370 books in 20 months: South African author defends AI use | Kuwait Times Newspaper

CAPE TOWN: South African writer Coral Hart has published more than 370 books since February 2025 with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). She strongly defends using AI, even though she has faced a lot of criticism and threats. Hart is not her real name. The writer, who is in her forties, uses this name to keep her identity private. She has become a well-known example of how AI is changing book publishing. On social media, people have called her a “grifter,” meaning someone who makes money dishonestly, and a “villain.”

Hart told the AFP news agency that she had received “tens of thousands” of hateful messages and several death threats. Few writers who use AI are willing to talk about it openly. Hart said she decided to speak up because people need to start discussing AI in writing. 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,” she said.

Before Hart started using AI to write books about 20 months ago, she had worked in publishing for 14 years. She had also written several dozen books without AI. She spent three months learning how different AI tools work and creating a system that could make a book. She now uses several AI tools for different jobs. These include ChatGPT, which she says is “really good at dialogue, terrible at prose,” meaning it writes conversations well but is bad at other kinds of writing. She also uses Claude, which she says is good at organizing stories, and other tools, including Grok.

Hart said that simply asking ChatGPT or Claude to write a book produces very bad results because the tools do not have enough information to work with. She described the result as “a flaming dumpster fire of trash.” 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. Her system then uses this information to create a book. She said the system can now write an entire first draft in one go. When she first started, it could only write one paragraph at a time.

Hart said the first draft is usually not very good. She puts it through AI again to make bigger changes to the story and fix problems. These include details that do not match, characters whose stories are not properly finished and important parts of the plot that are forgotten. After that, a human proofreader checks the book. This person removes signs that the writing was made by AI and rewrites some parts.

One of Hart's novels made it into Amazon's list of the 100 bestselling books. But most of her 371 books, many of which are romance stories, are written for particular groups of readers. She uses market research to find out what these readers want. Hart estimates that she has sold more than one million books in digital, printed and audio versions. She says she has earned more than $1 million so far this year. She now runs a business that has taught several hundred people how to use her method. She is also getting ready to release software for writers who use AI, called Authorythm.

Hart also publishes books under more than 10 other pen names. She only tells buyers that she uses AI when the website or platform selling her books requires her to do so. Critics often accuse her of making “AI slop,” a term for poor-quality content created by AI. But Hart says book sales are the best way to judge whether readers like her work. “Readers don’t read rubbish books; they return them,” she said.

Hart pointed to the case of Haitian-Canadian writer Thelyson Orelien. His novel was removed from the list of books being considered for France's Goncourt prize after people accused him of using AI. His publisher confirmed the use of AI on Wednesday. Hart said critics had praised the novel and it had sold well before the argument over AI began. She questioned whether people really dislike a book or simply dislike knowing that AI was used to make it. “If you need an AI label to hate something, do you hate it, or do you hate AI?” she asked. — AFP