At the height of his powers, and perhaps his amphetamine habit, legendary sci-fi author Philip K. Dick cranked out around thirty novels in two decades, along with what was probably several hundred short stories. These included enormously influential classics like “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “The Man in the High Castle,” and “A Scanner Darkly” — all the work of a man whose eclectic imagination was matched only by his paranoia, which forced him to constantly probe the nature of reality itself and our easily-manipulated ability to perceive it.
When their output reshapes entire genres and perhaps even pop culture at large, a writer’s prolificacycan fill us with awe. How can so much come out of one mind? But now, in an age of AI slop, quantity and speed simply arouses suspicion, because AI chatbots can help anyone produce the output of a PKD or a Stephen King. Graphomania used to require writers to write.
Consider the novelist Coral Hart. Starting last February, she began using Anthropic’s Claude AI to start churning out romance novels, becoming an invisible juggernaut of the smut world, according to a new interview with The New York Times.
Across 21 different pen names, Hart says she produced more than 200 romance novels last year and self-published them on Amazon, which has been drowning in AI slop for years now. None were huge hits on their own, per the NYT, but in all they sold around 50,000 copies, raking in six figures. While being interviewed on Zoom, she finished producing a book in just 45 minutes. Your average human writer doesn’t stand a chance, she says.
“If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?” Hart told the NYT.
Hart, who was already a seasoned smut writer before turning to AI, also launched a business teaching other authors how to crank out novels with tech. Called “Plot Prose,” she’s claimed to have taught more than 1,600 people, including authors who were publicly against using the tech.
A large component of her lessons involve how to get around various chatbots’ guardrails, which make them resistant to writing anything too risque. She also focuses on trying to enliven the bots’ clunky prose. She recommended coming up with an “ick list” of words to tell the AI to avoid, which it would otherwise overuse. She also advised giving the AI a detailed list of sexual kinks, ranging from the generic, like dirty talk, to the highly specific, like, and we quote the NYT, “using a dead spouse’s old silk robe as a restraint during bondage.” “Be shameless,” was Hart’s advice.
You might not have a high opinion of romance paperbacks, but there’s undeniably an art to writing them, especially at the incredible quantities required to match smut readers’ voracious appetite. And like in any other genre, plenty of veteran authors are worried that they’re being drowned out by the AI-reliant newcomers. “It bogs down the publishing ecosystem that we all rely on to make a living,” Marie Force, a best-selling romance novelist who was alarmed to discover that her novels were used to train Claude without permission, told the NYT. “It makes it difficult for newer authors to be discovered, because the swamp is teeming with crap.”
The reporting describes Hart as an “evangelist” for AI. Even so, she’s not willing to put her professional reputation on the line for the tech. “Hart” is a pseudonym she uses to teach her AI courses, while she uses her real name for other publishing and coaching work. Her books are published under other pseudonyms, because she doesn’t want to disclose her AI usage due to the stigma. Her advice to “be shameless,” apparently, only applies insofar as it doesn’t expose you to being judged by your peers.
The post “Novelist” Boasts That Using AI She Can Churn Out a New Book in 45 Minutes, Says Regular Writers Will Never Be Able to Keep Up appeared first on Futurism.
