Coral Hart defends AI writing after publishing 370 books

South African writer Coral Hart has defended using artificial intelligence to publish more than 370 books since February 2025, saying her books are selling. Hart, a pseudonym used to protect the author’s identity, said one novel reached Amazon’s top 100 bestseller list and estimated total sales across digital, print and audio formats at more than one million copies. The output has brought a fierce response. Hart has received tens of thousands of hate messages and several death threats, while social-media users have called her a “grifter” and a “villain.” She has also faced accusations of adding to “AI slop,” a term for low-quality AI-generated material. Hart said the process was not a matter of asking a chatbot to produce an entire novel from a single prompt. Before adopting AI, she had worked in publishing for 14 years and written several dozen works without it. She then spent three months learning different models and building a framework for producing books. She defines each project’s concept, style, characters and chapter plan before using ChatGPT, Claude and Grok to develop and draft the text. Hart described ChatGPT as strong at dialogue but weak at prose, Claude as useful for story structure, and Grok as helpful for “spicy scenes.” The first AI draft is generally poor, Hart said. Her process runs it through AI-led developmental editing and corrections, including checks for continuity, incomplete character arcs, dropped plot threads and inconsistent details. A human proofreader reviews the final version, correcting remaining AI indicators and rewriting where necessary. Hart said early efforts could produce only a paragraph at a time, often requiring two or three prompts for each paragraph. She now says she can draft a whole book in one sequence, and argues that models’ prose, syntax and sentence structure have improved substantially over the past year. Malay Mail reported that the 371 titles are largely targeted at particular readerships using market research, with many in romance. Hart said she had earned more than $1 million so far in 2026, publishes under more than 10 additional pen names, and reveals AI use only where a sales platform requires it. That disclosure question remains unsettled across publishing. Amazon Kindle requires writers to disclose AI-generated content, according to InsideHook, but does not require disclosure of AI-assisted content. Its guidelines define AI-assisted content as human-made work edited, refined, error-checked or otherwise improved with AI, and include AI brainstorming in that category. Hart heads an operation that has trained several hundred people in her approach and is preparing to launch Authorythm, software intended for AI authors.