Accused of contributing to ‘AI slop,’ South African author Coral Hart defends her use of artificial intelligence (AI) in her creative process. By her estimates, she has sold over a million books. This woman in her forties, who publishes under a pseudonym, has become a symbol of AI’s arrival in publishing.
She has published nearly 400 books since February 2025 with the help of AI, a process she says she owns despite criticism. On social media, insults abound, and she mentions ‘tens of thousands’ of hateful messages as well as multiple death threats. Very few authors are willing, in this context, to speak openly. ‘I chose to be the one who shows up and says: we need to have these discussions,’ she states. For her, the technology ‘is here’ and ‘they are not going to unplug it because authors decided so.’
A Multi-Step Method
Before starting, Coral Hart had fourteen years of experience in publishing and had written several dozen books without AI. She spent three months familiarizing herself with the models and building a method capable of producing a book. She now alternates between ChatGPT, ‘very good with dialogue,’ Claude, ‘incredible for prose,’ and Grok, which she describes as ‘completely uninhibited’ and recommends for erotic scenes.
According to her, a request that is too simple yields nothing good: ‘If you just ask ChatGPT or Claude “write me a book,” you’ll get something catastrophic, because you gave it nothing.’ She starts by defining a concept, a style, characters described in detail, and a list of summarized chapters, before ‘generating the book.’ The requests made to the AI, called prompts, were initially limited to one paragraph at a time. ‘Today, I can get a first draft in one go,’ she points out.
The first draft, which she systematically considers ‘bad,’ then goes through an AI tool that harmonizes the text and checks narrative continuity. A second pass works on style and flow, then a human proofreader reviews the details and rewrites a few passages. For her, the quality has clearly improved: ‘The syntax has improved, the sentence structure too.’
Sales and a Business
Of the 371 titles in her catalog, the vast majority are niche products, identified after a thorough market analysis. Only one novel has entered Amazon’s top hundred bestsellers. Coral Hart claims to have surpassed one million books sold, in digital, print, and audio formats, with over a million dollars in revenue in 2026 alone. ‘My books sell,’ she insists. ‘Readers don’t read bad books, they return them,’ an option allowed by Amazon.
She now runs an SME, which has already trained several hundred people in her method, and is preparing to launch a turnkey software for AI authors, called Autorythm. For her own production, she only mentions the use of AI if the sales platform requires it. ‘Suddenly, I’m supposed to disclose my creative process when for 16 years, no one ever asked me,’ she argues. She says she is willing to do it ‘for good reasons,’ but refuses for now: ‘Today, if I say it, people will hate me, add my name to a list, and threaten me.’
She also mentions the controversy surrounding Thélyson Orélien, whose novel was removed from the initial selection for the Goncourt Prize after accusations of AI use, a use confirmed by his publisher. Coral Hart points out that this book had received praise from literary critics and strong sales before the controversy. And she asks: ‘If the AI label makes you hate a book, is it the book you reject, or the AI?’
