Alexandra Alter

speaker

167 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 13 Feb

Alexandra Alter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Hard Fork · ‘Something Big Is Happening’ + A.I. Rocks the Romance Novel Industry + One Good Thing · 13 Feb 2026 podcast

And people love it for that reason.

So within these kind of familiar tropes, people can be very creative and original and create these original characters and scenarios.

And I think people do worry that automating the process, you lose some of that for sure.

Yeah.

I think we're waiting to see how that takes shape because right now we're in the very early stages of people openly writing with AI where we can say, okay, this novel was written with AI.

How are readers going to

react to that and so we haven't seen an ai novel go up against an original novel in that way i will say you have both in romance you have like the twilight craze led to a million vampire boyfriend novels so many um but then you have something like 50 shades of gray which like before that book nobody knew that middle-aged women really wanted to read about bondage and they did it was kind of a

Opened up this whole field.

So I think you have both.

You have super original stuff and then you have things that are maybe riding on the coattails of popular trends and those do well also.

That is a really good question.

And what I found, you know, reading probably half a dozen novels that I knew to be AI-generated, and I've read a lot of fan fiction for work, I've read a lot of self-published romance, and romance, just like any genre, there's an entire range from exquisite prose to things that are more clichéd and formulaic.

And I think what I found didn't necessarily come together in the way you would want in some of the AI-generated stuff.

It was exactly what readers and writers were complaining about, that the sort of emotional nuance, the characters, like there was something – and it might have been.

It's hard to know because when you know it's AI –

I felt a little bit of distance from the characters.

I sort of felt like, well, there's not a human talking to me, which is one of the things I love about reading.

It's like I'm in someone else's brain right now.

That's like a magic trick.

And so when you know that that's not happening, it feels quite flat.

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