‘Books are selling’: S.African author defends her use of AI after publishing 370 books in 20 months

CAPE TOWN, October 23 — South African author Coral Hart, publishing under a pseudonym, has released over 370 books in just 20 months, all created using artificial intelligence. Despite facing criticism and death threats, Hart staunchly defends her use of AI in the publishing industry. In an interview with AFP, Hart revealed she received tens of thousands of hate messages and suffered several death threats due to her innovative approach.

Hart, who previously worked in publishing for 14 years, began experimenting with AI models around two years ago. She soon mastered three primary models: ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok, each excelling in different aspects of her writing process. The author explains that she defines the story concept, characters, and outlines before delegating the actual writing to her AI systems.

Hart demonstrates how she can now create an entire book in one sequence, a significant improvement from the earlier process of writing one paragraph at a time. Initially, the first draft of a book was subpar, requiring further enhancements through AI-driven developmental edits and human proofreading to address continuity issues and plot inconsistencies.

Despite the challenges, Hart claims that her books, many of which are romance novels, have been well-received, with one making it to Amazon's top 100 bestsellers and generating over a million sales, earning her more than $1 million in revenue this year. Hart has also trained hundreds of individuals in her AI authoring method and is developing software called Authorythm to further facilitate this process.

She contends that the real measure of her work lies in the sales, dismissing accusations of contributing to "AI slop." Hart emphasizes that readers are not interested in poorly written books and would return them. The author draws attention to another controversy involving a novel by Haitian-Canadian author Thelyson Orelien, which was withdrawn from France's Goncourt prize shortlist after accusations of AI usage.

Hart questions the necessity of labeling her work as AI-generated for negative attention, asking whether critics genuinely dislike her work or AI in general.