Romance novelists at risk from chatbots?

[Kyng]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64975524

Sales of romantic fiction continue to boom, but with the genre often accused of being formulaic, are its authors at risk of being replaced by book-writing chatbots?

Julia Quinn is the author of the bestselling Bridgerton series of novels, which follow the love lives of eight siblings from a family of that name in 19th Century London.

Seattle-based Ms Quinn is said to have more than 20 million books in print in the US alone, and the TV adaptation of Bridgerton is one of the Netflix's most-watched shows.

But is rapidly-advancing technology about to threaten the livelihoods of romantic fiction authors?

The problem is the release last autumn of ChatGPT - an advanced language processing technology, developed by OpenAI.

---

Well, I got the sense that romantic fiction was quite formulaic - but honestly, I wasn't aware that it was quite that formulaic . And it's kinda surprising if this would be one of the first genres to be taken over by AI, since we don't often think of 'romance' and 'robots' as going together!

So, is there anything that romance authors can do about this?

[JHG]

Easy fix: make more LGBT romances.

[Pyrite]

I don't think that, at present, AI such as ChatGPT will be able to recreate even the most basic and formulaic of novels. I would back ChatGPT to be able to write the blurb for a novel of any sort really, but the novel itself will be 80,000-100,000 words. I just don't think that AI is advanced enough to sustain a 'human-like' story on that scale. At some point, things will feel too formulaic and, as you say, robotic.

[Kyng]

Easy fix: make more LGBT romances.

TBH I don't see this being an "easy fix": at best, it'd be a temporary fix (because, once the AI has more existing LGBT romance novels to work with, it'll get better at writing them itself).

Of course, the idea of doing something outside the mainstream is a good one; it's just that if everyone's doing the same thing, it'll become the new 'mainstream', and AI will get better at writing it !

I don't think that, at present, AI such as ChatGPT will be able to recreate even the most basic and formulaic of novels. I would back ChatGPT to be able to write the blurb for a novel of any sort really, but the novel itself will be 80,000-100,000 words. I just don't think that AI is advanced enough to sustain a 'human-like' story on that scale. At some point, things will feel too formulaic and, as you say, robotic.

Yeah, definitely.

I suspect ChatGPT might be able to do a decent job of writing the first draft of a novel. But it'd require a lot of editing, and I suspect the plot would require some re-working (if it even had a coherent plot at all ). I certainly don't think an author could publish unedited ChatGPT output as a novel, and expect good reviews!