampire series here, where AI-powered scammers attempt to get indies to pay for fake "services" from their imaginary agency, publisher, or book club. False reviews, though, are a whole other level of faux validation. I've not been approached (yet!) by services offering to sell reviews, but I'm sure it's a matter of time. As indies, we're very conscious of our pages that are being read, of the titles that are (or aren't) being sold, of our relative rank within the ever-expanding arena of Amazon's category ranks. Once we've avoided dashing ourselves against Scylla of false publishers, we still need to avoid getting sunk by the Charybdis of anonymity... and the promise of rescue that a review site can offer.
Like all other things indie, ARC (advance reader copy) reviews are now commoditized, monetized, productized, and slopified. My peers are venting about bland, pasty summaries of their works which they supposedly paid for, and having to waste their own creating time rejecting reviews that were too quick, too polished, too bland, too generic. They are spending more time chasing the promise of grabbing those readers and gathering their feelings instead of, you know, creating. It's heartbreaking.
Validation, as an indie, has to come from within. It's the process itself, in doing the writing (and the reading) and putting out a best effort and hoping to connect. It's indeed lonely here in the slop and in the muck and mire, but I'm in no hurry to hurry along, to be held up as an example of someone well-meaning who done wrong, or someone who cared so little that they didn't bother at all. I hate having to swim with the output of a thousand AI-generated "writers" who churn out anonymous pap in the time it takes me to bang together a blog post. But I do believe that every shortcut they take puts the satisfaction and the validation out of their reach. If you didn't make it, then how can you take pride in it? And if you're not taking pride in your work, then why do it at all?
🧩🦏