Author Behind Hundreds of AI-Assisted Novels Speaks Out on Backlash and Sales

A South African author who writes under the pseudonym Coral Hart says she has published more than 370 books since February 2025 using artificial intelligence, and she is defending the method publicly despite a torrent of abuse. She gave the interview to AFP, which was carried by outlets including Kuwait Times and Malay Mail.

Hart, who is in her forties, told AFP she has received "tens of thousands" of hate messages and several death threats. She has become a symbol of AI's arrival in publishing, and social media users have attacked her with harsh insults. Few authors who use AI are willing to speak openly, she said, and she chose to do so because the industry needs to have the conversation.

How her AI writing process works

Before turning to AI about 20 months ago, Hart worked in publishing for 14 years and wrote several dozen books without it, according to AFP. She said it took her three months to learn the various AI models and build a framework that could produce a book.

She now switches between several tools. AFP reported that she uses ChatGPT, which she says is strong at dialogue but weak at prose, and Claude, which she credits with good story structure. She also uses others, including Grok.

Hart said the tools cannot simply be told to write a book. She said that approach produces a very poor result because the software has nothing to work from. Instead, she sets the story concept, the style, character details and chapter outlines, and only then does her system generate the text.

When she started, she said, she could generate one paragraph at a time, which usually took two or three prompts. She can now draft a whole book in one sequence. She told AFP that AI models have improved vastly since last year in prose, syntax and sentence structure.

The first draft is generally weak, she said. It goes back through AI for developmental edits and then again to catch continuity problems, such as unfinished character arcs, dropped plot threads and characters whose eye color changes. A human proofreader then removes any leftover signs of AI and does some rewriting. After that, she said, the book is usually ready to publish.

Sales, pen names and a software launch

One of Hart's novels reached Amazon's top 100 bestsellers, AFP reported. Most of her 371 titles, many of them romance, are aimed at specific readerships identified through market research.

By her own estimate, she has sold more than one million books across digital, print and audio formats. She said she has earned more than $1 million so far this year. She also publishes under more than 10 other pen names.

Hart now runs an operation that has trained several hundred people in her method, and she is preparing to launch software for AI authors called Authorythm, according to the report.

Why it matters for readers and writers

For book buyers, the practical point is disclosure. Hart told AFP she mentions her use of AI only when a sales platform requires it. That means a reader browsing an online store may not be able to tell from the listing how a book was produced, unless the platform asks for a label.

For working authors, Hart's account describes a high-volume model: hundreds of titles in under two years, built around market research and a small amount of human editing. She argues that sales settle the quality question. "Readers don't read rubbish books; they return them," she said. She rejects the label "AI slop," which AFP described as low-quality AI-generated content, and which critics regularly apply to her work.

Her critics' views are represented in the report only through the abuse she described receiving, and the sources do not detail specific objections beyond the "slop" accusation.

The Goncourt case she points to

Hart told AFP she has followed the dispute over a novel by Haitian-Canadian author Thelyson Orelien. The book was withdrawn from the shortlist for France's Goncourt prize after accusations that he used AI, and his publisher confirmed the withdrawal on Wednesday.

Hart said critics had praised the book and its sales were strong before the controversy. She asked whether people who need an AI label to dislike a work actually dislike the work or dislike AI itself. She also said the technology is not going away because a group of authors objects, adding that it will not be switched off or unplugged.

Around Prague, based on reporting by Kuwait Times, News of Bahrain, Malay Mail