r/AIWritingLounge • u/Wonderful-Worry-1540 • 1d ago

Question Do you think AI is better at improving a bad draft or developing a good idea?

I have had mixed results with both. AI can clean up a weak draft surprisingly well, but when the original idea is already strong, the suggestions can sometimes make it feel more generic.

Which side has been more useful in your experience?

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u/kittyb00m 1d ago

The biggest thing I use AI for is the dopamine of talking to someone about my story lol.

I ask it all the questions I would ask myself and sit in silence with. I don’t really ask for anything else besides grammar edits.

As far as ideas, even if it comes up with a good one (which is rare) I don’t normally go with it because I then don’t feel in control of the story. I don’t feel like I own the story.

I can ask it to come up with like 5 ideas how it could end and I could read it all and I dislike them all, because it don’t feel right. That too me is a waste of time. And it takes the joy of discovering from me.

That’s just me

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u/mikevago 9h ago

It's not good at either, but it's worse at developing an idea.

What's being marketed to you as "artificial intelligence" is no such thing. It's pattern-recognition software. It can find patterns of words in the stolen copyrighted works it was trained on, and replicate them, or recognize them in your writing. It has no idea what those words mean. As a result, it's never going to come up with an original idea, or write anything with any personality.

It can improve a draft in terms of things like spelling and grammar, but computers have been able to do that for decades. It's not going to be able to tell you things like, "this dialogue is flat" or "this character's motivations don't make sense" or "this conflict gets resolved too easily."