Human writers face an impossible race against chatbots that finish a book before lunch

A New York Times report examines the use of AI in romantic fiction and uncovers a familiar phenomenon: AI-generated romance novels sell well — as long as no one knows they were written by AI.

"If you hide that there's A.I., it sells just fine," says author and publisher Elizabeth Ann West, co-founder of Future Fiction Press, a publishing house that exclusively produces AI-generated novels. Their books carry a disclaimer on the Amazon product page.

An author like Coral Hart, who produced more than 200 romance novels last year using AI models like Anthropic's Claude and earned six figures in the process, deliberately conceals her AI use under her current pen names. During a Zoom interview with the Times, one of her AI programs was running in the background and generated a complete novel in about 45 minutes — about a rancher who falls for a city girl running away from her past. "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?" Hart asks. On top of that, imitating an author's style often requires just two books as training material.

A BookBub survey of more than 1,200 authors across genres shows that about a third are using generative AI for plotting, outlining, or writing — the majority without disclosing it to readers. Even authors who publicly oppose the technology are secretly signing up for Hart's AI writing classes, according to the Times.

Claude delivers the most elegant prose, but can't do dirty talk

Hart, who publishes under 21 different pen names, tested several AI models for her novels. Her verdict: Claude delivered the most elegant prose, but was terrible at sexy banter. Other programs like Grok and NovelAI produced graphic sex scenes, but the result felt "rushed and mechanical" and lacked emotional nuance. "You are going to get hammering hearts and thumping chests and stupid stuff," Hart says. "At the end of every sex scene, everyone will end up tangled in the sheets."

Chatbots are particularly 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 AI usually jumps straight to the obvious narrative climax, she says. To get around Claude's prudishness, Hart feeds the chatbot very specific instructions, a list of kinks, and the emphasis that sex is not gratuitous but "crucial to the plot."

Psychologist Sonia Rompoti from Athens, who also writes AI-assisted romance novels, puts the problem succinctly: "It doesn't understand the human experience. It will tell you, in a biological way, what goes where, but it will not add any emotions." As a plus-size woman, Rompoti wanted curvy heroines in her novels — but the AI constantly caricatured their bodies, for instance noting that a chair groaned when the protagonist sat down. "People don't read romance to see what bodies do," Rompoti says. "They read it to feel seen."