NovelX.ai

NovelX is an AI erotic story generator, and unlike the mainstream chatbots that get all defensive when things get NSFW, this tool doesn’t block your filthy requests.

You give it an idea (or hit Surprise me if your imagination’s in a funk) and it gets to work building out a chapter-by-chapter story around custom characters. The tool comes with two heat settings, Spicy or Explicit, plus AI cover art and audiobook-style narration.

The big selling point is "Story Memory": it’s supposed to remember who your characters are and what’s already happened, so your brooding philosopher doesn’t turn into a raging Viking by chapter three. Anybody who has tried to piece together long-form erotic lit with an LLM will know how critical this step is.

The tool is run by Sub Zero Labs, an Estonian outfit that also owns CharacterX and EmberX - and it works in the browser or as an iPhone app. I think it's the first tool we've covered that actually passed Apple's entry test!

So how does it work?

Before a single sentence is written, a workshop proposes titles, builds a cast with portraits, offers two openings and two covers, and lets you set heat, pacing, point of view, chapter length and the voice of the prose.

Once you start "writing", you get Story Memory, a lorebook, story rules, next-beat choices and a highlight-a-line rewrite tool. So while the AI is penning the prose, you are effectively the creative director.

I made a free account and spent my tokens on a contemporary romance called Rain Check. I tested out the in-story images, played the narration, built a chat character and talked to her until the paywall stopped me.

Here is how each part works, what impressed me and where it falls short.

Signing up and the free allowance

Getting in is easy. The age gate is a plain "Enter" click, no annoying ID or selfie check. Sign-up asked for an email address and then a 6-digit code sent to that inbox.

The first screen after verifying was a welcome "gift", which turned out to be an offer for the yearly plan at $79.99 rather than anything free. Guys, I'm not sure you got the memo there!

My free account started with 10 tokens, and free users get 5 more every day.

How it works is that a chapter, a chat message, narration and a standard image each cost 1 token. As far as mental currency conversion goes, it's pretty straightforward.

Creating the story in the workshop cost 1 token, a full chapter cost 1, a continuation cost 1, the character chat setup cost 2 and each chat message cost 1. The exception was the standard in-editor image, which took my balance from 7 to 5, so it cost 2 tokens instead of the 1 the site claims.

Narration played without any charge, but when I left the page and came back the control read "Narration missing", so it hadn't been saved.

All told, the 10 tokens bought me one full chapter of about 2,342 words, one continuation, one standard image and three chat messages, with two covers and two portraits thrown in during setup. When I sent a fourth chat message, a banner read "You've used 10 tokens since you joined" and the premium paywall opened.

The story workshop

You start from a prompt box on the homepage, which has Story, Chat and Audiobook modes plus "Surprise me" and "Find an idea" buttons for anyone without a premise. I asked for a flirty, steamy story that I could sling on Kindle: Lena, with vivid green eyes and a silver locket she always wears, meets a charming stranger called Marcus at a hotel bar on a rainy night.

The workshop then walks through setup in steps. It suggested titles and a blurb, built character cards for Lena and Marcus with a portrait each, wrote two alternative openings for me to pick from, and offered two covers in different styles.

This all cost a single token, and is one of the most impressive story setups I've seen on a free tier. It also means the story starts with a written record of who the characters are... which, as you might expect, matters a lot later when you test memory.

Writing options and controls

There are various creative tools at your disposal, though the site could do a better job of explaining how each affects the story:

• Heat: Wholesome, Steamy or Explicit. Changing heat after setup offers to rebuild the prompt.

• Pacing: Slow, Medium or Fast.

• POV: first, second or third person.

• Length: Quick, Short, Balanced, Extended or Full. Deep Chapter sits behind the paywall.

• Voice chips: fine-tuning tags such as Dialogue-Heavy, Dirty Talk, Filthy Language and Rough & Dominant.

• Custom instructions and story rules, plus a theme picker.

• Opening choices and next-beat choices, so you can pick where the story goes rather than just pressing continue.

• Editing tools: Undo, Try another, Regenerate choices, and a highlight-a-line rewrite.

• Lorebook and Story Memory, which hold characters, relationships and objects across chapters.

I wrote chapter 1 at Full length, Explicit heat, third person and Dialogue-Heavy.

Having heat, pacing and voice as separate dials is useful - it lets you keep a slow build while making the language filthy, or keep the language soft while making the content explicit. Most erotic generators give you a single spice slider. The highlight-a-line rewrite is the kind of tool a real writer wants, since it lets you fix one bad sentence without throwing away the whole chapter.

How the writing actually reads

My bar-scene opening was a decent start. It opens on ice gone to water in Lena's glass and rain coming down "in ropes" against the window, and it builds the room with concrete details: peat smoke, damp wool, a bartender wiping the same stretch of mahogany for ten minutes. The dialogue is real back-and-forth with some wit.

The explicit scene itself was weaker than the build-up. Once they reached the room the prose became more generic, relying on familiar beats and phrasing rather than the specific detail that made the bar scene work. It was explicit enough for the Explicit setting, but I could see myself using the rewrite feature to piece the transitions together.

AI tropes and repetition

NovelX has a couple of familiar quirks that give the AI game away...

Within one chapter the same props kept returning: Lena touches or turns the locket again and again, the whiskey comes back in nearly every exchange, and Marcus's loosened tie is mentioned more than once. Stock phrases recur too, including "exactly where I want to be" and laughter or a voice that is "low and rough".

Each instance reads fine on its own, but over 2,300 words the pattern is noticeable.

The Try another and line rewrite tools help clean this up, but you have to do it yourself.

Memory, context and originality

The character card said Lena has green eyes, yet her eye colour never appeared in chapter 1, while Marcus's hazel eyes were mentioned. So I wrote a continuation in which Marcus asks about the locket and tells her the first thing he noticed about her eyes, without naming the colour. NovelX got both right. Marcus said he "saw green" from two stools away, and the locket was still silver.

Story Memory and the cards are clearly being read.

The trouble is what it added. Nobody asked for a backstory, and the continuation supplied one anyway: the locket was her grandmother's, it holds some of her grandmother's garden soil rather than a photo, and Marcus is divorced, with his ex keeping "the good silverware and the dog".

Some of this is charming, and it shows originality, but it is invention, and it locks details into the story that you may not want. I guess that's the inevitable trade-off in handing over creative control to an LLM.

In my short test, memory of what I set was good, but the model fills gaps freely, so you need to check the lorebook and correct it.

Character chat

I've covered a ton of adult AI tools. It never ceases to amaze me how devs just cannot resist the temptation of adding "chat".

On NovelX, Chat lets you turn a character into... a chat partner.

Creating Lena for chat, with a new portrait, cost 2 tokens, and each message cost 1. Her opener was in character, and when I asked about the locket she said it was her grandmother's and that her grandmother "wore it to every bad decision she ever made". When I asked about her eyes she answered "Green" with no prompting about the colour, describing it as "like the bottle your beer came in". So chat recalled the card correctly, but it also invented the same grandmother backstory independently of the story.

The bigger issue is that chat puppets the user. Lena's replies described what my character did and felt, rather than leaving my actions to me. That is a common fault in AI roleplay, and here it makes the chat feel more like a story being written at you.

I can't imagine the users signing up to NovelX are here primarily for the chat-based features, so I'll just say: there are better choices out there if you're looking for an AI companion.

Narration and audiobook mode

NovelX can read your story aloud, and the free account offered a narrator voice called "NovelX Velvet". The player highlighted the prose as it read, which makes it easy to follow along for the subtitles generation. I also spotted an Audiobook mode on the homepage. Narration cost me nothing on the free tier, but it wasn't saved either, so returning to the page showed "Narration missing".

Audio export is a paid feature - so if you want to keep it, you'll need a subscription.

Imagery: covers, portraits and in-story images

Images are everywhere on NovelX: story covers, character portraits, images in the editor and pictures in chat. There are seven looks available free: NovelX, Illustrated, Anime, Photo, Manhwa, Keyart and Fantasy. Two engines appear in the image menu, Standard and the paid Unfiltered engine, which NovelX says "renders whatever you describe" in the editor, in chat and on portraits.

The quality is the polished romance-cover style you would expect... but it practically screams AI.

Across the covers, the portraits and the in-story image, Lena kept her green eyes (jeez, the AI is not subtle 😂), silver locket and burgundy dress, the rain stayed in the scene, and Marcus kept his charcoal suit. The photoreal cover was just as consistent as the illustrated one.

However, the image is a good example of my common complaint. The AI clings to your small details... making them unmistakeable to the point that you can basically tell what was prompted, by what gets exaggerated.

From what I saw, there was no real option for explicit imagery either. I placed a Standard image inside an explicit paragraph, and what I got was the clothed couple portrait above. The Standard engine softens the sex rather than showing it, and explicit images need the Unfiltered engine on a paid plan.

Features beyond erotic writing

Beyond the writer, NovelX has an Explore section of community stories arranged in trope shelves, where each story card offers Remix, Like and Start Reading.

Remix lets you take someone else's premise and write your own version. The homepage claims more than 89,000 stories written, which you can revisit and remix to your heart's content. Your private Library is split into Stories, Chats and Characters, and you can publish a story to Explore and group stories into series.

Overall, NovelX.ai is a strong writing tool, albeit one that requires some hand holding if you're looking for it to stick with a consistent story. It has deep controls, a complete workshop, good memory for what you set, and some nice (but clearly AI) imagery.