Romance Publishing Has an AI Problem and Most Readers Don't Know It Yet

Source: Slashdot

AI-Generated Romance Fiction: An Emerging Issue

The 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.

Case Study: Coral Hart

Coral Hart, a Cape Town‑based novelist previously published by Harlequin and Mills & Boone, 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.

Survey of Authors

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.

Market Context

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.