Author from South Africa Wrote Books with AI and Earned Over $1 Million

The South African writer known by the pseudonym Coral Hart has reported earning over $1 million since the beginning of the year thanks to books created with the help of artificial intelligence. In approximately 20 months, she has published 371 books, primarily romance novels, and estimates she has sold over a million copies in digital, print, and audio formats. One of her novels made it into Amazon's top 100 bestsellers. However, the author has faced harsh criticism online: she claims to have received tens of thousands of abusive messages and several death threats. Hart does not disclose her real name.

It took the writer about three months to master AI tools and develop a workflow. She uses several models, assigning tasks among them: ChatGPT for dialogues, Claude for plot development, and Grok for specific explicit scenes. However, the generation does not start with a simple request to write a novel. First, Hart independently determines the concept, style, character traits, and chapter plans, after which she assigns the neural networks to prepare the text. Initially, she had to generate individual paragraphs in several stages, but now, she says, a draft of an entire book can be obtained in one pass. She also notes improvements in prose quality and sentence construction in modern models.

The first draft of the manuscript usually requires several stages of refinement. Hart uses AI to edit the structure, check the sequence of events, complete storylines, and develop characters. Then, a human proofreader reads the text, correcting remaining errors and rewriting certain fragments. Most books are targeted at specific readerships, and their themes are chosen based on market research. Hart currently leads a team that has trained several hundred people in her approach and is preparing to launch the Authorythm program for authors using AI. She discloses the use of neural networks in her books when required by marketplace rules. The writer evaluates criticism related to the quality of such works through customer reactions and sales.