“If I can write a book in a day, and it takes you six months to write a book, who will win the race?”

That wonderful quote from a wonderful New York Times Article about “Coral Hart,” the pseudonym of a Cape Town, South Africa-based writer who was granted anonymity by the Times to talk about his use of AI to mass produce “more than 200 romance novels,” which he sold on Amazon without disclosing that they were products of AI models like Claude and Grok, and in doing so he took about 5,000 sales, he said about 5,000 sales.

The man known as Hart allowed a seemingly real photo of him, smiling face and all, to be used by the Times, apparently in the service of a side hustle teaching people how to use AI to create their own novels, courses he markets under the name “Hart”.

Hart, the story says, “requested anonymity” for what sounded like reasons related to professional recovery. He apparently works as a coach of some sort, and has some unnamed paper-publishing work he does under his real name. But he “feared that revealing his use of AI would hurt his business for that job.”

With his face now on the outside, how unrecognizable is he?

The Times’ Alexandra Alter wrote that during a Zoom conversation with Hart some unnamed AI program churned out instructions for an entire novel over the course of 45 minutes. The article also claims that by Hart teaching business, Plot Prosehe is working on a proprietary piece of software that “can create a book based on an outline in less than an hour, and costs between $80 and $250 a month.” It looks as good as the same piece of software Hart demoed directly to the Times.

The PlotProse website advertises something called “The PlotProse Skip-the-Draft Package,” which claims to produce novels that are 90% complete and “fully packaged for publication.”

the section The “February Launchpad” from PlotProse costs $300, and it’s described as a mentorship program “designed to take you from an idea to a fully published author with a three-book catalog.” AI-generated participants in their three books, can expect, “instant market momentum,” and “a complete, repeatable production and launch blueprint that allows you to continue growing your business in the coming months.”

The package, the site claims, “eliminates the blank page, replacing months of drafting with a data-backed manuscript and a clear, proprietary roadmap for rapid publication.”

The Times’ Alter wrote that Hart did not disclose the use of AI, even to readers, because Hart admitted that “there is a strong stigma around the technology.”

Hart’s strange choice to reveal his face but not his name is all the way to YouTube as well. Last year she appeared on the video podcast “Brave New Bookshelf” to discuss what she at the time called an experiment in writing under 20 different pseudonyms (“Coral Hart” is apparently a discontinued pseudonym when it comes to book bylines).

In the video, he sometimes misses and calls himself and his pseudonyms “we.”

“When I say ‘we’ it’s just me and those pen names personalities, right? My AI pen names are just run by me. That’s part of the experiment. See if I can replace the volume of publishing as opposed to throwing ad money at something. So far the answer is yes. I’m still putting out quality books. I’m just learning how to do it fast and stack up and juggle.

It amazes me that making six figures every year is both ambitious in one way, and small potatoes in another. Even if you don’t have any doubts about the secret sale of people made by AI text, creating millions of words of any kind of details-even loose ones-and then selling them on Amazon still involves a lot of mouse clicks or finger taps on the iPad 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 much more cash reward.

This has to be one of the stranger cases of doing it for the love of the game that I’ve seen. Whoever Coral Hart was, she was never like that SELFISH in terms of wants and money. It sounds like he just wants a decent income in exchange for turning the crank of a giant text meat grinder all day.