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Cape Town: South African writer Coral Hart has published more than 370 books since February 2025 using artificial intelligence, a process she passionately defends despite criticism and threats.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cGrifter\u201d, \u201cvillain\u201d \u2014 insults abound on social media to describe the author who, in her forties, has become the symbol of AI\u2019s arrival in publishing.<\/p>\n Coral Hart \u2014 a pseudonym she uses to protect her real name \u2014 told AFP in an interview she had received \u201ctens of thousands\u201d of hate messages and several death threats.<\/p>\n In this hostile environment, few authors using AI agree to speak publicly and show their faces.<\/p>\n \u201cI chose to be the one to step up and say, these are conversations we need to start having,\u201d Hart said.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is here\u2026 They\u2019re not going to switch it off or unplug it because a bunch of authors said so.\u201d<\/p>\n Before she started writing with AI around 20 months ago, Hart had been working in publishing for 14 years and written several dozen works without the technology.<\/p>\n It took her three months to familiarise herself with the various AI models and build a framework capable of producing a book.<\/p>\n Now she juggles between ChatGPT, which is \u201creally good at dialogue, terrible at prose\u201d; Claude, \u201creally good story structure, terrible at sex drives\u201d; and others like Grok, \u201ccompletely unhinged\u201d but good on \u201cspicy scenes\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you say, ChatGPT, write me a book, or, Claude, write me a book, you\u2019re going to get a flaming dumpster fire of trash back because it doesn\u2019t have anything (to work with),\u201d Hart said.<\/p>\n