South African writer defends AI-assisted output of 370 books

CAPE TOWN: South African author Coral Hart has become the emblem of AI's emergence in the publishing world by publishing over 370 books since February 2025, utilizing artificial intelligence. Despite facing criticism and threats, Hart passionately defends her AI-assisted writing process. The author, who chose to use the pseudonym Coral Hart, has received tens of thousands of hate messages and death threats.

Few AI-assisted authors are willing to speak publicly due to the hostile environment. Hart acknowledged the improvements in AI models, noting that the prose, syntax, and sentence structures have been enhanced. She uses multiple AI models, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok, each excelling in different aspects of writing. Hart defines the story concept, style, character details, and chapter outlines before generating the book using AI.

The first draft of a book requires multiple rounds of AI editing and human proofreading to fix any issues. Although one of her novels reached Amazon's top 100 bestsellers, most of her 371 books are tailored to specific readers based on market research. Hart's AI-assisted writing has earned her over $1 million this year and she now runs an operation that has trained hundreds of people in her method and is preparing to launch software for AI authors called Authorythm.