It is no secret that I despise the romance genre and the sordid depths BookTok has dragged it to. From painfully predictable plotlines, irritating characters as two-dimensional as a sheet of paper and a sinister obsession with hockey, I firmly believed that nothing could possibly exacerbate its mediocrity. Unfortunately, little did I know that the genre had already plummeted to the depths of hell when Coral Hart got her conniving hands on a ChatGPT account.
Coral Hart, an ‘author,’ and her deviously unimaginative schemes clawed their way to my attention through her interview with the New York Times, in which she claims responsibility for the writing of over 200 romance ‘novels’ in 2025. On further reflection, I realize that the former statement was a lie, as she did not write any of them: AI did. Hart even states that one took her 45 minutes to churn out, an already troubling indication of its shallow quality. The AI then spews out a sick amalgamation of overdone tropes from Hallmark movies, such as excruciatingly bland ‘city girls’ falling in love with equally boring men in an irrelevant small town.
A lot has been said about how AI’s soulless writing fails to measure up to a human author due to its inability to grasp the human spectrum of emotions. Instead of beating a dead horse by restating this argument, I have decided to deepen my misery and show you the consequences of the horse’s death by reading one of Hart’s (otherwise known as AI’s) depraved creations, Mistletoe and Memorandums. The novel, published just last year, centers around Maren, a photographer, and her ex-boyfriend Cody, whose vague management career morphs into whatever the plot requires, hinting at the disgusting stew of clichés and bad writing that awaits anxious readers such as myself.
The central conflict revolves around Maren’s struggles to open up to others because Cody abruptly left her three years ago. It is perfectly acceptable if you forget this fact midway through the book, because Hart, or rather AI, brings this up every alternate page. First, Maren ponders why she can't open up to anyone. Then she tells her friend about how she is incapable of opening up. Then a few pages later another friend urges her to open up to others. Subsequently, Maren tells Cody that she has trouble opening up. Then Cody repeats the exact same thing to her within the next two pages. If you felt exhausted reading that, picture the agony I was in.
Looking past the fact that the plot is a worn-out backstory from most BookTok romance novels, this novel made it clear that AI is incapable of being subtle, with deep psychological issues being framed in the bluntest of terms. The value of literature stems from allowing a reader to form their own unique interpretation of the work, but here, everything is force-fed to us. There is no room for subjectivity; we are left with overused phrases, such as ‘her walls crumbled down.’ Phrases like these that include the word ‘walls,’ which are either crumbling down or building up, are used a total of 26 times in 186 pages. I did count that, and it amounts to once every seven pages. This is a clear example of AI essentially plagiarizing from countless other human-written works, stealing common language and synthesizing it into offensively mediocre slop.
Additionally, many conflicts in the novel are highly trivial with no actual importance to the overarching plot, and serve to just inflate the number of pages. For instance, a second love interest is introduced who has no distinguishable characteristics apart from being called Dave. In fact, by the 13th chapter the love triangle conflict is resolved, and I was cruelly subjected to two more chapters of meandering dialogue addressing Maren’s need to open up to people, just in case I forgot.
Moreover, the AI used here almost leans into comical lunacy at times and compares Maren writing spreadsheets to her “building up emotional armor” when working with Cody. I genuinely cannot fathom how that statement is supposed to make sense. These desperate attempts to create deeper meaning lead to odd inflations of the situation, such as when Maren and Cody’s conversation is allegedly filled with “three years of unspoken history,” but all they discuss is backup storage for data files for an entire page. The very concept of character development simply did not occur to either Hart or the AI.
Adding to the mounting charges of incompetency, the blurb of the novel on Goodreads describes a completely different plot — though still about spreadsheets and ex-boyfriends — but with different names and jobs, proving Hart’s admirable commitment to putting in as little effort as possible. The plots could be substituted, and would remain meaningless. AI-written drivel is incapable of forming deeper meaning, which I wish I could have realized before spending 30 minutes reading this book.
Instead of jail time for this offense, Hart has received over six figures from mass-producing these pamphlets of evil. In fact, she now holds writing courses with the company Plotprose, which threatens to teach more aspiring offenders to use AI to unleash further destruction on bookshelves and I find the prospect of more devoid of meaning literary garbage to be absolutely terrifying.
For a more enriched BookTok experience, I would point you to Hart’s antithesis, Quan Millz. It is true that his riveting publications, such as This Hoe Got Roaches In Her Crib: An Urban Satire, are absurdly outlandish, but all 71 of his insane novels are uniquely human, without a trace of AI. Plotlines from the perspective of a cockroach leading his family to “a mecca of stale food” may be ridiculous, but still point to the topic of family dynamics under poverty, deeper meaning which AI could never conceive. I believe that human creativity may be flawed and complicated, but is always far ahead of any circular, two-dimensional plot Hart and her league of AI-powered tools can conjure.
Sanjita Paspulati is a freshman in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. She can be reached at sp2579@cornell.edu.
Hater Friday runs on Fridays and centers around critiquing media or culture.
