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South African author defends use of AI to write her books

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Coral Hart - a pseudonym she uses to protect her real name - has published more than 370 books in just 20 months using AI.

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This story was published by Africanews on October 23, 2026 and curated on Africa Front.

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South Africa News, African Technology, Arts & Culture

October 23, 2026

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South African author defends use of AI to write her books

The publisher of Haitian-Canadian writer Thelyson Orelien said Wednesday it was dropping him after it confirmed he used artificial intelligence to help write his novel "It Was Either That or Die."

Amid this controversy, South African writer Carol Hart has defended using the technology which has helped her write 370 book since February last year.

"Grifter" and "villain" are some of the insults on social media to describe the author who, in her forties, has become the symbol of AI's arrival in publishing.

Coral Hart, a pseudonym she uses to protect her real name, said she has received "tens of thousands" of hate messages and several death threats.

In this hostile environment, few authors using AI agree to speak publicly and show their faces.

"I chose to be the one to step up and say, these are conversations we need to start having," Hart said.

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.

She says it took her three months to familiarise herself with the various AI models and build a framework capable of producing a book.

Now she juggles between ChatGPT, which is "really good at dialogue, terrible at prose"; Claude, "really good story structure, terrible at sex drives"; and others like Grok, "completely unhinged" but good on "spicy scenes".

"If you say, ChatGPT, write me a book, or, Claude, write me a book, you're going to get a flaming dumpster fire of trash back because it doesn't have anything (to work with)," Hart said.

She said she defines her story concept, style, details of the characters, and chapter outlines. And only then will her system generate the books.

The first draft of a book is generally not good, the writer said.

It is run through AI for "developmental edits" and then again to fix any issues. At the end of this process, there is a final check by a human proofreader.

Although one of her novels made it into Amazon's top 100 bestsellers, the vast majority of her titles, many of them romances, are tailored to specific readers based on market research.

She has sold more than one million books, by her own estimate, in digital, print, and audio formats, earning more than $1 million so far this year.

On the debate around Orelien’s novel, which was withdrawn from the shortlist for France's Goncourt prize after the AI accusations, she said critics had praised the book and sales were strong before the controversy.

"If you need an AI label to hate something, do you hate it, or do you hate AI," she asked.