South African writer defends AI-assisted output of 370 books

People on social media have called Hart, who is in her forties, insulting names such as “grifter” and “villain”. She has become a symbol of how AI is changing the book industry.

Coral Hart is not her real name. She uses it to protect her identity. In an interview with AFP, she said she had received “tens of thousands” of hateful messages and several death threats.

Because of this angry reaction, few writers who use AI are willing to speak openly about it 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.

She said AI is already here and will not disappear just because some writers want it to. “They’re not going to switch it off or unplug it because a bunch of authors said so.”

Before she began using AI to write books about 20 months ago, Hart had worked in the publishing industry for 14 years. She had also written several dozen books and other works without AI.

She spent three months learning how different AI programs work and building a system that could help create a book.

Today, she uses several AI tools for different jobs. She says ChatGPT is “really good at dialogue, terrible at prose”, meaning it writes conversations well but is poor at other kinds of writing. She says Claude is good at planning the structure of a story but “terrible at sex drives”. She describes Grok as “completely unhinged”, meaning unpredictable, but good at writing “spicy scenes”, or scenes with sexual content.

Hart said that simply asking ChatGPT or Claude to write a book produces very bad results because the AI has not been given enough information to work with.

Instead, she first decides what the story will be about, how it should be written, who the characters are and what will happen in each chapter. Only after she has planned these details does her system use AI to create the book.

Hart said that when she first started, AI could write only one paragraph at a time. She usually needed to give it two or three instructions, called prompts, just to create that paragraph.

“I can now draft the whole book in one sequence,” she said.

Hart said AI programs have become much better since last year. She said the quality of the writing, grammar and sentence structure has greatly improved.

‘Books are selling’

Hart said the first version of a book is usually not very good.

She puts this first version through AI again to make bigger improvements to the story. She then uses AI another time to find and fix problems. These include events that do not match earlier parts of the story, weak sections in the middle, characters whose stories are not finished, storylines that are forgotten and details that change by mistake, such as a character's eye colour.

After these steps, a human proofreader reads the book. This person fixes mistakes, changes some of the writing and removes signs that make the text sound as though AI wrote it. Hart said the book is usually ready to publish after that.

One of Hart's novels reached Amazon's list of the 100 bestselling books. However, most of her 371 books, many of which are romance stories, are written for particular groups of readers. She uses detailed research into what people want to buy to decide what kinds of books to create.

Hart estimates that she has sold more than one million books in digital, printed and audio formats. She says she has earned more than $1 million so far this year.

Hart now runs a business that has taught several hundred people how to use her book-writing method. The business is also preparing to release software for writers who use AI. The software is called Authorythm.

When publishing her own books, Hart says she tells readers or sales platforms about her use of AI only when the platform requires her to do so.

Hart, who also publishes books under more than 10 other pen names, said nobody had asked about how she created her work during the past 16 years.

She said she was now willing to explain her writing process publicly, but only “for the right reasons”.

Hart is often accused of helping create “AI slop”. This means poor-quality material made by AI, including writing, videos, music and images. But Hart says the most important way to judge her work is whether people buy it. “Books are selling,” she said.

“Readers don’t read rubbish books; they return them,” she said.

Hart has also been following an argument about a novel by Haitian-Canadian writer Thelyson Orelien. The novel was removed from the shortlist for France's Goncourt literary prize after claims that Orelien had used AI. His publisher confirmed on Wednesday that he had used the technology.

Hart said critics had praised Orelien's book and it had sold well before the argument about AI began. She questioned whether people really disliked the book itself or simply disliked the use of AI. She asked: “If you need an AI label to hate something, do you hate it, or do you hate AI?”