The Future of Books We Absolutely Do Not Want is Already Here.

It’s no surprise that the first real exposure of professional writers using AI on a large scale came from the world of romance. This isn’t about ethics or art or anything like that, it’s about two things that have long driven romance novels: innovation and frequency. Romance has been at the forefront of most (all?) book trends over the past few decades, including self-publishing, fan fiction, and e-books. Romance rewards publishing large volumes of books quickly.

Generative AI is at a crossroads. From a pure market fit perspective, it seems like romance is the place in the book world that is most likely to see serious, large-scale experimentation with AI.

And this New York Times profile of Coral Heart shows just that. He has published dozens of books under multiple pen names. Your book will be created in less than 45 minutes. A unique Romance Writing LLM and paid classes to learn the ropes of a new industry. “Imprints” specializes in AI-generated text. As Carrie Fisher said, when harry met sally: Your basic nightmare.

Alter does a good job of tracking several characteristics of AI books (if you’re reading the phrase “Ragged Prayer,” you’re probably reading an AI book). But these small tics probably won’t last long. It’s very difficult to tell whether certain types of writing are AI, especially those with a lot of metaphors or formulas, and some romance books may be AI.

This is the latest article to clarify the single most important question about AI and book writing. Can LLMs write books that replace human-written books in any field? It’s starting to look like the answer is yes.

That doesn’t help the second most important question: what exactly does it add to books and reading as a culture? I’m a “trade-off” type of person. This is what I’ve been doing with e-books, self-publishing, and Amazon. There are some advantages and some disadvantages. The former list will be shorter, the latter will be longer.