Bonus Episode—AI in Historical Romance Publishing with Nichole Van

After I announced that I’d invited fellow historical romance author Nichole Van onto the podcast, I had a listener reach out to me asking if hosting Nichole came into conflict with my no Gen AI stance as they believed she had used Gen AI images in promoting her books previously.

So, I reached out to Nichole and said, “hey—my bad for not looking into this. I’m leaving it up to you if you still want to do the episode or not, but just be prepared for some comments or questions about AI.”

And Nichole responded that she had stopped using AI and would love to chat about it. As we prepared, we realized we had so much to say about AI that we decided to make this discussion an entirely separate bonus episode.

We talk about A LOT related to AI in this episode and it was fascinating to hear Nichole’s thoughts as someone who’s had not just her writing scrapped by AI, but also her images as a photographer, shaping her understanding and relationship to it. There’s how we define AI tools vs. Gen AI, a lot about all the gray areas in-between that are hard to navigate, and really that we are both against Gen AI, but there are no easy answers. Especially as some of the historical romance space around us has begun to embrace AI. And we wrap up with the thought that at the end of the day, we all just need to think through where we stand and be clear about it ,while lending one another some grace as we all figure this out in a rapidly changing system.

All my thanks to Nichole for a truly great conversation, and I hope you’ll all tune in next week as well to hear about her amazing books!