South African writer Coral Hart has published over 370 books using artificial intelligence since February 2025, a process she fiercely defends despite criticism and threats.
On social media, the author, who is being called a 'fraud' or 'villain,' has become a symbol of AI's emergence in the publishing industry. Coral Hart, using a pseudonym to protect her real name, told AFP that she received 'tens of thousands' of messages filled with hatred and several death threats.
In this hostile environment, few authors who use AI are willing to speak out publicly and show their faces. Hart stated: 'I decided to be the one to start these conversations because these are the conversations we need to have.' She added that 'they won't shut this down just because a bunch of authors said so.'
Before she began writing with AI about two months ago, Hart worked in the publishing industry for 14 years and wrote several dozen works without using this technology. It took her three months to master various AI models and create a system capable of generating a book.
She now works with tools such as ChatGPT, which is 'very good at dialogues but terrible at prose'; Claude, which 'handles story structure very well but is awful at describing sexual scenes'; and others, like Grok, which is 'completely off base' but good at 'spicy scenes.'
Hart explained that if you ask ChatGPT or Claude to write a book, the result will be a 'fiery garbage fire' because they lack material to work with. The author herself determines the story concept, style, character details, and chapter plan, and only then does her system begin generating the book.
When she started, Hart said they could write one paragraph at a time, usually requiring two or three prompts for it. Now, however, she is capable of drafting an entire book in one sequence.
According to Hart, AI models have 'significantly improved' since last year. She noted improvements in prose, syntax, and sentence structure.
The author emphasized that the first draft of a book is usually not perfect. It goes through AI for 'developmental edits,' and then is checked again 'to eliminate any continuity issues, plot holes, flat middles, unfinished character arcs, dropped storylines, people whose eye color changed.' Finally, a human proofreader reads the text to correct any 'AI errors that slipped through' and performs additional editing. 'And it is usually ready for publication.'
Despite one of her novels entering the Amazon top 100 bestsellers, the vast majority of her 371 titles, many of which fall into the romance genre, were created based on specific reader profiles derived from thorough market research.
By her own estimation, she has sold over a million books in digital, print, and audio formats, earning over a million dollars this year so far. The South African author is now leading a project that has trained several hundred people in her method and is preparing to launch software for AI-using authors called Authorythm.
Regarding her own production, she mentions using AI only when required by the sales platform. Hart, who publishes under more than ten other pseudonyms, stated that 'for the last 16 years no one asked me about my creative process.' Now she is ready to make it public 'for the right reasons.'
Regularly accused of creating 'AI sludge'—low-quality content generated by AI in text, video, music, or images—Hart points to the main criterion: 'Books sell.' She added that 'readers do not read garbage books; they return them.'
The writer monitored the debates surrounding the novel by Haitian-Canadian writer Télisson Orélien, which was removed from the Goncourt Prize shortlist after accusations of using AI, which his publisher confirmed on Wednesday. Hart noted that before this controversy, the book had received high critical praise and strong sales, asking: 'If you need an AI label to hate something, do you hate the thing or do you hate AI?'
