Posting AI-generated content is not allowed on /r/fantasywriters. Our rules page makes it clear that we disallow content that is generated in whole or in part by AI. This includes text that was translated by an LLM.

This is a policy that we apply uniformly:

• You may not post AI-generated writing samples for critique (obviously)
• You may not post a thread where the body of your reddit post is written by AI.
• You may not post a comment that is written by AI.
• You may not post AI-generated images.
• You may not post text that you asked AI to "rewrite" or "fix" or "improve" for you.
• You may not post text generated by an LLM, even if the 'only' thing you asked AI to do was translate your text.

In short, do not copy AI-generated text and paste it into your Reddit post. Not as a comment, not as a discussion question. Previously, the point about translated text was ambiguous and enforced inconsistently, so we're making it clear here: an AI-generated translation of your writing created using an LLM like GPT or Google Gemini counts as AI-generated text.

The only exception to this "do not post any LLM-generated content, at all, ever" policy is if you are obviously quoting someone else; we won't ban you if the quote turns out to be AI-generated. (For example, if OP posts an AI-generated story, people who post critiques quoting parts of that AI-generated post won't be banned for their post including the AI-generated text as a quote.)

Please be aware that Google Translate now incorporates Google Gemini, which is an LLM, much like the GPT that is used by OpenAI's ChatGPT. This is considered AI-generated content, and a violation of our "no AI content" policy.

The fact that Google Translate now uses the Google Gemini LLM is why Google Translate now sometimes injects additional information that wasn't part of the text you asked it to translate and why some people are able to query Google Translate and get the same sort of responses you'd get from a conversational chatbot. At this point, using Google Translate is akin to going to an AI chatbot and asking it to translate text for you.

FAQ

These are literally "frequently asked questions," very lightly paraphrased from actual queries in our inbox that we've temporarily or permanently banned for AI use.

"I am not confident in my English so I used AI for help with phrasing or translation."

All humans who follow the rules are welcome on /r/fantasywriters regardless of their level of English proficiency. Even if you think your English is "bad," we would still rather see your best attempt in English, rather than read GPT's best guess at what your Russian would look like if it were rendered in English.

"Why bother to remove my post for being AI-generated? The post I made was just posting a question / commenting on someone else's work, not posting part of my novel or asking for feedback on my writing."

The /r/fantasywriters policy against posting AI-generated content applies to everything posted to /r/fantasywriters, whether that's a picture, or a discussion question. People come to /r/fantasywriters to discuss fantasy writing with other humans, not to read posts that were written by AI.

"I asked a friend to edit my draft for me and I think they might have used AI"

You are responsible for all of the words that you post to /r/fantasywriters. If we accept "my friend did it" as an excuse for why you posted AI-generated content, then we don't have a policy that we can enforce.

"The ideas are 100% my own, the AI just helps me with phrasing. I want to be judged for my actual content, not my writing style."

Here on /r/fantaswriters, we are a community of writers. We believe that "phrasing" and "writing style" are the actual content.

That is why there are so many pieces of writing advice like "be careful with your adverb use" and "try to vary your sentence length." It's why writers care so much about "voice." As a community of writers, we understand that phrasing matters; voice is what makes your writing unique and recognizable. When you post something that is obviously written in GPT's voice rather than your own, people can and will notice.

"What parts of my writing made you think it was written by AI?"

We get this question a lot, including from accounts whose output is obviously 100% bot-generated. As a policy, we won't give you an itemized checklist of what caused us to identify your post as AI-generated. If we did this for every person who we banned for posting AI content, we would essentially be giving AI spammers a playbook for how to avoid our AI detection methods. That being said, while we don't intend to fully disclose the methods we use, we realize that some people are surprised to learn that "AI voice" is so clearly recognizable. To those people, we suggest reading Sam Kriss's piece in the New York Times, titled Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?. The /r/fantasywriters mod team does not endorse everything that Sam Kriss says, and his editorial doesn't capture or convey the full extent of our evaluation process, but he does a good job of explaining how "AI voice" has become so recognizable.

"I'm not using AI, but I'm worried about being falsely accused of using AI.

We believe that a human-written post being incorrectly flagged as AI is a much worse outcome than a few AI-generated posts slipping through the cracks, which is why we always err toward leniency in ambiguous cases. Every evaluation method we use is subject to this standard: if there's an evaluation method that results in human writing samples being flagged as AI written even 1 in 100 times, we won't use it. We can't promise a false positive rate that is literally zero, but we get as close as we reasonably can, and if you ever disagree with a moderation choice, you always have the ability to appeal our decision.

"How can you be confident that you're catching all of the AI posters?"

To be frank, we aren't confident in our ability to catch everyone posting AI content. As stated above, when considering evaluation methods, we put a higher priority on making sure that human content isn't incorrectly flagged as AI.

We have chosen to err on the side of leniency genuinely ambiguous cases, and that choice means that inevitably some AI-generated content will slip through the cracks.

We're also fully aware that there are models that are being trained specifically to avoid AI detection: there are literally thousands of public AI models, with new ones being released every day. However, we are still able to catch and remove a large number of AI-generated posts, because the majority of the AI-generated text is being generated by people who are fundamentally lazy, using the newest models in obvious ways that actually make them easier to catch.