Sexy music welcomed festival hopefuls into TSB Space at Tūranga on Friday night for Romancing AI - a sequel to last year's terrific interactive event, AI vs Librarians.
On each seat was a sheet for audience members to create a character looking for love. You could hear the audience getting in the mood, whispering to each other sweet nothings of 'what's my profession'. Characters also needed a hobby, and a descriptor - and that's where things got really creative.
MC Brian read the room, announcing that it was 'filthy with librarians'. The night's focus was on creating AI art, exploring what AI can do with character specifications, creating dialogue and book covers. For which you need no talent and get instant results!
What this means for human artists is an ethical concern. Can AI be original? Is it copy-catting? Were we feeding the machine in that moment? There are resistance groups, like Artists Against Generative AI popping up around this on social media.
The team married this experiment with romance fiction. Although not many in the room confessed to being romance fans, reading statistics show that romance is 'a big deal with a capital D’ said Brian.
Before the games began, team AI shared slides of the history of the romance novel. These included the rise of the bare-chested (male) cover and a feature on perhaps one of the biggest names in romance, Fabio, who has even written romances of his own.
It seems romance novels are no longer a guilty secret hidden in your nightstand - they are now dominating the mainstream of reading. Inclusive and literary, there are sub-genres such as Amish and Dinosaur Romance!? (I think they made that up.)
There was a lot of fun to be had using the audience's character sheets to match-make couples for each book. Nicole Phillipson used Chat GPT to generate several names to choose from, a meet-cute and some rather suggestive dialogue, which participants were game enough to read out - with hilarious results.
But the real hilarity was to be found in the book covers Eamonn Redmond suggested to Starry AI. It couldn't cope with our creative specs and produced some very garish covers: omitting some elements while adding spooky extra hands. It sure as heck couldn't handle a threesome.
Admittedly, being into pasta twirling is difficult for any artist to render, especially on a mini golf course. Not to mention recycling tyres for fun. These were more like fetishes, than hobbies?
I'm told the team will gather and publish the results on this website over the weekend. Here's a wee spoiler of a very cute gay couple into mushrooms. Needless to say there were fireworks!
The results
More for book lovers
Stuck for something to read? Ask our team of Readers' Advisory Librarians for a reading recommendation, or check out our fiction genre guides:
- Request reading recommendations - Tell us your reading "must haves" and we'll pair you up with your perfect match (book, that is)
- Romance reading guide
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