Romance Publishing Has an AI Problem and Most Readers Don't Know It Yet
4 104The romance genre -- long the publishing industry's earliest adopter of technological shifts, from e-books to self-publishing to serial releases -- has become the front line for AI-generated fiction, and the results as you can imagine are messy. Coral Hart, a Cape Town-based novelist previously published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon, produced more than 200 AI-assisted romance novels last year and self-published them on Amazon, where they collectively sold around 50,000 copies. She found Anthropic's Claude delivered the most elegant prose but was terrible at sexy banter; other programs like Grok and NovelAI wrote graphic scenes that felt rushed and mechanical. Chatbots struggled broadly to build the slow-burn sexual tension romance readers crave, she said.
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.
4 comments
Re:Yes. Seriously. Ask your finance manager. (Score: 5, )
by Moridineas ( 213502 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @06:39PM (#65978878)
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.
That's not really a thing. Christian propaganda, basically. Rome (and are we talking about the Empire, East or West? Greek or Latin? Successor states? yadda yadda) fell for many reasons, but immorality ain't one of them.
As she suggestively removed her right arm... (Score: 5, Funny)
by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @02:19PM (#65978262)
He caressed her third foot just above the knee...
1984 is finally here (Score: 5, Insightful)
by gwjgwj ( 727408 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @02:56PM (#65978366)
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.
Re:Read the human shit first. Then judge. (Score: 5, Informative)
by 0123456 ( 636235 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @02:22PM (#65978280)
> 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.