In an article called “The New Fabio is Claude,” the New York Times speaks to romance novel “authors” who claim that AI is the future of the genre. This is both obviously untrue, but also not at all what these two authors have demonstrated with their financial success from using AI.
The Times spoke to two authors who use AI to write entire books. One, who uses the pen name Coral Hart, says that by using prompting and Claude, she can generate an entire book in 45 minutes. Interestingly, she also sells courses about how to best use AI to write romance novels.
“Ms. Hart has become an A.I. evangelist,” the article reads. “Through her author-coaching business, Plot Prose, she’s taught more than 1,600 people how to produce a novel with artificial intelligence, she said. She’s rolling out her proprietary A.I. writing program, which can generate a book based on an outline in less than an hour, and costs between $80 and $250 a month.”
Out of curiosity, I checked out the Plot Prose website. The “script the draft” package on the homepage of Plot Prose promises it can deliver “your next novel 90% complete and fully packaged for publication,” saying you can skip the “hardest part” of writing, which is writing. She also offers “AI creation kits,” which are pre-packaged drafts and outlines that also include “AI-writer optimized scene beats for fast execution.”
Another so-called “author,” Elizabeth Anne West, says that eventually, readers won’t care if a book is written by AI. Coincidentally, West also sells courses on how to use AI to write romance novels.
“Ms. West, who also teaches classes on how to write with A.I., has gotten blowback from opponents of the technology, including occasional death threats on social media,” the article says. “But she believes that in time, A.I. generated fiction will become widespread and popular.”
In between these two buried pieces of context–that both of these writers have an economic interest in the success of AI in the writing space because they sell courses on how to use AI to write books–this article only barely describes whether or not these books are any good or if readers like them. Another author who uses AI to write romance novels even admits that the technology is pretty bad at doing so.
“Whenever Ms. Rompoti’s curvy protagonist, an event planner named Sienna, was in a scene, the A.I. constantly referenced her weight, for example, noting that a chair groaned when she sat down,” the article reads. “‘When you make a point that someone is plus size, it will exaggerate, somebody is suddenly humongous,’ Rompoti said.”
Both Hart and West claim that their courses are popular—Hart makes the claim that even authors who are against AI in public sign up for her classes–but of course they would. They both run businesses that depend on the idea that romance novels are best written with AI. Except, curiously, West also says that the books that have a disclaimer about AI being used in the writing process don’t sell as well.
“If you hide that there’s A.I., it sells just fine,” she told the Times.
Riley MacLeod
My response to this as a journalist and reader of the occasional romance novel is: of course she would say that. Of course she would say that “eventually, audiences won’t care.” Hart and West have a vested economic interest in this technology succeeding in the literary space. Hart claims she made six figures off of her AI-published romance novels, mostly because she uses AI to produce a manuscript in under an hour. She said that her 200 AI books garnered collectively 50,000 sales, meaning each book sold on average 250 copies. The only way this is a viable business model is if you don’t care if the books are good or if people like them.
Indeed, my friend and romance novel author Ella Dawson pointed out that the GoodReads presence for both Hart and West paints a sobering picture of how these books are received. Most of Coral Hart’s books on GoodReads are rated one or two stars. West’s work seems better received, but I think it’s worth pointing out that it appears that every single piece of fiction she has published is fanfic about Pride and Prejudice, a work currently in the public domain, making her entire output dependent on the work of another author as a baseline.
“This reporter got snowed,” Dawson told me over text. “The New York Times has a bumpy track record when it comes to taking the romance genre seriously (a Fabio headline? In 2026? Seriously?) but I’m still baffled by their decision to profile these AI-reliant con artists masquerading as authors.”
For these AI evangelists featured in this article, finding a dedicated audience and reaching those readers through the quality of your work is not the goal. Writing for readers to “feel seen,” as Rompoti describes in the Times’ article, is immaterial. The goal is to make money using fiction. These people have already decided that the fiction they produce is not art—it is content, and the best way to make money through content is either to produce a lot of it, or sell a course on how to get rich fast by producing a lot of content.
Even according to the Times’ own reporting, readers do not seem to like AI romance novels. One of the two AI critical sources quoted in the article said that she would never knowingly pick up a book written by AI. Another, an author whose work had been scraped by Anthropic to train their AI model, pointed out that flooding the zone with slop makes it much harder for real human authors to be discovered by readers.
What I found most curious was Coral Hart’s reasoning for using a pseudonym in the article. Coral Hart is a retired pen name and the source would not give any of her current pen names “because she still uses her real name for some publishing and coaching projects. She fears that revealing her A.I. use would damage her business for that work.” Huh! That’s weird!
The lack of care paid to the actual readers of these AI books feels like a deliberate exclusion. The article describes romance readers as “voracious” and romance novels as “reliant on formula." Ergo, romance novels don’t have to be good, because romance readers will read any old shit as long as it has a Happily Ever After!
“Credulous reporting like this does nothing but prop up the lie that these ‘authors’ and AI companies desperately want us to believe: that the proliferation of AI across every industry is inevitable .It isn’t! I mean seriously, why would you ever take the word of a self-proclaimed coach who sells courses on using AI to create novels?” Dawson told me. “Readers are not ATMs, romance novels are not content to farm, and if you can’t write a book without firing up a plagiarism machine, you’re not meant to be an author.”
There’s not much daylight between what these two women do and what’s described in this Super Eyepatch Wolf video about “Influencer Courses” grifts. Through the course of this video, the improbably named John Walsh actually takes some of the YouTube influencer courses only to discover that the people selling these courses don’t even have the YouTube numbers to back up the claims they make. One person selling a multihour lecture about how to be successful on YouTube only had 4,000 subscribers.
It’s the same model for these grifters. If you make the claim that you are successful—claims which the Times makes very little effort to confirm independently—then you can become a subject matter expert, and sell your expertise for a pretty penny. And the content itself can be complete bullshit that sucks and no one likes, because the content is merely an advertisement for the courses you sell. And those courses don’t have to be good, either! You can just charge $250 for bullshit!
To me, this is all evidence that AI is still a forced meme. You don’t have to listen to the grifters who tell you that “eventually” everyone will be using this technology and that no one will mind if their books are written by AI. That eventuality is not a guarantee, and there is no real indication that it will ever arrive. Similarly, Christa Désir, vice president and editorial director of Bloom Books, says that AI books will become “undetectable at a certain point.” Handily, to make a prediction like this, you don’t have to provide any evidence to support your claim. You can just say shit, and the Times will print it.
Janus Rose
