Cape Town-based writer Coral Hart has published more than 370 books since February 2025 using artificial intelligence, a method she defends despite heavy criticism and threats. Online, she has been labelled a “grifter” and a “villain”, and she has become a symbol of AI’s growing presence in publishing.
Hart uses a pseudonym to protect her real name. In an interview, she told AFP that she had received “tens of thousands” of hate messages and several death threats. Few authors who use AI are willing to speak publicly or show their faces, given the hostility they face.
Hate messages and the decision to speak out
Hart said she chose to speak publicly because she wanted to start a wider conversation about AI in writing. She argued that the technology will not be removed simply because some authors object to it. Her public profile contrasts with the silence of many others in the field.
Hart had worked in publishing for 14 years and written several dozen books without AI before she began using the technology around 20 months ago. It took her about three months to learn the various AI models and build a framework that could produce a full book.
How her AI writing process works
Hart described a process that depends heavily on human planning. She defines the story concept, the style, the character details and the chapter outlines before her system generates any text. She said the tools she uses have different strengths, with ChatGPT praised for dialogue, Claude for story structure, and Grok for what she called “spicy scenes”.
She said that early on, the tools could only produce one paragraph at a time, and she often needed two or three prompts for each. She now says she can draft a whole book in a single sequence. Hart added that AI models have “improved vastly” since last year, particularly in prose, syntax and sentence structure.
Hart said the first draft is usually weak, so it goes back through AI for developmental edits and further passes to fix continuity errors, weak middles, incomplete character arcs and dropped plot threads. A human proofreader then removes what she called “AI tells” and does some rewriting before the book is ready.
Sales, market research and a growing training operation
Although one of her novels reached Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers, most of her 371 titles, many of them romance, are aimed at specific readers based on what she described as rigorous market research. By her own estimate, she has sold more than one million books in digital, print and audio formats. She said she has earned more than $1 million so far this year.
Hart now leads an operation that has trained several hundred people in her method. She is also preparing to launch software for AI authors called Authorythm. She publishes under more than 10 other pen names, and she mentions her use of AI only when a sales platform requires it.
She said that in her 16 years in the industry, no one had asked her about her creative process. She decided to make it public “for the right reasons”. Hart points to sales as the best measure of success, saying simply, “Books are selling.”
Debate over AI labels and the Goncourt shortlist
Hart has followed the debate around a novel by Haitian-Canadian author Thelyson Orelien. The book was withdrawn from the shortlist for France’s Goncourt prize after accusations that he had used AI. His publisher confirmed the withdrawal on Wednesday. Hart said the book had been praised by critics and sold well before the controversy.
She questioned whether critics are reacting to the quality of the work or to the technology behind it. Asking whether people object to the book or to AI itself, she said: “If you need an AI label to hate something, do you hate it, or do you hate AI?”
