Can AI write a romance story or romance novel? Does artificial intelligence have enough understanding of the English language and of the themes and elements that are important to create compelling romance stories? It shouldn’t be difficult to create basic plot points, basic sentences, and basic paragraphs, but writing real romance that connects with readers is a lot more difficult that never making a grammar mistake. In fact, a story filled with grammar mistakes, but also filled with human emotion and a true understanding of the human emotion of “love” would probably be better than one with perfect grammar and an imperfect understanding of what makes love special.
There are several popular sites that publish romance fiction created by humans, for example Wattpad, Literotica, and AO3. Those sites have been around for many years, and they are the barometer we can use to measure AI romance fiction by.
All of that being said, let’s go to the AI and see what it can do.
This time, we decided to try the AI Story Generator at ToolBaz. This AI story generator does not specify which text generation technology specifically is being used, but we’ll guess it’s one of the open source solutions as they claim to allow “unlimited” use and that would be expensive with a commercial AI text generator like OpenAI. Here’s what the AI came up with when we asked it to write a romance story.
The story prompt:
Write a short romance story about a student having a crush on their teacher.
The romance story text:
Jenny had been crushing on her teacher, Mr. Smith, since she started college a few months ago. She found him to be charming, intelligent and handsome, and she loved attending his classes. Every day she would try to sit as close to him as possible, and she would always make sure she was the first to answer his questions in class.
One day, after class had finished, Jenny mustered the courage to approach Mr. Smith and asked him out for coffee. He was taken aback by the invitation, but eventually agreed. Jenny was over the moon and couldn’t believe that her crush was going out with her.
The two of them went to the coffee shop and talked for hours about their interests and dreams. It soon became apparent that they had a lot in common, and the chemistry between the two of them was undeniable.
When it was time to go, Mr. Smith asked Jenny for her phone number, and the two of them parted ways with a kiss on the cheek.
Since that day, Jenny and Mr. Smith have been inseparable. They started dating, and they are now planning their wedding next summer. Jenny is the happiest she has ever been, and she has her teacher to thank for that.
How did the AI do?
First, we have to give the artificial intelligence credit for deciding that the romance story was between a college student and a college teacher when we only told it “student” and “teacher” without specifying what type of school. A stupider AI could have made a big mistake there and caused problems for everyone.
As far as the actual story, it reads a lot like a fan fiction on a site like Wattpad or A03. These sites are full of simple fantasies about K-Pop stars and Harry Potter, written by younger authors who are just getting started in their writing. There’s nothing wrong with those simple starter stories, but they tend to use the same plot lines and even the same language, vocabulary, and phrases over and over again.
There’s little doubt that this line was generated by training large language models on fan fiction text content:
Jenny was over the moon and couldn’t believe that her crush was going out with her.
Wattpad shows nearly 50,000 results for “over the moon” and both AO3 and Wattpad show tens of thousands of matches for “her crush”, as you would expect on sites that publish mostly fan fiction.
This story was better than our previous test. The story contains elements that are common in many romance stories – a girl with a crush, a hard to get figure who has power or authority, a meeting that leaves the main character feeling on top of the world, and a happy ending. Even though the elements are in the story, they are done in a very basic and simplistic way that does not elevate the story beyond what one might expect from a machine that read a lot of similar stories. There are no beautiful sentences, no surprises, nothing new or exciting or original.
We might say that this was a romance story written by a young person who had yet to have any experience with actual romance beyond exposure to young adult movies, TV shows, and books. That puts the AI at teen or pre-teen level in its writing skills. Not bad for a technology that is also still in its early years, but we hope for better in future AI writing tests.