Coral Hart has produced 370 romance novels since February 2025 using AI, and her defense of their quality rests partly on a blunt observation: the “books are selling.” But sales leave a question unanswered when readers aren’t necessarily told how those books were made.
The South African novelist describes a process that takes more than a single prompt to produce a publishable romance. She combines human-designed plots and characters with repeated AI drafting and editing, followed by human proofreading. She discloses AI use where platforms require it, rather than routinely telling every buyer. That distinction matters: buying a book isn’t necessarily an endorsement of how it was made.
According to The Straits Times, Hart has around 14 years of publishing experience and initially wrote a few dozen romance novels without generative AI. She now sells her work under more than ten pen names that conceal her identity, using ChatGPT, Claude and Grok to generate prose.
Each chatbot gets a different assignment. ChatGPT is “really good at dialogue, terrible at prose,” Hart told Agence France-Presse. Claude, she said, is “terrible at sex drives.” Grok handles the “spicy scenes,” although she described it as “completely unhinged” at other moments. Rather than trusting one model with everything, she chooses between models whose weaknesses she openly acknowledges.
Recent improvements have also changed how much text she can generate at once. “I can now draft the whole book in one sequence,” Hart said. A full AI draft, though, isn’t the finished book she describes putting through editing and proofreading.
Her output is substantial either way. The source report describes her catalogue as nearly 400 books, while giving a specific total of 370. Measured from February 1st of 2025 through the reporting period, that works out to one novel every 1.75 days: roughly a book every other day, or about four a week.
Futurism takes a sharply skeptical view, calling Hart’s method a quantity-over-quality approach and questioning whether “author” accurately describes her role. It treats her appeal to sales as a rationalization, not proof of literary merit. The outlet also describes hostility toward AI as widespread among authors and readers, pointing to a novel pulled after its author was accused of using AI.
Hart says she has received “tens of thousands” of hate messages about her process. Even so, she sees herself as an ambassador for AI-assisted writing. “For the last 16 years, nobody’s asked me what my creative process was,” she told AFP. That reference to 16 years differs from the roughly 14 years of publishing experience reported by The Straits Times; the reporting does not reconcile the two.
Futurism interprets her willingness to court attention as an embrace of bad publicity. Hart’s position is that opposition won’t make the technology disappear: “This is here,” she told AFP. “They’re not going to switch it off or unplug it because a bunch of authors said so.”
The unresolved issue is what buyers know. Hart’s workflow involves more human input than pressing a button and publishing whatever appears, but that doesn’t settle the quality argument. Sales establish that people buy the books; without consistent disclosure, they cannot establish that those buyers knowingly accept AI-generated prose.
