“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?”
That strange quote is from an extraordinary New York Times article about “Coral Hart,” the pseudonym of a Cape Town, South Africa-based writer granted anonymity by the Times to talk about her use of AI to mass produce “more than 200 romance novels,” which she then sells on Amazon without disclosing that they’re the products of AI models like Claude and Grok, and in so doing she has pulled in six-figures, she says, off of about 50,000 sales.
The person known as Hart allowed what seems to be a real photograph of her, smiling face and all, to be used by the Times, apparently in service of a side hustle teaching people how to use AI to manufacture their own novels, courses she markets under the “Hart” name.
Hart, the story says, “requested anonymity” for what only sound like reasons related to professional expediency. She apparently works as some kind of coach, and has some unnamed role in publishing—work she performs under her real name. But she “fears that revealing her A.I. use would damage her business for that work.”
With her face now out there, how anonymous can she possibly be?
The Times’ Alexandra Alter writes that during a Zoom conversation with Hart some unnamed A.I. program churned instructions into a full novel over the course of 45 minutes. The article also claims that through Hart’s teaching business, Plot Prose, she’s working on a proprietary piece of software that can “generate a book based on an outline in less than an hour, and costs between $80 and $250 a month.” It sounds a great deal like the same piece of software Hart demoed directly to the Times.
The PlotProse website advertises something called “The PlotProse Skip-the-Draft Package,” claiming to produce novels that are 90% complete and “fully packaged for publication.”
The section on the “February Launchpad” from PlotProse costs $300, and it’s described as a mentorship program “designed to take you from a single idea to a fully published author with a three-book catalogue.” Participants who AI-generate their three books, can expect, “instant momentum in the market,” and “a complete, repeatable production and launch blueprint that allows you to keep scaling up your business in the following months.”
The package, the site claims, “eliminates the blank page, replacing months of drafting with a data-validated manuscript and a clear, proprietary roadmap for rapid publication.”
The Times’ Alter writes that Hart doesn’t disclose the use of AI, even to readers, because Hart claims that “there’s still a strong stigma around the technology.”
Hart’s odd choice to reveal her face but not her name extends to YouTube as well. Late last year she appeared on the video podcast “Brave New Bookshelf” to talk about what she was at the time calling an experiment to write under 20 different pseudonyms (“Coral Hart” is apparently a discontinued pseudonym when it comes to book bylines).
In the video, she occasionally slips up and refers to herself and her pseudonyms as “we.”
“When I say ‘we’ it’s just me and those personalities of pen names, right? My AI pen names are run just by me. That was part of the experiment. See if I could substitute volume of publishing as opposed to throwing ad money into something. So far the answer is yes. I’m still putting out quality books. I just learned how to do it fast and stack and juggle a lot.”
It strikes me that making six-figures per year is both ambitious in a way, and in another way, small potatoes. Even if you have zero qualms whatsoever about secretly selling people AI-generated text, generating millions of words to any sort of specifications at all—even loose ones—and then marketing them on Amazon still involves a whole lot of mouse clicks or iPad finger taps or whatever the case may be. And at the same time, you can almost certainly scam people out of crypto with much less effort and a whole lot more monetary reward.
This has to be one of the stranger cases of doing it for the love of the game I’ve seen. Whoever Coral Hart is, she doesn’t exactly seem greedy in terms of wanting money. She seems like she truly just wants a decent income in exchange for turning the crank on a giant text meat grinder all day long.
Read the full article here
