Cape Town, October 23, 2026 (V7N) – South African writer Coral Hart has published more than 370 books since February 2025 using artificial intelligence, a process she passionately defends despite criticism and threats, she told AFP in an interview.

"Grifter," "villain" — insults abound on social media to describe the author who, in her forties, has become the symbol of AI's arrival in publishing.

Coral Hart — a pseudonym she uses to protect her real name — said she had received "tens of thousands" of hate messages and several death threats. In this hostile environment, few authors using AI agree to speak publicly and show their faces.

"I chose to be the one to step up and say, these are conversations we need to start having," Hart said. "This is here... They're not going to switch it off or unplug it because a bunch of authors said so."

Before she started writing with AI around 20 months ago, Hart had worked in publishing for 14 years and written several dozen works without the technology. It took her three months to familiarise herself with various AI models and build a framework capable of producing a book.

Now she juggles between ChatGPT, which is "really good at dialogue, terrible at prose"; Claude, "really good story structure, terrible at sex drives"; and others like Grok, "completely unhinged" but good on "spicy scenes."

"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)," Hart said.

The author defines the story concept, a style, details of the characters and chapter outlines, and only then does her system generate the books. She said she can now draft an entire book in one sequence, with AI models having "improved vastly" since last year.

The first draft is generally not good, she said. It is run through AI for "developmental edits" and then again "to fix any continuity issues, story issues, flat middles, character arcs that are incomplete, plot threads that have been dropped, people whose eye colour has changed." A human proofreader then reads through the text to fix any "AI tells that have slipped through."

Although one of her novels made it into Amazon's top 100 bestsellers, the vast majority of her 371 titles — many of them romance — are tailored to certain readers based on rigorous market research. She has sold more than one million books, by her own estimate, in digital, print and audio formats, earning more than $1 million so far this year.

The South African now heads an operation that has trained several hundred people in her method and is preparing to launch software for AI authors called Authorythm. She publishes under more than 10 other pen names and mentions her use of AI only when required by a sales platform.

Regularly accused of contributing to "AI slop" — low-quality AI-generated content — Hart points to the ultimate yardstick: "Books are selling."

"Readers don't read rubbish books; they return them," she said.

Hart has followed the debate around a novel by Haitian-Canadian Thelyson Orelien that was withdrawn from the shortlist for France's Goncourt prize after accusations that he used AI, which his publisher confirmed on Wednesday. Critics had praised the book and sales were strong before the controversy, she said, asking: "If you need an AI label to hate something, do you hate it, or do you hate AI?"

The debate over AI in publishing is expected to intensify as more authors adopt the technology and platforms weigh disclosure requirements.

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