I’ve always been fascinated with romance novels — the kind they sell at the drugstore for a couple of dollars, usually with some attractive, soft-lit couples on the cover. So when I started futzing around with text-generating neural networks a few weeks ago, I developed an urgent curiosity to discover what artificial intelligence could contribute to the ever-popular genre. Maybe one day there will be entire books written by computers. For now, let’s start with titles.

I gathered over 20,000 Harlequin Romance novel titles and gave them to a neural network, a type of artificial intelligence that learns the structure of text. It’s powerful enough to string together words in a way that seems almost human. 90% human. The other 10% is all wackiness.

I was not disappointed with what came out. I even photoshopped some of my favorites into existence (the author names are synthesized from machine learning, too). Let’s have a look by theme:

Babies, Babies, and More Babies

A common theme in romance novels is pregnancy, and the word “baby” had a strong showing in the titles I trained the neural network on. Naturally, the neural network came up with a lot of baby-themed titles:

Mediterranean Baby

The Baby Pregnancy

The Baby Barbarian

Blackmailed Baby

The Greek Baby Boss

Becoming the Baby Count

The Baby Doctor Seduction

Mistress Man’s Baby

Secret Secret Baby

The Surgeon’s Baby Surgeon

Pregnant for the Rage

Double Baby

A Irresistible Good Baby

Tycoons, Royalty, Playboys, and Bosses

There’s an unusually high concentration of sheikhs, vikings, and billionaires in the Harlequin world. Likewise, the neural network generated some colorful new bachelor-types:

His Pregnant Prince

The Sheikh’s Marriage Sheriff

Purter the Playboy

The Prince’s Virgin’s Virgin

Storm Jake

The Consultant Count

Virgin Viking

The Prince’s Round Brothers

Prince Dad Sheikh?

Butterfly Earl

Sin Secret Ray

Count Sergei’s Proposal

The English Millionaire Investigator

The Sheikh’s Convenient Desires

I have so many questions. How is the prince pregnant? What sort of consulting does the count do? Who is Butterfly Earl? And what makes the sheikh’s desires so convenient?

Gettin’ Married

Although there are exceptions, most romance novels end in happily-ever-afters. A lot of them even start with an unexpected wedding — a marriage of convenience, or a stipulation of a business contract, or a sham that turns into real love. The neural network seems to have internalized something about matrimony:

Mistress Wife

Husband Bride

Marriage Valley

Her Marriage Marriage

The Husband Man

Missingbroom Bride

The Man’s Marriage Touch

The Billionaire’s Marriage Valley

The Savage Bride

Consultant Bride

They Call Me Doctor Love

Doctors and surgeons are common paramours for mistresses headed towards the marriage valley:

Surgery by the Sea

The Strange Consultant Surgeon

The Doctor’s Children’s Proposal

The Man for Dr. Husband

Dear Dr. High-Kungly Seductive Mistake

My, Hot Doctor

Surgery Seduction

Under the Mistletoe

Christmas is a magical time for surgeons, sheikhs, playboys, dads, consultants, and the women who love them:

Winning for Christmas

Christmas of the Year

Christmas Pregnant Paradise

Christmas with her Blackmail

Desert Santa

The Santa Wife

Impossible Santa Wife

The Boss’s Secret Conspiration to Christmas Wish

Mission: Christmas to Knith

What or where is Knith? I just like Mission: Christmas…

Home on the Range

This neural network has never seen the big Montana sky, but it has some questionable ideas about cowboys:

Forbidden Texas, Texan

Midwife Cowpoke

Pregnant Cow

Cattle Lover

Under the Cowboy

In the Mountain for the Tender Seduction

The Raunchy Ones

The neural network generated some decidedly PG-13 titles:

The Sexy Affair

Dangerously! Seduction

Private Part

Inheritance Sex

The Sex Lovers

Naked Hot Ranger

The Virgin Date of Sexy

Sex Revenge

Rather Depressing Books

They can’t all live happily ever after. Some of the generated titles sounded like M. Night Shyamalan was a collaborator:

The Blood!

Sob Over the Boss

Married in Fear

Christmas By Fear

Hot Fearhaper

How did the word “fear” get in there? It’s possible the network generated it without having “fear” in the training set, but a subset of the Harlequin empire is geared towards paranormal and gothic romance that might have included the word (*Note: I checked, and there was “Veil of Fear” published in 2012).

Well, You Tried, Computer

To wrap it up, some of the adorable failures and near-misses generated by the neural network:

A Risk Worth Dad

Glord in the Dark

The Juggers

Can’t Good

Seeping Baby Man

Never Happened

I Hate the Marine

Romancy Heart

Uncristible

Undercover Movercum

Captive Something Bachelor

A Perfect Giantess

Falling for Her Doorstep

Nookan’s Buttymance

Crassion

Crom Pregnancy Hospital

I hope you’ve enjoyed computer-generated romance novel titles half as much as I have. Maybe someone out there can write about the Virgin Viking, or the Consultant Count, or the Baby Surgeon Seduction. I’d buy it.

Methods

I built a webscraper in Python (thanks, Beautiful Soup!) that grabbed about 20,000 romance novel titles published under the Harlequin brand off of FictionDB.com. Harlequin is, to me, synonymous with the romance genre, although it comprises only a fraction (albeit a healthy one) of the entire market. I fed this list of book titles into a recurrent neural network, using software I got from GitHub, and waited a few hours for the magic to happen. The model I fit was a 3-layer, 256-node recurrent neural network. I also trained the network on the author list in to create some new pen names. For more about the neural network I used, have a look at the fabulous work of Andrej Karpathy.

Erratum

I discovered that “Surgery by the Sea” is actually a real novel, written by Sheila Douglas and published in 1979! So, this one isn’t an original neural network creation. Because the training set is rather small (only about 1 MB of text data), it’s to be expected that sometimes, the machine will spit out one of the titles it was trained on. One of the more challenging aspects of this project was discerning when that happened, since the real published titles can be more surprising than anything born out of artificial intelligence. For example: “The $4.98 Daddy” and “6'1” Grinch” are both real. In fact, the very first romance novel published by Harlequin was called “The Manatee”.