By Mike Pearl
Publication Date: 2026-02-09 10:00:00
“If I can create a book in a day and it takes you six months to write a book, who will win the race?”
This strange quote comes from an extraordinary New York Times article about “Coral Hart,” the pseudonym of a Cape Town, South Africa-based author who was anonymized by the Times to talk about her use of AI to mass produce “more than 200 romance novels” that she then sells on Amazon, without disclosing that they are products of AI models like Claude and Grok, and in the process, she says, she has about 50,000 sales brought in a six-figure amount.
The person known as Hart allowed the Times to use what appeared to be a real photo of her, smiling face and all, apparently in the service of a sideline of teaching people how to use AI to produce their own novels, courses that she markets under the name “Hart.”
The story states that Hart “requested anonymity” for reasons only seemingly related to professional expediency. She seems…
