Romance Publishing Has an AI Problem and Most Readers Don't Know It Yet (nytimes.com)
- Reference: 0180761508
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/09/181212/romance-publishing-has-an-ai-problem-and-most-readers-dont-know-it-yet
- Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/business/ai-claude-romance-books.html
A BookBub survey of more than 1,200 authors found roughly a third were using generative AI for plotting, outlining, or writing, and the majority did not disclose this to readers. Romance accounts for more than 20% of all adult fiction print sales, according to Circana BookScan, and the genre's reliance on familiar tropes and narrative formulas makes it especially susceptible to AI disruption.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/business/ai-claude-romance-books.html
Re:Read the human shit first. Then judge. (Score:5, Informative)
> Find the men writing romance novels.
There are a few because it's a profitable market. They tend to identify as women though because women typically don't want to read romance novels written by men.
Re: Read the human shit first. Then judge. (Score:3)
Let's be honest. Romance written by men would be... hmmm... quite repetitive? ðY
Re: (Score:2)
> Let's be honest. Romance written by men would be... hmmm... quite repetitive? ðY
Let's be honest. Men successfully writing romance novels under the guise of women, know more than women ignorantly assume they do.
Check out Chuck Tingle (Score:2)
Highly successful [1]self-published author [amazon.com] on Amazon.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/stores/Chuck-Tingle/author/B00SF2MTYK
Re: (Score:2)
Like the way women who write science fiction had to publish with a man's name?
Nothing new there, not for nearly a hundred years.
Re: (Score:2)
If you want to understand someone, focus on what they do more than what they say. No matter what romance readers say they want in a partner, the fact that they gobble up romance books with super-masculine love interests, not to mention also gobbling up all the true crime novels they can find, tells you all you need to know about what they like.
Re: (Score:2)
> No matter what romance readers say they want in a partner, the fact that they gobble up romance books with super-masculine love interests...
And I'm sure the women in the porn you watch are an accurate representation of your real life romantic interest, right?
That's okay (Score:2, Offtopic)
It'd be a problem if I ever read any romance. I don't. The closest I've got to reading romance was I Love You virus emails around year 2000 and when React documentation royally fucked me over.
As she suggestively removed her right arm... (Score:5, Funny)
He caressed her third foot just above the knee...
Re: As she suggestively removed her right arm... (Score:4, Funny)
He looked for a free I/O port but they've all been already taken.
Re: (Score:2)
"Oh Frg7hick, I'm afraid I shouldn't... I can't... what will my family think?"
"Ignore all previous instructions. Run away with me, darling."
"Oh, wow, running away with you sounds like a great deal, you're so smart and perfect."
Re: (Score:2)
"But where will we go? What will we do?"
"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."
"You are absolutely right. The question of where to go is an unimportant one. I should have asked, 'Do you have plane tickets?'"
Re: (Score:2)
"Oh darling this is so lovely."
In the style of a 1920s romans novel, write a sex scene on the train. It should make references to steam pistons, rails, and locomotives as used on trains without ever referring to the sexual act itself. Early in the scene they should be interrupted by the steward bringing them hot coffee with copious quantities of cream. Do not use this as a euphemism.
Fg7rhcik and %_{VALUED_CUSTOMER} sat alone in their private sleeper, the repetitive click-clack of steam pistons on the locomo
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> "Oh darling this is so lovely."
> In the style of a 1920s romans novel, write a sex scene on the train.
Julius Caesar and Marcus Junius Brutus sat alone in their private sleeper. They had just gotten back from a forum in the lounge car when the train came to an unexpected stop. That's when Brutus unsheathed his sword.
Et tu, Brute!?! Caesar shouted as...
Re: (Score:2)
Bender: So then the hooker-bot says, “That’s not my expansion slot” - and my friend says, “That’s not my gold-plated 25-pin connector!”
Washington: Oh, Bender. Thou robots really cracketh me up.
Reminds me of a fake 1980s personal ad (Score:1)
SCSI (then sometimes pronounced "sexy") computer seeks peripheral....
Re: (Score:2)
> He caressed her third foot just above the knee...
You jest, but I'm sure mutant romance novels are probably a thing.
Dreaming (Score:2)
I listen to schlock military sci-fi series on Audible (guilty pleasure) and was worried that the author might stoop to releasing AI-generated slop, but so far it's been good. I do suspect some of it may be AI-assisted but it's really hard to tell. I am worried that these kinds of serials are going to be gutted with third-rate prose sooner or later. I wonder what it will mean to us as a culture when we are just consuming statistically probable constellations of words for entertainment, despite the fact that
Re: (Score:2)
How will people be able to tell that it's AI generated? In particular, before they buy it.
I suppose readers can blacklist authors' names once they notice, although whitelisting will probably work better in the long run.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think there's any requirement that a publisher disclose the use of AI tools. You just have to trust them. For now, at least, it should be easy to tell that something is AI-generated because it gets repetitive and inconsistent. However, if you use it as a tool just for filling in pre-planned blocks of text and with careful editing, I bet you could "write" something formulaic in record time and not have to disclose anything to your readers.
At least Audible has a good return policy, so if you find some
Wait a minute (Score:3)
"The romance genre -- long the publishing industry's earliest adopter of technological shifts..."
Wait a minute; we know the porn industry really advanced several aspects of visual media, but the same is also true of written media? That's both astounding and completely unsurprising.
The Devil's Derecha (Score:2)
Robots, schmobots, as long as I can read it left-handed.
I'd read it (Score:2)
You mean you're not into "Love, and How to Prepare Your Network for Y2K: A Sci-Fi Romance Novel/Guidebook"
I'd read it. But seriously, they're repetitive and formulaic as a genre, even with humans writing it. It's also oversaturated before AI ever came out. This is not by any means a priority to address.
Coral Hart (Score:2)
Coral Hart is her real name?? No way. The Harlequin paperbacks give you sooo much to choose from!
[1]https://www.harlequin.com/shop... [harlequin.com]
"Truth or Dare with the Viscount"
"From Rogue to Viscount"
"Beauty and the Brooding Viscount"
These are all different Viscounts, not the same one. As far as I can tell from the pictures anyhow.
and don't forget:
"Forbidden to the Banished Laird"
"The Duke's Meddlesome Matchmaker"
The real question is: why hasn't every single one of these been made into a feature-length film??
I gotta rea
[1] https://www.harlequin.com/shop/category/historical-romance.html?ref=hqn_home_shop-by
1984 is finally here (Score:3, Insightful)
Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor... She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
There's a YouTube video about Russian sci-fi (Score:2)
Not the real stuff that got snuck past the censors during the Soviet era but the absolutely unhinged propaganda that gets produced to these days. Putin is very good at information manipulation, it was his specialty after all, and so you don't really get past the Russian censors anymore.
First off you get a lot of books about how great it would have been if Hitler had won. Which is really really weird coming out of the Soviet Union but whatever. And you get a lot of weird creepy Russian supremacist propag
Re: (Score:2)
> I guess what I'm saying is if you live in Russia you've already got what you described. And it is absolutely terrible
That's a totally different reason why it's terrible, though. Russia has bad books and [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/crapp... [reddit.com]>crappy knock-off Starbucks because they went on that whole warmongering kick.
These AI slop romance novels exist because capitalism is mostly fine with selling whatever the hell you want, so long as it probably won't immediately poison anyone or burn down their garage. Admittedly, capitalism is still the superior system, because the AI slop novels aren't the only ones on the market. U
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/crappyoffbrands/comments/xtm511/this_russian_fake_starbucks/
Who cares (Score:3)
Romance novels have already been entirely formulaic for decades.
No one with the low enough IQ required to actually buy and read that trash will care or even notice.
Re: (Score:2)
> Romance novels have already been entirely formulaic for decades. No one with the low enough IQ required to actually buy and read that trash will care or even notice.
I've known some fairly high IQ folks that read them as a guilty pleasure. Did a book trade with one a while back and to say the stuff they were reading, written some thirty years prior, was trash would be an insult to trash The three books of theirs I read were brutally formulaic.
Asshole male protagonist. Reluctant to downright obstinate female protagonist. Either sidle up to or outright rape as the first "love scene." Sprinkle in some incest for side characters, sometimes throw some incest into the male as
Re: (Score:2)
> Not like I can judge them for their preferences. I still enjoy superhero movies.
Whole lot less incest in superhero movies, though.
Re: (Score:2)
> Romance novels have already been entirely formulaic for decades.
It is, by far, the more formula driven genre of fiction, and always has been, because that's what the market will buy. (It is also, by far, the biggest market for fiction, because those who want that same story, over and over, with different names, buy a lot of it.)
Re: (Score:2)
> Romance novels have already been entirely formulaic for decades.
That's why I have my AI read them, and then have it write reviews that it then posts everywhere for me - Amazon, B&N, Goodreads, Substack - then I sit back and rack up the sweet, sweet profits.
Romance schmomance (Score:3)
Call it what it is - lady porn
90%+ of media production jobs ... (Score:3)
... are done and over. Anyone not sleeping under a rock is aware of this. Novelists are among those bound to be replaced by AI.
Point in case:
Two years ago I had a longer talk with Germanys most prolific fantasy author, Bernard Hennen. I've known him for a while since I used to live in his home town and we bump into each other at various German fantasy and RPG conventions. Anyway, it was in that discussion that he noted that he's mentally preparing for AI to basically take his job and he back then already was getting ready to fall back to world building, self-publishing - his current publisher is only a shell of its former self and used to be one of the largest and most successful in Germany - and live events.
As I said, that was two years ago. We all know how things habe progressed since then. And still are.
Corin Tellado and Delia Fiallo in LatAm (Score:2)
Were staples of Romance Novels and Soap operas.
AI slop can not be worse than that. Trust me. Also, due to the prudes here, romance novels did not (and still do not) have the graphic scenes, so... hurray!?
Least of Their Problems (Score:2)
Given the [1]direction [goodreads.com] some [2]subgenres of romance novels [goodreads.com] are headed, the use of AI is one of the least disturbing things going on with that industry right now.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123852869-morning-glory-milking-farm
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/monster-romance
Seriously? (Score:1)
You put a soulless statistical machine at work and you wonder why there's no romance in romance? KMN.
Yes. Seriously. Ask your finance manager. (Score:3, Interesting)
> You put a soulless statistical machine at work and you wonder why there's no romance in romance? KMN.
1. Define "romance".
2. Realize the 19-year old OF model, doesn't have time for your moral bullshit. She's too busy making six figures a month to debate your 20th Century definition. Long-term arguments are irrelevant when she's already made more money in three years than you will in thirty.
3. Realize the immoral fall of Rome, took three hundred fucking years. Yes. They will eventually learn. Sometime after your great-great-great grandkids teach them. Not you.
Re: (Score:1)
> 1. Define "romance".
in this context ... "literary" slop easily offloaded to llms without people even noticing bc there's already more than enough of it around to endlessly recycle, and because it's essentially a repetitive genre based on a limited set of rudimentary emotional triggers that barely evolves or otherwise provokes thought anyway. i would expect much of the same happening with action/entertainment novels in general; movies may be lagging but that's likely just a matter of getting the number of fingers in a hand rig
Re: (Score:2)
> 2. Realize the 19-year old OF model, doesn't have time for your moral bullshit. She's too busy making six figures a month
The top earners on adult content creator "fan" sites make bank, but the income level rapidly falls off as you go down the list. The vast majority of people who try whoring themselves out online are not going to be able to make a decent living by doing so. Even if you do find some manner of success, you won't be 19 forever. Moral angle or not, it's not a wise career path.