South African woman made R16.55 million in less than a year using AI to write romance novels

warrenpridgeon said:
Lol... likely yes.

AI is a useful tool. And even using it for research/checking stuff for writing novels it's great. But at the number of books she put out there could not have been actual meaningful input from the human. There wouldn't even be enough time in the day to READ all of the output never mind actually be a part of the creation of it.

Right? Or am I just tripping because I'm jealous?
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I used AI for an article once. Ended up rewriting the entire thing with my own thoughts and research. Fact of the matter is AI doesn't come up with original stuff and you have to verify it in any case. In the long run it doesn't save you time professionally and the quality is directly related to the time you put in.
 
Good for her. She's making a decent living. People have been buying and reading crap like this long before AI was around. There's clearly a market for it and if people are willing to pay for it despite knowing it's crap then all power to her.
 
Azbubu said:
So that’s an AI generated image and not really her face then? Right?
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www.france24.com

370 books in 20 months: S.African author defends her use of AI

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.
www.france24.com www.france24.com

Coral Hart -- a pseudonym she uses to protect her real name -- told AFP in an interview she had 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.

"This is here... They're not going to switch it off or unplug it because a bunch of authors said so."
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I am curious how many in this thread have an AI side hustle? It seems to be the popular trend at the moment.

Book writing, spinning articles, AI writing, etc, is an old trade. Nothing new here; it has long been a pump and dump.

An interesting thing that I have noticed is how many businesses are anonymously building and selling AI products. No names, no entities. Just a website. Usually, payment processors have rules about this, so I am not sure how it passes review?

Also, alt personalities also seem to be a booming business right now.
 
There was a recent study about AI writing and as expected people hated it. However people in the study were also unable to tell which testing samples were AI generated.

I'm going to call bunk on this article though. So she made $1m so far this year, let's say she could push that to $1.2m by the end of the year.
But instead of doing that she's founding businesses to help others do the same, driving LinkedIn engagement, doing workshops every 3 odd weeks etc. over the course of the year?

If she was really making $100k per month she wouldn't be bothering with the rest, the whole setup stinks of your generic snake oil salesman that has to pretend to be successful.
 
Azbubu said:
Fake name but real face? That ought to protect her privacy and identity.
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Maybe AFP is pretending that they met a real person IRL. There are pushes to normalise AI personas. Humans are becoming a byproduct.

I am not hating on a success story; one has to appreciate the hustle unless it is a skelm business. Yes, snake oil is a thing and people are gullible, but this will never change. As said, as long as no one is being crooked, I am okay, AI or not.
 
Swa said:
I used AI for an article once. Ended up rewriting the entire thing with my own thoughts and research. Fact of the matter is AI doesn't come up with original stuff and you have to verify it in any case. In the long run it doesn't save you time professionally and the quality is directly related to the time you put in.
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I use it to corral the runaway threads in my head when I write blogs. But I don't like how it phrases stuff and the things IT decides to add. So dump all my thoughts/stories, have AI check if I'm saying anything that contradicts with itself or doesn't make sense and then type out the entire thing myself a second time.
 
warrenpridgeon said:
18 books a month?!
20 000 words per novel (average - some numbers go as high as 40 000)
370000 words a month
12333 words a day.... every day... for 20 months.

At best she would have been giving it high level plots.
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It's basically one book, every single business day.

The article says someone proof reads, and edits the mistakes etc. I guess they are busy reading and editing the entire day then.
 
Swa said:
I used AI for an article once. Ended up rewriting the entire thing with my own thoughts and research. Fact of the matter is AI doesn't come up with original stuff and you have to verify it in any case. In the long run it doesn't save you time professionally and the quality is directly related to the time you put in.
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The article said she spent 3 months learning AI, probably developing some framework she can reuse. So not simply prompting some chatbot as most AI beginners do.
 
zll said:
I don't buy it. While AI had gotten better, I still have to edit the hell out of it. Considering she's hiding most of her work, I suspect she's scamming people by making up claims to pump up the appeal of her course. This is standard YT scam nonsense.
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Or the 370 “books” are those 25 page short story vibes.

Which is the only thing I reckon AI could write coherently.
 
xera said:
The article said she spent 3 months learning AI, probably developing some framework she can reuse. So not simply prompting some chatbot as most AI beginners do.
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Ok, so it took her 3 months to create the training data. That's about how long it takes for a good writer to create a good book if they work non stop. So it may not be slop but it's still probably a lot of duplication or variation on the same theme.
 
Swa said:
Ok, so it took her 3 months to create the training data. That's about how long it takes for a good writer to create a good book if they work non stop. So it may not be slop but it's still probably a lot of duplication or variation on the same theme.
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Likely not even "training data", very likely their workflow/framework.

For my blogposts I've built a framework that goes like this:
- dump all my thoughts, anecdotes and the story as a deurmekaar thing
- claude orders it, warns me where I've contradicted myself, tells my "xyz sentence doesn't make sense" etc
- I make corrections, then retype everything myself again. Specifically leaving in things and sentence construction in a manner that Claude doesn't want me to... because that's how I talk/type.
- get Claude to take quotes from my typed out stuff and put them on relevant cards, via a template I made, for social media posts and gives me a "schedule" for rolling out the posts.

I effectively type out my post twice. I refuse to let Claude be the person coming up with the ideas or "writing" my blog posts. For CRUD stuff in code, shap, for creative stuff, as PART of the process (but not the creative part), shap.

I don't like AI gen music, stories or like ART ART etc. I've used quick AI gen pics for blog/social posts because I cannot afford to retain a graphic designer... but I do create graphics from scratch from time to time.

I'm currently building a game... some Claude involvement... but the characters all have backstories, along with the levels having stories. I'm hand drawing the characters on a tablet and I'm going to animate them after that. I could have been done three times over if I let Claude do all the work. I want it to be MY work though.
 
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