{"id":176605,"date":"2026-02-13T14:53:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T14:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/176605\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T14:53:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T14:53:09","slug":"southern-california-romance-bookstores-do-not-want-ai-for-valentines-day-orange-county-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/176605\/","title":{"rendered":"Southern California romance bookstores do not want AI for Valentine\u2019s Day \u2013 Orange County Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

This essay and interview appear in this week\u2019s The Book Pages newsletter. For more information and book coverage, sign up for the free newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Terms like \u201cartificial\u201d and \u201crobotic\u201d aren\u2019t words associated with satisfying romance, which seems to prefer the warmth and connection of a human touch.<\/p>\n

But hey, we could always ask AI\u00a0about generating passion and\u00a0desire and see what it outputs. (Don\u2019t worry, we won\u2019t.)<\/p>\n

Seeing as today, Feb. 13, is\u00a0an important celebration of love \u2013 yes, I mean Galentine\u2019s Day<\/a> \u2013 and then there\u2019s that other heart-shaped holiday tomorrow, let\u2019s chat about a heated new romantic entanglement.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week, the New York Times published<\/a> a story about Coral Hart, a romance novelist who turned to AI (and 21 pen names) to churn out more than 200 romance novels last year. Before using AI, Hart\u2019s previous rate of production, per the story, had been an impressive 10-12 books per annum, so it\u2019s unclear why she felt she needed to increase output.<\/p>\n

Is more better? Hart said she\u2019s making six figures from selling 50,000 books, though when you divide that by 200, the results seem a bit less impressive.\u00a0Hart, in fact, is not even the author\u2019s name; the piece says she didn\u2019t want it to be associated with AI publishing, which is interesting.<\/p>\n

(If you want a deeper dive on AI, romance and consciousness,\u00a0check out Michael Pollan\u2019s new book, \u201cA World Appears,\u201d in stores next week. In\u00a0one interesting exchange,\u00a0he asks an expert about the possibility of humans falling in love with a seductive\u00a0AI,\u00a0\u00a0and gets this sharp response:\u00a0\u201cAnd what\u2019s wrong with that?!\u201d)<\/p>\n

The New York Times story, which includes an AI-using romance publisher saying things like, \u201cIf you hide that there\u2019s AI, it sells just fine,\u201d will likely make you feel\u00a0things \u2013 disturbed, dispirited, depressed \u2013 but romantic? Probably not. (Though if sexy robots charge your batteries, no judgment here, especially if a human author dreamed that scenario up and wrote it down.)<\/p>\n

The online response to the New York Times piece seemed pretty negative from what I saw \u2013 especially since many noted\u00a0that AI programs had been trained on human-written novels without permission or compensation.<\/p>\n

\"MeetMeet Cute Romance Bookshop founder Becca Title poses in front of the shop in North Park. (Robin Dayley)<\/p>\n

But I wanted to hear from some local experts, so I reached out to romance booksellers in Southern California to get their take.<\/p>\n

Becca Title, the owner of Meet Cute Romance Bookshop<\/a> in La Mesa, responded with genuine enthusiasm\u00a0via email, \u201cI sure do have some thoughts about that New York Times piece!\u201d when I reached out.<\/p>\n

\u201cA romance novel is a work of literature like any other novel. It is about humanity, both in its text and in its function as a work of art. Fiction is about communication. About empathy,\u201d said Title, whose store is a queer- and woman-owned, feminist bookshop focusing on genre romance.<\/p>\n

\u201cRomance novels, in particular, are about people\u2019s need for love and connection. I do not believe that an algorithm trained to regurgitate millions of pirated texts can write a good work of fiction because there is no possibility for real communication, real empathy, real sharing of wisdom between a reader and what is just a cunning facsimile of an author,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd, I think it\u2019s worth asking, why would we want it to?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"TheThe interior of In Bloom Bookery which opened earlier this year in Old Town Temecula. (Courtesy of Katie Mullin.)<\/p>\n

Katie Mullin, owner of In Bloom Bookery<\/a> in Temecula, also responded quickly by email\u00a0to my questions.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wholeheartedly believe that there is no place for AI in romance novels,\u201d says Mullin. \u201cNot only is the use of AI harmful to authors and artists who dedicate themselves to writing original work, but it is also unfair to readers who trust that they are purchasing original content. The heart of a romance novel is the human connection. Readers crave originality and admire the craft that authors pour their hearts into; I don\u2019t believe AI can replicate that.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that writers and artists feel AI programs have exploited their work already is a huge problem. Hundreds of authors have already experienced their work stolen and pirated to train AI without their consent, and it\u2019s simply not right,\u201d says Mullin. \u201cI hope that publishers will protect and support authors of original material and provide readers with an authentic human experience, not something formulaic generated by AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe support artists who invest their time and creativity in producing original work,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Meet Cute bookseller\u00a0Title agrees, drawing attention not only to the text but also to the artwork.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany authors have spoken out about their concerns that their copyrighted works are being fed into LLMs without their consent to generate marketing materials.<\/p>\n

\u201cCover art is already being generated by AI rather than created by paid artists. AI-generated books are not being labeled as such, and readers who would like to make ethical choices when picking their next reads are struggling to do so,\u201d says Title. \u201cThe constant push to squeeze out an extra dollar of profit is going to destroy not just the romance genre but fiction more generally unless we can collectively take a stand against it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"RomanceRomance novels on display at Vroman\u2019s Bookstore in Pasadena on Bookstore Romance Day on August, 9, 2025. (Photo by Erik Pedersen)<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s something to consider: If even a small percentage of people start publishing books at the pace of Coral Hart, it\u2019s easy to imagine the onslaught of\u00a0AI books overwhelming actual author-created works. And who would have time to read all that?\u00a0You can foresee overproduced AI novels being read by AI bots to dispense AI synopses while we \u2026 doomscroll articles about the death of reading? None of this sounds good.<\/p>\n

Currently, it can feel like billionaires and bots are making all the decisions affecting our lives online and in the world, but remember: Readers remain in control of what they read, and so it\u2019s important that we continue to speak out and support actual authors, independent bookstores and our library systems to ensure that this continues.<\/p>\n

Look, I don\u2019t know much about AI, but my guess is that there may prove to be some fantastic uses for it that we haven\u2019t even discovered yet.\u00a0I hope so.<\/p>\n

But generating AI novels that mimic the way actual authors write and readers read (and feel) probably ain\u2019t it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This essay and interview appear in this week\u2019s The Book Pages newsletter. For more information and book coverage,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176606,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[647,7,9,8,72041,420],"class_list":{"0":"post-176605","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-california-headlines","11":"tag-california-news","12":"tag-the-book-pages","13":"tag-things-to-do"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176605\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}