From the New York Times, February 8:
The New Fabio Is Claude
The romance industry, always at the vanguard of technological change, is rapidly adapting to A.I. Not everyone is on board.
Last February, the writer Coral Hart launched an experiment. She started using artificial intelligence programs to quickly churn out romance novels.
Over the next eight months, she created 21 different pen names and published dozens of novels. In the process, she discovered the limitations of using chatbots to write about sex and love.
Some programs refused to write explicit content, which violated their policies. Others, like Grok and NovelAI, produced graphic sex scenes, but the consummation often lacked emotional nuance, and felt rushed and mechanical. Claude delivered the most elegant prose, but was terrible at sexy banter.
“You are going to get hammering hearts and thumping chests and stupid stuff,” said Ms. Hart, who lives in Cape Town in South Africa. “At the end of every sex scene, everyone will end up tangled in the sheets.”
Chatbots were also bad at building sexual tension — the slow-burn, will-they-or-won’t-they plotlines that romance readers crave. When told to craft a love scene, the bots usually jumped straight to the obvious narrative climax.
Ms. Hart found Anthropic’s chatbot to be the most versatile, and developed ways around Claude’s prudishness. Among her techniques: feeding Claude very specific instructions and a list of kinks, and stressing that sex was not gratuitous, but crucial to the plot.
A longtime romance novelist who has been published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon, Ms. Hart was always a fast writer. Working on her own, she released 10 to 12 books a year under five pen names, on top of ghostwriting. But with the help of A.I., Ms. Hart can publish books at an astonishing rate. Last year, she produced more than 200 romance novels in a range of subgenres, from dark mafia romances to sweet teen stories, and self-published them on Amazon. None were huge blockbusters, but collectively, they sold around 50,000 copies, earning Ms. Hart six figures.
While we spoke over Zoom, an A.I. program she was running ingested her prompts and outline and produced a full novel, about a rancher who falls for a city girl running away from her past. It took about 45 minutes.
Ms. Hart has become an A.I. evangelist. Through her author-coaching business, Plot Prose, she’s taught more than 1,600 people how to produce a novel with artificial intelligence, she said. She’s rolling out her proprietary A.I. writing program, which can generate a book based on an outline in less than an hour, and costs between $80 and $250 a month.
But when it comes to her current pen names, Ms. Hart doesn’t disclose her use of A.I., because there’s still a strong stigma around the technology, she said. Coral Hart is one of her early, now retired pseudonyms, and it’s the name she uses to teach A.I.-assisted writing; she requested anonymity because she still uses her real name for some publishing and coaching projects. She fears that revealing her A.I. use would damage her business for that work.
But she predicts attitudes will soon change, and is adding three new pen names that will be openly A.I.-assisted, she said.
The way Ms. Hart sees it, romance writers must either embrace artificial intelligence, or get left behind.
“If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?” she said.Romance at the Vanguard
Whenever the publishing industry is rocked by a technological shift, it usually hits romance first. Romance writers are prolific and their readers are voracious, so they’ve been early adopters of e-book subscription services, self-publishing, social media networking and online serial releases.Romance is also the publishing industry’s best-selling genre. It accounts for more than 20 percent of all adult fiction print sales, according to Circana BookScan, and has continued to grow in recent years even as overall adult fiction sales have stagnated....
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