AI slop or smart strategy? South African author Coral Hart defends Her 370 AI- assisted books in 20 months

South African writer Coral Hart has published more than 370 books since February 2025 using artificial intelligence, and she says she will keep defending the practice despite a wave of online abuse, according to an interview by news agency AFP. Hart, who is in her forties and writes under a pseudonym to protect her real identity, she has received "tens of thousands" of hateful messages and several death threats. Critics on social media have called her a "grifter" and a "villain," and she has become a symbol of AI's growing presence in publishing. Few AI-using authors speak publicly, but Hart said she chose to do so because the conversations "need to start" and the technology will not be switched off.

Before turning to AI roughly 20 months ago, Hart worked in publishing for 14 years and wrote several dozen books without it. She told AFP it took three months to learn the various AI models and build a workflow capable of producing a book.

She now alternates between tools, describing ChatGPT as strong at dialogue but weak at prose, Claude as strong on story structure, and Grok as "unhinged" but useful for spicier scenes. Simply asking an AI to write a book yields poor results, she said. Instead, she supplies the concept, style, character details and chapter outlines before her system generates a draft.

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The process has sped up considerably. Hart said she once needed two or three prompts to produce a single paragraph, whereas she can now draft a full book in one sequence. She said prose, syntax and sentence structure have all improved markedly since last year.

First drafts are typically weak, she said, so they are passed through AI again for developmental edits and continuity checks, covering issues such as flat middles, unfinished character arcs, dropped plot threads and changing eye colours. A human proofreader then removes any remaining "AI tells" and rewrites where needed.

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Most of her 371 titles, many of them romance, are tailored to specific readers using market research, though one novel reached Amazon's top 100 bestsellers. Hart estimates she has sold over one million copies across digital, print and audio formats, earning more than $1 million this year. She publishes under more than ten other pen names and discloses her AI use only when a sales platform requires it.

Her company has trained several hundred people in her method and plans to launch software for AI authors called Authorythm.

Hart, who is regularly accused of producing "AI slop," said sales are the true measure of quality. "Readers don't read rubbish books; they return them," she said.