South African writer Coral Hart has published more than 370 books since February 2025 using artificial intelligence, and she is defending the practice despite insults, criticism and threats. Hart uses a pseudonym to protect her real name. She told AFP in an interview that she has received “tens of thousands” of hate messages and several death threats.
Social media users have called her a “grifter” and a “villain.” In her forties, she has become a symbol of AI’s arrival in publishing, and few authors who use the technology are willing to speak on the record or show their faces.
“I chose to be the one to step up and say, these are conversations we need to start having,” Hart said. “They’re not going to switch it off or unplug it because a bunch of authors said so.”
Hart spent 14 years in publishing and wrote several dozen books without AI before she started working with the technology about 20 months ago. It took her three months to learn the various AI models and build a framework capable of producing a full book.
She now works across several tools. She described ChatGPT as “really good at dialogue, terrible at prose,” and Claude as “really good story structure, terrible at sex drives.” She called Grok “completely unhinged” but said it is good at “spicy scenes.”
How does Coral Hart use AI to write her books?
The process starts with the human. Hart defines the story concept, the style, the characters and the chapter outlines. Only then does her system generate the book. “If you say, ChatGPT, write me a book, or, Claude, write me a book, you’re going to get a flaming dumpster fire of trash back because it doesn’t have anything to work with,” she said.
Hart said the tools have changed quickly. When she started, she said, “we could write one paragraph at a time. I usually took two or three prompts to do that.” Now, she said, “I can now draft the whole book in one sequence.” She credits recent updates with much stronger writing. “The prose has improved. The syntax has improved. The sentence structure has improved.”
The first draft, she said, is usually weak. It goes back through AI for what she calls “developmental edits,” then again to fix continuity problems, flat middles, incomplete character arcs, dropped plot threads and characters whose eye color has changed. A human proofreader then reads the manuscript to catch “AI tells that have slipped through” and does some rewriting. “And it’s usually ready to go,” she said.
Her catalog is built for commercial appeal rather than critical acclaim. One of her novels reached Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers, but most of her 371 titles, many of them romance, are aimed at specific readers based on what she describes as rigorous market research. By her own estimate, she has sold more than one million books in digital, print and audio formats.
Her operation has now trained several hundred people in her method. She is also preparing to launch software for AI authors called Authorythm. Hart publishes under more than 10 other pen names, and she said that for most of her career nobody asked about her creative process. She mentions her use of AI only when a sales platform requires it. Now, she said, she was ready to make it public “for the right reasons.”
Are AI-written books selling to readers?
Critics often accuse her of contributing to “AI slop,” a term for low-quality AI-generated content in text, video, music or images. Hart’s answer is the one she considers most important. “Books are selling,” she said. “Readers don’t read rubbish books; they return them.”
Hart also pointed to a recent controversy in France. A novel by Haitian-Canadian writer Thelyson Orelien was withdrawn from the shortlist for the Goncourt prize after accusations that he used AI. His publisher confirmed the use of AI on Wednesday. Hart said critics had praised that book and that sales were strong before the controversy. “If you need an AI label to hate something, do you hate it, or do you hate AI?” she asked.
Este artículo fue escrito con la asistencia de IA.
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