Well, Kevin, welcome back from our nation's capital.
Yes, I was in DC very briefly this week, uh, there for some book meetings. Um, and it was very cold. Um, but the bigger observation is that Washington DC is like freaking out about AI.
Yes. So, everywhere I went, every meeting I had, um, people were sort of asking me, is this stuff real? Is it happening? Are we in the takeoff? Is the singularity approaching? Um, and it does feel like the sort of political salience of AI has gotten much much higher just in the past couple of weeks.
Well, why do you think that is?
So, there are a lot of reasons for that. I think one of them is that I think there's been a lot of people waking up to the new agentic coding capabilities of these models. We've obviously talked about that on the show. Um, cloud code, etc. Um, I think that is starting to kind of make its way out into the world. There's also this stock market stuff uh that's been going on with a lot of the software stocks that are falling because of the threat of AI. And then I think there's just sort of this ambient cultural vibe shift happening um that has led to a lot of people in my life who are not like AI bubble people um texting me and saying, "Hey, is this really something I should be worried about? Is my job at risk here?" And uh so today I think we should talk about this because among other reasons there is this viral essay uh that I've been sent now no fewer than three times just in the past day um that is by a man named Matt Schumer called Something Big Is Happening. And it's basically a distilled version of something you and I have been talking about on this show for a while now, which is like these tools are getting really good. They're changing the way that programmers work. They're approaching some sort of inflection point and everyone needs to be worried about this.
Yeah. So, all of this is starting to make me think that there is something big happening here and I'm not sure it's exactly what Matt thinks is happening, but I do think we are reaching an inflection point in people's feelings and senses about AI and where it's going. And I think we should spend some time today exploring that.
There's a lot to dive into, Kevin. And before we do that, perhaps we should make our disclosures.
Yes. I work for the New York Times which is suing OpenAI Microsoft and perplexity over alleged copyright violations.
And my boyfriend works at Anthropic.
Okay. So, let's start with this what they're calling the SAS apocalypse. The uh selloff in some of the tech stocks. SAS is of course software as a service.
Not the sort of SAS you're used to seeing on Rupaul's Drag Race.
Different kind. So, this would be companies like um Salesforce and Workday and uh what are some other good SAS companies?
A good Here's a SAS company. If you've ever seen a billboard in San Francisco and you haven't understood what the company does, that's a SAS company.
Yes, these are companies that sell software to other businesses. And over the past couple of weeks, we've seen a lot of these companies stock prices falling precipitously. So on Monday this week, uh, Monday.com, the production management software company, uh, their stock plunged more than 20% after a week, financial outlook,
had a real case of the Mondays over there.
Yes. Workday, which makes sort of HR tools for companies. Um, they announced on Monday that their CEO is stepping down after their stock lost 17% of its value last year.
His workday came to an abrupt end.
Yes. And a bunch of other SAS company stocks also fell. Salesforce, Shopify, Adobe, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft. Basically, if you are a company that builds software for other companies, you are not having a good month.
And give us the basic investor thesis, Kevin, for why those companies just don't work aren't worth as much anymore.
So, I think in this specific instance, it it's not clear to me that there was like one particular trigger. People pointed to this set of plugins that Anthropic released which included some tools for law firms trying to use AI. And some people think that was sort of behind a lot of the the sell-off. I don't think it was that in particular. I think maybe that was sort of the the straw that broke the camel's back, but I think there is sort of a mounting sense that as we've talked about in this show, now you and I and anyone can theoretically at least build your own version of that and these companies may not be as valuable.
Yeah. I mean, there have always been people who would look at a product like Salesforce, which offers customer relationship management. you know, if you're a salesperson, it helps you keep track of all of your different leads. And they've said, "Well, you know, that's basically just a fancy spreadsheet. You know, I could I could make my own spreadsheet." And there are companies that are born almost every year that kind of take a direct run at Salesforce and they say, "We can build a better version of this." And I do think that when uh Claude Co-work came out and all of a sudden you could just take a bunch of files on your computer and throw them into Claude and get something useful back, there were people who said, "Huh, maybe we can actually just make a version of it ourselves." And I will say, as a small business owner, uh I I used a plugin that Claude has for finances. And I just took all of my financial data that my bookkeeper has kept for me, you know, over the past five plus years and I threw into Claude and we had a nice long conversation about what was going on in my business. Now, it so happens that I don't pay a startup to do this for me. This was just kind of a little bonus that I got, but could I imagine some people saying, "Hey, why am I using this kind of like bespoke financial startup to do business analysis when now I can just put these files into something that lives on my computer?" So I actually do feel like I have a sense of why the market freaked out a little bit.
Yeah. And do you feel like that fear is justified? Like do you because there there have been a couple reactions to this from the business community. One reaction is the the sort of investor reaction which is oh my god all of the SAS companies are overvalued. Uh Salesforce doesn't have a moat anymore. Workday doesn't have a motor anymore. Everyone's going to be vibe coding their own versions of these tools and using them at their businesses. And uh the other reaction which is sort of the the the reaction to that reaction is like calm down, don't freak out. No one is going to be vibe coding their payroll software. That's not how this works. So there are people saying yeah this market reaction is overblown and despite the fact that these vibe coding tools are very cool. Um they are not going to lead to the death of the software industry. So, this gets at a really interesting question that I think is still unanswered, Kevin. And that question is, what makes these companies truly vulnerable? Is it the technology itself or is it that the technology will just enable different kinds of business models? Right? So the argument that it's the technology itself is the person who says, "Look, we're just going to be able to vibe code all our own software now or or or or we'll have like just very smart agents that can do all of the different things that every piece of software we used to buy did for us, right? That's the sort of technology demolishes everything argument." And I would say that that's like a minority view. The most of the people that I read and talk to do not actually think that that's going to happen. But there is this other view which is that the technology enables a change in the business model. And I think law is a really good place to think about that, right? Because lawyers are expensive. They charge by the hour. The most expensive ones charge $1,500 for an hour of a lawyer's time. Well, what happens when you don't need an hour of a lawyer's time anymore? What happens when there's a legal startup that does all your contract review essentially instantly? There's going to be a different business model around that. And so if you're a big white shoe law firm and you're charging $1,500 an hour, all of a sudden it does seem possible that one of these little startups is going to eat your lunch. So that's the distinction I would draw.
Yeah. So you see this more as like a case of the startup with 10 employees being able to use AI to do the work that would have required a thousand people uh a year or two ago.
Yes, absolutely. Let's talk about another really common business model in tech. Uh a lot of these business software companies um have you pay by what they call the seat. So, if you want 10 of your employees to be able to use software like let's say notion, you buy 10 seats, another uh thread of anxiety rippling through Silicon Valley right now is maybe paying by the seat isn't really going to make sense anymore because we're actually just going to have one agent that does that whole thing. We're not going to expose that to employee. Employees don't need to worry about that anymore and so we're just not going to buy seats. So again, if if I had like one prediction to make here, it's that you're going to see more companies experiment with outcomebased pricing. You're already starting to see this with companies like Sierra, which is a customer service startup, and they will sort of handle customer service uh like inquiries that your business may get, and you pay Sierra based on how many calls it resolves for you. So that's the kind of thing that I think we're going to start seeing more and more of. And to be clear, if you if you're like an incumbent SAS company and you have a seatbased business model, that is eventually going to be a problem for you.
Yeah. So, do you think this selloff is justified? Do you think people are panicking for the right reasons inside these companies and their investors?
Here's a funny thing. As a journalist, we're not allowed to buy individual stocks. So, I actually never have any idea of what the investors are supposed to be doing. So, I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to comment on whether I think, you know, the stock market is is justified here or not, but I'm happy to comment on the overall picture, which is, do I think that AI is about to change a whole lot of business models and that a whole lot of businesses are probably going to have to either change dramatically or go out of business as a result? Absolutely.
Yeah. And I think this this notion that like no one is going to vibe code their own payroll software. I I think that is like I am not as convinced of that as some people. I think that if you are a business and you have, you know, 10,000 20,000 employees and you're paying by the seat for some piece of software, um whether it's payroll or workday or, you know, your HR compliance software, um those are real expenses. And so, do I think that the like the CEO of the company is going to vibe code the thing, you know, with one cloud prompt that is going to replace the software tool? No. But I can totally imagine a world in which you have sort of one or two full-time developers who are managing and overseeing and repairing your own internal software um and you don't have to pay for a bunch of seats for someone else's thing. I think that's a very plausible outcome. So I am not as dismissive of the uh sort of the fear around these SAS businesses as some people. And yeah, if I were any of these large enterprise businesses um with tens of thousands of employees charging, you know, per seat for software, I'm I'm very worried. Now, another push back that we're seeing to this narrative that like AI is going to eat all the software companies is, well, it's all going to be so insecure and sloppy and buggy that no one is going to rely on it. Do what do you make of that argument?
I think you're absolutely right that it will be buggy and insecure and you're wrong that people won't rely on it. If there's one thing we've seen with molt book mania, it's that security is basically the last priority. At least for the, you know, uh, bleeding edge maniacs who just want to try everything first,
right? But if you're a law firm or a bank or something like that, you do care about things like that.
I I think that that is true. And, you know, there are are whole startups, and I know this because I see the billboards around San Francisco that specialize in various compliance functions. you know, it's like, well, if you're going to offer this kind of service, you have to be this kind of compliant, and so you're going to pay us to make sure that all goes very well. That to me, like, because that is a repeatable automated process where you're just trying to get your business to like match a bunch of checkboxes on a form, that just kind of seems like something that you're going to be able to train an agent to do. So, like there are going to be some categories of things that I think are just going to be very risky for a long time. And then there are just these kind of like automated compliance functions that I just look at and I think well I don't I can't think of a reason why a good agent wouldn't be able to do that.
Yeah. And I think in these cases where it's in a more sensitive industry or something that has more regulatory or compliance needs like I just think it will take a little bit more effort to automate some of these functions but I think it's totally doable. So one one thing that we've uh heard about just in the last week was this story about Enthropic developing tools with Goldman Sachs. So uh together these companies have been um deploying AI agents inside Goldman um and Anthropic actually has forward deployed engineers that will like go to if you're a big customer uh you know like every other AI company they will send people to your office to like work to put agents into your workflows. And so that is also something that we're seeing is like for the really sensitive things, it is not impossible to design AI tools that comply with all your various requirements, but you might need a little more handholding.
Yeah. Goldman said, "Claude, we want you to design the most dangerous mortgage that's ever existed. We want to get that on the market. Let's go, buddy.
Claude, don't do it." Now, do you want to talk about this big essay that's captured your imagination?
Yes. Yes. Well, I I should say like I think if you are a regular listener to the Hardfork podcast, none of what is in this essay will be news to you. Um but this essay did go insanely viral. I am hearing about it all over the place. Um it's called something big is happening and it's basically an explainer for non-technical people about why everyone who's or a lot of people who are in technical fields are freaking out about what's happening in AI. And this is uh by a guy named Matt Schumer. He runs an AI company. So there's a little um you know conflict of interest there. But he's basically saying look the technical parts of my job are automated. Not they will be automated or they might be automated but I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. Uh he talks about the advances in recent coding models these agentic coding systems. Um he talks about how you know a lot of people have not tried AI since the original sort of LLM boom and their impressions of AI are falling behind. Again none of this is news to you if you are a listener of this podcast but he's sort of talking about this idea that these new models are contributing to their own development. this idea of recursive self-improvement and he says that you know GPT 5.3 codeex which came out just last week openai says that this is their first model that was instrumental in creating itself so the AI models are now at least if you believe the labs um contributing to their own development starting to accelerate the development of these AI systems and so what might have taken you know if there might have been 6 months between one model and the next a year ago now That might be a month or two or even a couple weeks.
Yeah. And look, I'm going to I'm going to throw a hype flag on the play, Kevin, because I think that all labs have a vested interest in you believing that if you use their software, you can just tell anything to improve itself and it will become amazing. I'm not saying it's not true. I'm just saying we should approach such claims with a degree of skepticism. Now, at the same time, I've talked to enough software engineers who work on this stuff that I do think that it is true in some ways like that if you that if you squint that it is true. It is 100% true that they use these models in the production now with everything that they do, right? Like like Claude and and and GPT codecs are deeply integrated into the workflows of both companies. And you know, you look over the past 3 months, does it feel to you like there's been an acceleration in the pace of releases? It kind of feels that way to me, right? We'll see if that pace feels like it continues to accelerate, but I it feels like things are moving faster now than they did say in February 2023. Yes. Right. So there there's evidence for it. I just always want us to be a little cautious with these claims.
I think that's right. At the same time, I think that the timelines here are shorter than many people would imagine. Um, I talked to a a executive at one of the big AI companies this week who said that basically right now software engineering is kind of 90% automated, right? You still need a human to check in on the code that's being written to make sure it works to fix things when they break. Um, but you know that that basically within the year this person's prediction was that software engineering will be fully automated. Now that could take a little longer. um it could happen sooner than the end of the year, but I think that is sort of the moment that a lot of people in the tech industry are looking at as as sort of the beginning of what they call the takeoff. And one one specific detail I would add here is that I've been talking to engineers who've been telling me about the specific ways that these agents work. And something that comes up again and again, I've heard Sam Alman say a version of this is that these models just never get tired. They're relentless. And so you can say to them, I want you to meet this objective. And they will just keep trying things until it works. And of course, there are some people who work this way. Uh but those people don't work 24 hours a day. They don't typically work, you know, overnight. Sometimes they get tired, their morale drops. That's not true of the agents. And so engineers I've talked to have started to see this behavior. And this is another reason why they think, aha, we're starting to enter this takeoff phase is the relentlessness of the agents.
Yes. And so that's basically the point of this viral essay is things are happening, things are accelerating. It is not just coming for programming work. It is going to be a force in all kinds of white collar fields. This is sort of the the worker side of the AI panic. And uh Matt's recommendations are, you know, basically um figure out how to use these tools. Try them out if you haven't tried them in a while. He says get your financial house in order. basically this, you know, the next few years could be very disruptive to your career, uh if you're a white collar worker. So, like, don't, you know, take on a bunch of new debt or anything like that. Um, and then he,
what am I supposed to do with this yacht I just bought this week? Oh my god, now you tell me.
So, yes, I don't feel like this is the best explanation I've heard of for what people should do, but I do think that this was something that has been rocketing around the internet. I think that people who have not been paying attention to what's happening in AI are starting to um wake up and maybe in ways that are panicky and maybe just in ways that are sensible.
Well, let me ask you about the panicked observation that kicks off the piece, which is that he likens this moment to the February before the pandemic and says basically there were people in February 2020 who were paying attention who said, "Hey, uh this thing is growing exponentially and it's likely to catch us all up in it." And Matt is saying you should be feeling the same way about AI. How do you feel about that comparison?
I actually think that comparison is fairly apt. Um I had a similar moment uh the other day. I was looking at this chart uh that came out of a report that semi analysis, the great uh semiconductor newsletter put out where they looked at the percentage of GitHub commits that are being made by Claude Code. So essentially a GitHub commit is like when someone pushes some code to a GitHub repository to an open source project and right now the percentage of GitHub public commits that are being written by cloud code is 4% and we should say there are some sort of addendums to that some of these are being written by cloud code but pushed by humans in which case it doesn't show up as cloud code but just say say it's 4%. Sure.
They are predicting that at the current trajectory by the end of 2026 more than 20% of all daily commits on GitHub public projects will be authored by claude code. That is one tool. So that is essentially a story that feels to me like an exponential outcome here like the beginnings of something like a pandemic where all of a sudden it's like this tiny little thing and only the real like data nerds are paying attention to it. But if you just extrapolate on a straight line, you end up in a very different world a year from now. Yeah.
And some people always look at those charts and they say, well, you shouldn't extrapolate along a straight line and that the real world things move slower. And you know, I think there there there are places where that is true. Um, but I looked at that same piece and I do believe that the ceiling for uh, you know, clawed commits to GitHub is probably not 20%. I think it's probably going to be a lot higher than that. I think that by the end of the year, if you are still writing code by hand, uh that is going to be uh an obsolete behavior.
Well, I really like writing it on on long in longhand on this legal pad and you can't take it away from me.
I just think like it is so clear to me that this is the way software development is going and we should say like it's not that has spillover effects in a lot of other industries as well. A lot of things that we would uh you know consider normal companies are software companies. U banks produce software. Their interfaces are software. Law firms have software. So I think that the notion that this is just going to be confined to coding is is wrong. And I think that people should be paying attention to what's going on in coding.
All right. Well, any practical tips as we wrap up here for people beyond just pay attention to this, right? cuz I think this is kind of the trap that we fall into and this is why a lot of people tune out this kind of uh conversation I think quite understandably is people keep saying hey everything's about to change. I think a lot of people hear them, they think, "Okay, well, like, let me know when everything has changed." Like, you know, uh, in the meantime, I have to get dinner on the table, right? What actually should people be doing aside just like listen to the hard fork show and rate it five stars on Apple's podcast?
Well, subscribe to the YouTube channel, too.
Um, no, I look I I want to do some writing and thinking about this because I feel like this has been the prescriptive what should you do part of this has been the weakest in my estimation. Um the thing that everyone says is like get familiar with the tools and I do think there is some merit in that like I think that if you have not touched uh cloud code or codeex or one of these agentic coding tools maybe the last time you used an LLM you know for serious work was a year or two ago. I think it's worth getting back up to speed on that. I I find that a little bit maybe unsatisfying as a response to all this. But I'm curious like do you have any better tips for people who are maybe starting to freak out about AI in their own lives and work?
Well, I just think that this needs to be part of our political conversation, right? Like I think this needs to be a conversation that constituents are having with lawmakers. They need to be telling them, "Hey, my boss is telling me that I need to start using AI every day and that there's a high risk that I'm about to lose my job and that maybe there's going to be permanent unemployment in subj job categories. What is your plan for that?" Right? Many economists are looking at that and they believe that is at least a possibility in at least some industries and they don't believe the AI lab spin that oh don't worry technology always creates more job opportunities in the long run right so we do need to have a political conversation about this and we may need to have you know real sort of government answers for people if and when their jobs do become automated away
yeah I think that the people at the AI companies are woefully underestimating how much people hate this technology already Mhm.
And unemployment is still at near record lows. And so I think that if if and when this does start to uh you know eat away at some of these white collar industries, I think the backlash is going to be furious. I think it's going to be very intense. Um we're already starting to see elements of this kind of populist reaction to AI. Bernie Sanders recently said that he is going to introduce a bill to put a moratorum on data centers for AI. Um, so I think we can expect a lot more of that kind of thing. And I think this is something that if I were, uh, you know, working at one of the big AI companies, I'd be very worried about. Mhm. Well, Kevin, love is in the air. Or was it AI generated love?
Yes. It is almost Valentine's Day, and we have a a story today that we think will bring a little bit of the Valentine's Day spirit to our listeners. So earlier this week, New York Times reporter Alexandra Alter put out a story we both loved about the way that AI is disrupting the romance novel industry. Yes. Are you a big romance novel reader? You know, I can't say I've read too many of them. But one thing I know about that industry is that they are very early adopters of new tech and basically always have been.
Yes. And according to Alexandra, a growing number of writers are using AI to churn out uh tons and tons of these novels uh at record speed. Uh in one case she reported on a writer who went from writing about 10 books a year uh which is already a lot to do now doing more than 200 romance novels a year with the help of AI.
And to put that in perspective that is 200 times as many books as Kevin will publish in 2026.
It's true. So we should say like these are not literary fiction. These are not going to be winning any Pulitzer prizes. Uh but they are stories like the whiskey wedding or diagnosis of the heart. sort of think of like the old, you know, romance novels with like a a shirtless firefighter on the front. That's kind of the genre we're talking about here.
What they used to call a bodice ripper back when the gals still wore bodises.
Yes. And this has been very divisive among writers, publishers, and readers. And uh it just raises a whole lot of questions about how this technology is moving into industries like publishing.
That's right. And while we didn't quite intend it this way, if you've always wanted a chatbot to talk dirty to you, the segment will have some practical tips.
Yes. very useful for that.
Yes. So, we're very excited to hear more from Alexandra about this story. Let's bring her in. Alexander Alter, welcome to Heart for Fork.
Hi. Thanks so much for having me.
How did you discover this story? How did you stumble into this?
So, the question that led to this story came up last year when Open AI said that they would allow erotic content. They were going to make this change and start with age verification and then allow users to generate erotica, which is something that users had apparently been clamoring for. And so then I started asking around to figure out whether romance authors and publishers were feeling threatened by this. Was this something that they felt like might erode the market for traditionally published romance novels? Um, you know, if readers could instantly generate their own love stories. And I was expecting to find a lot of hand ringing and anxiety, which I did find. But I was also surprised to find a few writers who were willing to speak to me about how much they love AI and how they've been using it to turn out dozens of romance novels and they feel like it could revolutionize the genre. Uh, so that was a surprise to me because it's a very contentious issue in the literary world. Most people, if they're using it, are not open about it. Um, and then the next question was, "How good or bad is AI at writing sex and love stories?" And the the answer was, "It's pretty bad and it requires a lot of help."
So, we'll get into the controversy around it, but I want to hear first about kind of how this is actually working. Tell us about what is the workflow for a romance author who has decided, you know what, I'm tired of writing all these bodice rippers. It's time to just hand that over to the large language model. It's so interesting because there's different platforms that writers are using. There's places like Pseudorite. Then there are these sites that will generate customized erotica, like Red Quill or My Spicy Vanilla, and then there's just sort of your general bots, you know, your Claude, your your chat GBT Gemini. Um, and so writers have different tools that they're using, but what I learned from talking to a couple people was that um if you learn how to prompt the bot correctly, it will write a pretty compelling sex scene. You have to give it kind of an outline. It helps if you give it a ton of information and tell it what subg genre you want to do because of course they've ingested all of these books from different subg genres. So you can tell it, I would like a reverse harum, mafia, enemies to lovers, slowb burn romance, and it will deliver all those beats. Um, it will require editing. It will require prompting. But I think you know what I what I heard from people who have played around with it a lot is you know some of them say they can write a book in a day um and have it edited ready to publish.
Wow. Now Kevin have you ever tried pseudoite? I asked cuz you're a pseudo writer.
Yes. I actually played around with pseudorite before chat GPT. This was like one of the first AI programs that I ever played around with.
Um and it was uh somewhat helpful for me but it was more oriented toward fiction writing. So, I I totally get um what the what the appeal of the tool is. Um tell us the story of Coral Hart, who's a a longtime romance novelist who's been experimenting with some AI stuff.
Yeah, she was the one of the people that I found who was actually teaching other writers how to use AI tools to produce novels. Um and she has only been doing this writing with AI for about a year. She's been writing novels, romance novels for a really long time and was
Quite prolific, but realized she could absolutely supercharge her output if she started using AI. So last year she created 21 different pen names and published more than 200 romance novels in all kinds of genres: super spicy erotica, tame, sweet, teen stories, romcoms, you know, to sort of have her foot in every corner of this market to see what would pop. And so, just through a sheer volume kind of game, she ended up making six figures, she told me, selling these books. And in the process, she really learned a lot about which models, which chatbots would do what for her. She would combine them. Now, she's created her own proprietary AI writing system. But she has this whole kind of spreadsheet that she shared with me, which is sort of like, Claude writes beautiful sentences but is terrible at sexy banter. ChatGPT will block you every time. Grok will do whatever you want. Goes for the safe option every time. You know, NovelAI was literally trained on erotica and like it's out of control. So some of the writers though, they actually had to prompt their bots to sort of calm down a bit.
Yeah, I was so interested in the bits of your piece about how there's a lot of steering needed to keep these things from sort of veering onto this very average set of romantic tropes, right? If you don't give the chatbot any guidance, it's going to suggest, you know, that the character should be having sex in the bedroom or the shower. It's boring.
Yes. And so Coral, this romance writer who's running these classes, is advising her students to like give them a list of settings that are weird, like a winery fermentation tank or a stalled ski lift or a horse stable. And she's also recommending that her students give the AI a detailed inventory of sexual kinks that are not just the old, you know, typical ones. So this is actually more involved than just typing into a chatbot like, give me a romance novel about, you know, a big city lawyer who moves to the country and falls in love with the stablekeeper.
Oh wait, that sounds interesting. What happens next?
Yeah. You know, it was super fascinating too. I sat in on one of Coral Hart's classes which was specifically about getting AI to write decent or even great, she said, sex scenes. And she said, "You are not going to get a good sex scene if you don't carefully prompt it. You're going to get weird euphemistic stuff." She mentioned that Claude had written in one of her recent drafts "his turgid manhood." That was the kind of language she was getting. And so then she started writing lists of words that the AI loved like shiver, unravel, manhood, moan, and blocking them, saying you cannot use these words. And I think the funniest thing that she says to students, she said it's very important that you tell the chatbot to slow down because otherwise they just jump to the end of the scene. Everyone's tangled in the sheets. So she gave them a specific prompt which was something along the lines of make it slow and agonizing. Do not rush to the finish.
So that was the approach that you're describing here with publishing hundreds of romance novels in a year seems functionally indistinguishable from spam, right? It's like you're trying to just sort of flood the market with as much material as possible in the hopes that you'll, you know, connect with customers. I'm curious, like, what is Coral's relationship with her own work? You know, as an author, I take some amount of pride in what I create. It's one reason why I don't use AI to write my columns. But Coral seems to have a different perspective here.
Very different. And that's a great question. And I asked her, too. I was like, do you, because she started off as a romance writer, presumably she likes writing stories. And I said, do you still think of yourself as a writer? And she said, I mean, not really. I'm more of a director. I'm a creator. She feels like she comes up with the plots and the characters, but she doesn't necessarily think of herself as the quote-unquote author anymore, which is a different kind of species of writer than we've seen before, I think. And a lot of people are very uncomfortable with that.
One of the reasons that your story was so interesting to me is that romance as a genre relies on these templates, right? Like enemies to lovers or the slow burn, or I think there's another one in your story, forced proximity, which I had never thought of as a romance template, but I guess it's not just from the...
Yeah. Yeah. That was actually the backup name for our podcast.
Well, within forced proximity you have only one bed, which is a great subgenre.
Very interesting. Well, we are getting a new studio, so we'll talk about that. But because the romance writers use these templates, I think some might look at that work as maybe less creative than somebody who is writing literary fiction and is just sort of writing whatever scenes come to mind. And I'm curious if you thought about that tension when you were writing this piece. And I want to be careful how I say this because I think if you're, you know, anyone who is working in genre fiction, if you're coming up with all the plots yourself, you are bringing your own humanity to that process. And yet I understand why some people are trying to automate it because they think to themselves, look, all of these stories hit the same eight or nine beats, and why bother writing them myself if the reader already knows where it's going to go before they've started reading it.
Exactly. I mean, I think that's a real point of contention. When you're talking about AI and romance, there are these tropes that readers love, but I think even the writers I spoke to who use AI said AI is really bad at human emotion, at nuance, at kind of the slow burn. And, you know, one person told me that she tried to get an AI program to write an enemies-to-lovers romance, and within the first chapter, they went from being enemies to being lovers. And so that's obviously not what readers were looking for. And I do think while there are these common tropes that readers love and you can see them all over Amazon, they're marketed that way. Readers like to see how are you going to put a twist on this? Like I think you're a fan of Heated Rivalry, Casey. Like huge fan. There was a big twist on the hockey romance the way that Rachel Reid did it, and people love it for that reason. So within these kind of familiar tropes, people can be very creative and original and create these original characters and scenarios. And I think people do worry that automating the process, you lose some of that for sure.
That raises the question for me of, you know, and I don't know if you happened to look at this data in particular, but I would be curious to know among best-selling romance novels, do they tend to be ones that are inventing new formats, are sort of driven by twists? Does it seem to be novels that are just particularly well written, or maybe, you know, an author has a huge fan base? Or is it a situation where some of these formats are just so popular that you actually can use AI to just write one from soup to nuts and it'll sell maybe better than someone who did try to come up with their own twist.
I think we're waiting to see how that takes shape because right now we're in the very early stages of people openly writing with AI where we can say, okay, this novel was written with AI. How are readers going to react to that? And so we haven't seen an AI novel go up against an original novel in that way. I will say you have both in romance. You have like the Twilight craze led to a million vampire boyfriend novels. So many. But then you have something like Fifty Shades of Grey, which like before that book, nobody knew that middle-aged women really wanted to read about bondage, and they did. It kind of opened up this whole field. So I think you have both. You have super original stuff, and then you have things that are maybe riding on the coattails of popular trends, and those do well also.
And like this is a subjective question, but like are these AI-generated novels any good? Like have you ever come across a passage in one of them where you're like, okay, this was as good or better than a real famous romance writer would have written.
That is a really good question. And what I found, you know, reading probably half a dozen novels that I knew to be AI-generated, and I've read a lot of fanfiction for work, I've read a lot of self-published romance. And romance, just like any genre, there's an entire range from exquisite prose to things that are more clichéd than formulaic. And I think what I found kind of didn't necessarily come together in the way you would want in some of the AI-generated stuff was exactly what readers and writers were complaining about, that the sort of emotional nuance, the characters, like there was something, and it might have been, it's hard to know because when you know it's AI, I felt a little bit of distance from the characters. I sort of felt like, well, there's not a human talking to me, which is one of the things I love about reading. It's like I'm in someone else's brain right now. That's like a magic trick. And so when you know that that's not happening, it feels quite flat, but it's hard to know that I was projecting.
How many of these writers are disclosing that they use AI? Because I can imagine that that would affect people's enjoyment of the book. If I, you know, open the first page of something and it says this was written by Claude, I'm like way less interested as a reader than if I don't know.
And writers are very well aware of that. So very few of them are disclosing that they're using it. It's very contentious. There's been a lot of outcry on social media. There were a couple of romantasy authors last year who accidentally left AI prompts in their books. People got quite upset about that. And I think, you know, it really takes you out of the moment when you're in the middle of a sex scene and it's like, "As an AI model, yeah, we need to compact this conversation so that we can continue." Right. Right. So I think it does shade readers' perspectives. And the thing that was interesting about the people I spoke to who were open about it was they are convinced that readers' attitudes are going to change. They think once readers give this a try and they see that these stories are good and they know that a human came up with the ideas and the characters, they're going to get over it. They've gotten over a lot of other stuff. So it's a really interesting unanswered question right now.
