“Novelist” brags she can generate a new book in 45 minutes but hides behind 21 pen names
A woman “novelist” is boasting of her ability to produce hundreds of romance novels with the help of AI and claiming that average human writers have no chance to keep up in modern times. It’s, of course, a travesty.
The so-called novelist, working under the pseudonym Coral Hart, told The New York Times in a recent interview that she began using Anthropic’s Claude AI last year to start churning out a bunch of romance novels.
Hart said she used 21 different pen names and generated more than 200 novels in 2025. She then self-published them on Amazon, and in all, the AI-baked novels sold around 50,000 copies.
Sure, some writers are extremely productive: Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson manage 2,000 words per day or more. But that’s still roughly one book per year – not hundreds.
Be shameless, but I won’t tell you my real name
Amazon, of course, has long had a huge problem with AI-generated books being sold on its website – and competing with those written by human authors.
The Authors Guild and similar organizations have also long said this was terribly unfair to true writers and their unique life experiences and talent.
“They cannot compete against industrialized content farms,” the Guild said already in 2023.
True, Amazon now requires authors to inform the company when content is machine-generated. But that doesn’t stop Hart from bragging about how well she’s doing and how she can churn out a book in just 45 minutes.
In the interview, she says, “If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?”
“If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?”
Carol Hart.
Hart goes on to claim she is also teaching other authors – all AI enthusiasts, we presume – how to speed up the writing process with tech.
Her advice for others is to “be shameless,” even though she doesn’t seem to apply it to herself: no one knows Hart’s real name as she fears being judged and stigmatized.
This might be a good idea because Hart’s way of writing is truly something worth judging. First, undeniably, veteran – and human – authors are worried they’re going to be outcompeted by the AI-reliant opportunists.
“It bogs down the publishing ecosystem that we all rely on to make a living. It makes it difficult for newer authors to be discovered, because the swamp is teeming with crap,” Marie Force, a best-selling romance novelist, told The New York Times.
Force was dismayed to discover that her novels were used to train Claude without permission. That’s, of course, another part of the theft: AI chatbots are coached using often illegally collected content.
“The problem with AI is the people who use AI”
In last year’s survey by Cambridge University’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, more than half (51%) of published novelists said they believed AI would entirely replace their work as fiction writers.
Some literary creatives also told researchers that they are forced to compete with AI-engineered books flooding the market, while others report finding books under their names on Amazon that they haven’t written.
That’s a huge issue. Surely, most true book lovers see the difference between original and machine-generated content but many online shoppers don’t, and when AI is infringing on copyright, human writers lose money.
Just as importantly, AI-generated prose simply isn’t real, and the people behind such fiction aren’t actually creative – unless you count smart prompting and synthetic text as art.
“Chatbots that can generate creative prose, poetry, or text that sounds like scientific writing or journalism are still only linking together word patterns they’ve calculated from their training data,” Emily Bender and Alex Hanna wrote in their book “The AI Con.”
“These are probabilistic algorithms trained on piles of work stolen from creative people.”
Some stories are truly sad. For example, Julie Ann Dawson, the founder and creator of Bards and Sages, a small publisher of speculative fiction and role-playing games, announced in March 2024 that she was closing up shop after twenty years.
Why? Because an influx of AI-generated content was at fault and became “the final straw.”
Describing hustlers like Hart, Dawson lamented: “The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don’t respect the written word. Those are people who think their ‘ideas’ are more important than the actual craft of writing, so they churn out all these ‘ideas’ and enter their idea prompts and think the output is a story.”
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