370 books in 20 months: S African author defends her use of AI

South African writer Coral Hart has published more than 370 books since February 2025 using artificial intelligence (AI), despite facing online abuse and death threats.
The author, who uses a pseudonym to protect her identity, said she had received “tens of thousands” of hateful messages. She has become a prominent figure in the debate over AI’s growing role in publishing.
After 14 years in the publishing industry and writing several dozen books without AI, Hart spent three months developing a system using multiple AI models to produce novels.
She creates the concepts, characters, writing styles and chapter outlines before using AI to generate drafts. These undergo further AI-assisted editing to address continuity, plot and character development, followed by human proofreading and rewriting.
Hart said AI models had improved significantly in prose, syntax and sentence structure, allowing her to draft an entire book in one sequence.
Many of her titles, particularly romance novels, target specific readerships through market research. Hart estimates she has sold more than one million books across digital, print and audio formats, earning over $1 million so far this year.
One of her novels reached Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers. She now trains hundreds of people in her methods and is preparing to launch Authorythm, software designed for AI-assisted authors.
Despite accusations of contributing to “AI slop”, or low-quality AI-generated content, Hart argues that sales and reader responses should determine a book’s value.
“Readers don’t read rubbish books; they return them”, she said.
Hart also questioned whether criticism sometimes targets AI rather than the quality of the work itself, citing the controversy surrounding Haitian-Canadian author Thelyson Orelien’s novel, which was withdrawn from the shortlist for France’s Goncourt prize following AI-use allegations.
“If you need an AI label to hate something, do you hate it, or do you hate AI?” she asked. — AFP