Read this: Generative AI is doing a number on the romance novel market

This particular writer is Coral Hart, who runs an “author-coaching business” called Plot Prose and is reported to have coached more than 1600 on how to pump out these works. She claims she can teach people how to generate a whole book from an outline in less than an hour. As the Times article mentions, there are reasons why this has happened in the romance genre specifically. The genre makes up about 20% of all adult fiction print sales, and is, generally speaking, more reliant on tropes, like enemies-to-lovers and happy endings, than other genres. “If you hide that there’s A.I., it sells just fine,” says the writer Elizabeth Ann West. She adds, forebodingly, “Eventually readers will not care.” 

Still, there are plenty of readers who still do care. The article does give time to the dissenting voices in the industry, but most entertainingly, offers a list of some of the common issues the various AI programs will insert into the novels. One program is especially fond of using the phrase “ragged prayer,” along with words like “shiver”, “unravel”, “tangled” and “exploded.” Sonia Rompoti, an author who used AI to produce the books The Billionaire’s Curvy Match and Curves to Own: Pregnant by the Billionaire bemoaned that “When you make a point that someone is plus size, it will exaggerate, somebody is suddenly humongous,” with the program including descriptors like “a chair groaned when she sat down.” Rompoti ended up rewriting some of these scenes to “make her protagonist seem like a real person and not a caricature,” in the words of Times reporter Alexandra Alter. 

You can read the whole piece over here.