Writing Fiction with AI

As I mentioned in a post many years ago, once upon a time—high school and college years, mostly—I used to read novels by Barbara Cartland, the step-grandmother of Princess Diana. Rumor had it that Ms. Cartland, who was a huge success in purely financial terms, had a stable of secretaries who did the actual writing. She would walk by, according to said rumors, and point her finger at one flunky after another, giving them the details—blonde (brunette, redheaded) heroine, rugged hero, meet cute as follows—then get on with her life while the secretaries did the actual work. As a result, the novels became, over time, glaringly predictable even by the standards of romance novels, which have a strict list of reader expectations to meet. I was reminded of this story, true or not, when I read an article in the New York Times (Alexandra Alter, “The New Fabio Is Claude,” New York Times Sunday Business section, February 8, 2026) a couple of weeks ago about romance novelists who’ve turned much of their novels’ production over to artificial intelligence (AI).

Now I have nothing against AI per se. I use it constantly, whether I like it or not, every time I have a Google query, and I appreciate the speed and specificity of the results (of course, I also double-check anything that’s important). Its summaries of email conversations come across as accurate if sometimes amusing and mostly unnecessary. I accept that it’s increasingly embedded in the software I use to write and publish my novels, from Word to Photoshop—although the results of, say, Word’s grammar checker still require human intervention to avoid errors both egregious and hilarious.

Still, it’s one thing to use a technology to catch errors you missed (which you then assess before you correct them), to fill in gaps in one’s knowledge, or even to alter a potential cover image (so long as it’s not copyrighted). Turning over the entire writing of a novel to a machine, however, seems … odd.

Sure, I understand that making a living by writing novels—even romances, which have large and devoted followings—was never guaranteed and has become increasingly difficult as self-publishing has become not just easier but more respectable. Without self-publishing—especially Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing—Five Directions Press would not exist, and my novels would probably still be files on my computer, shared via email with my closest friends. Yet there’s no question that these platforms vastly increase the number of titles available, intensifying the competition for readers’ eyes and loyalty.

As a result, making a living as a writer, especially of fiction, has become harder than ever. So I understand the appeal of maximizing one’s output, even if I don’t endorse the method. Nor do I find the basic argument convincing. Putting out a novel every two weeks may help a writer who already has a following and puts herself ahead of the crowd by embracing AI early on to make a living wage that lets her support herself as an author. But how long will that last? If the flood of self-published books cuts into authors’ incomes, what will a deluge of AI-produced books do to those same earnings? How much more difficult will it become for readers even to find a given author?

More fundamentally, don’t the fine arts, including writing, exist to give expression to the human experience, with each piece representing one perspective out of the billions of possibilities? Asking a machine to sample hundreds or thousands of examples, then generate its own version, misses the point. Reading is not about the generic; it’s about expanding one’s vision of the many different ways in which one can live as a human, experiencing through literature what we can’t—and may not want to—confront in real life. AI, though, doesn’t have its own perspective. It exists to reduce complex realities and individual approaches to simple answers, not to express a unique take on an old problem.

I stopped reading Barbara Cartland novels decades ago—not because the idea of a stable of writers offended me but because I lost interest in books that told the same story over and over, with purely cosmetic changes. These days, most romance novels have to work hard to get my attention, although I love stories that include elements of romance without it becoming the book’s sole reason for being. But whether I’m reading or writing, I expect a novel to go somewhere I didn’t expect and shine a light on individual growth and relationships between characters from a direction I may never have considered before. To throw that away solely to make a six-figure salary—well, that just strikes me as sad.

Image purchased from Clipart.com, no. 16133171.