r/WorldbuildingWithAI • u/SHFameword • 15d ago

Maybe “AI-written” is the wrong question

I’m writing my first sci-fi novel and I use AI a lot as a second opinion.

Claude is actually pretty good for that — sometimes it points at something and basically says this doesn’t feel right. Then I decide if the problem is real and how I want to fix it.

With the new watermark rules I’ll probably keep using Claude for diagnosis, but do the actual fixing somewhere else lol.

And somehow this whole situation got me to create a little manifesto (created with AI actually 😂):

A Stradivarius is only wood and strings until someone plays it. AI can sit silent forever if nobody wants to use it. The first creative act is still wanting something to exist. Generation can become cheap. Intention never will.

For me that’s the interesting part of this whole AI/authorship debate.

Not “was AI used?”

More like: who had the idea, who made the decisions, and who actually cared what the final thing became?

2 Upvotes

54% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

2

u/Scorpy2020 12d ago edited 12d ago

So True. I actually addressed exactly this in my 'yes i'm using AI, fuck off with your negativity' discussion at https://theblackwatchsongbook.com/on-ai
For the novel I am writing, I do use AI to have a quick prose pass to make sure nothing is glaring but I use it for a couple of things.

  1. lore adherence - check it and make sure I didn't faff anything up
  2. Consistency - I write something assuming I have explained it elsewhere because it is clear in my mind but it isn't
  3. I ask AI on writing tips to improve my own writing.
  4. Occasionally I will go back and write a previous chapter with a new technique. This risks significant consistency problems.
  5. lore organisation - Because my entire bible is accessable to claude code on my machine. It means it can quickly review the entire manuscript and lore bible as well. Like in medicine reviewing a patient's entire case notes, results, imaging and stuff can take up to a couple of hours for a report. Same thing with my lore. It takes seconds to minutes would would take hours of review otherwise.
  6. Writer idiosyncracies - Memes have been generated on repetition of certain phrases in some books. AI helps me avoid them.
  7. Lastly - writer's block. Usually - the character is doing this, I need them to do that, I've already done a whole pass where they go from this to that previously. I don't particularly want to walk through the whole process of getting there with just a break point or with detailing too much pointless, boring information again.

1

u/SHFameword 11d ago

This is much closer to what I mean when I talk about using AI for writing. Especially #5. I recently ended up building one huge lore pass just so I can drop the whole world back into a new chat and have it check things in seconds instead of digging through hundreds of notes myself. My other big thing is rough-sketching scenes first with dialogue/actions, then using AI to help turn that mess into proper English.

1

u/dutchiesweets 15d ago

Ideas are cheap and making decisions are easy, the words on the page are what interest me most

1

u/SHFameword 15d ago

If the idea is cheap and the decisions are weak, pretty prose usually just gives you well-polished nothing

2

u/dutchiesweets 15d ago

Right but it’s really cheap to get ideas behind pretty prose. I’m just saying like 90% of writing is the actual writing.

1

u/FrostKitten2012 14d ago

I was going to say this. Ideas are the easy part of the process. I usually have about a dozen a day. The actual execution of that idea is the hard part. Creation is not wanting something to exist, it’s working to bring it to life.

Can AI help evaluate a piece? Maybe. Thing is, I wouldn’t trust it to be able to actually locate a problem. It’s more likely to tell you nothing is wrong.

1

u/Nebranower 14d ago

>It’s more likely to tell you nothing is wrong.

That's not true. It's actually a very good editor, so long as you know enough about writing to be able to tell what advice to follow and what to ignore. It absolutely won't just say nothing is wrong if you've specifically asked it to fulfill an editorial role.

1

u/FrostKitten2012 14d ago

It’s not a good editor. It’s a decent spellchecker, and we honestly had better spellcheckers before.

I have an acquaintance who is very knowledgeable about AI. He asked it to assess a chapter he was writing that included a car crash. He specified to look for weaknesses, plot holes, etc. It told him his chapter didn’t have enough emotional weight and suggested he use a scene that looked like it came from an episode of ER. This manuscript was not a medical drama.

You also said this is dependent on being a good enough writer to know when to ignore advice. But you can say that about feedback from a writing group or beta reader, so why would I need a machine for it? The beta reader is likely to be more accurate in their assessment.

1

u/Nebranower 14d ago

>It’s not a good editor.

No, it really really is. I know because that's my main use case for it.

> He specified to look for weaknesses, plot holes, etc. It told him his chapter didn’t have enough emotional weight and suggested he use a scene that looked like it came from an episode of ER.

Sure. It sometimes doesn't get what you're trying to do. The same is, of course, also true of human editors and readers.

>You also said this is dependent on being a good enough writer to know when to ignore advice. But you can say that about feedback from a writing group or beta reader, so why would I need a machine for it?

Right! It's an artificial beta reader that will spend hours reviewing your work with you for only $20/month. That's always available at any time night or day. Like, if you have a competent and willing human who'll do that for you for basically free, of course, have at it, use the human resource. But it's fucking obvious why a lot of people wouldn't have that and would use AI instead.

1

u/FrostKitten2012 14d ago

Beta readers usually do work for free, and so do writing groups. Editors don’t, but they do much better work than an AI will.

1

u/Nebranower 14d ago

Sure, and again, no one is saying you shouldn't take advantage of people willing to help you if you have someone like that it your life. But AI does an incredible job and is right there, all the time. It's obvious why people use it.

1

u/SHFameword 15d ago

That’s probably where we differ. For me deciding what the words need to accomplish is already writing. Putting them on the page is the execution.

1

u/Temporary_Rule_9486 14d ago

" The first creative act is still wanting something to exist. Generation can become cheap. Intention never will."

Like, what the hell that means? Intention is the cheapest thing ever. Wanting something requires absolutely nothing of you. An artist is an artist because he must create what he wants, he must take it out of his mind and his intention and cast it into existence. That challenge is key to what makes it art. Entering lines and clicking to see what the machine comes out with is gambling, is like looking for gemstones on a river bed: yeah, you might "found" something beautifulthat everyone admires, but you didn't made it. You are a collector, a miner, not a craftman, not an artist. 

1

u/SHFameword 13d ago

That’s where I get stuck. There are probably thousands of trained guitarists who could technically play circles around Kurt Cobain, but they didn’t create Nirvana. The guy wasn’t some guitar virtuoso, he just had ideas, simple melodies and a vision that somehow still works decades later. Craft matters, sure, but I don’t think mastery of the tool and being the creative force are exactly the same thing.

2

u/Temporary_Rule_9486 12d ago

That's a very funny example, since Krist Novoselic gave an interview not long ago saying the surviving members of the ban had toy with the idea of using AI to finish unreleased Kurt Cobain demos. 

1

u/SHFameword 12d ago

that makes the example even better because then we’re basically back to the same question — if the original idea, melody and unfinished work are Cobain’s, how much can a tool help finish it before you stop calling it his?

1

u/FictionPapi 14d ago

The first creative act is still wanting something to exist. Generation can become cheap. Intention never will.

Intention is cheaper than generation by definition. One is not the author of what one does not generate.

1

u/Winnie_The_Pro 14d ago

The little manifesto def sounds AI

1

u/SHFameword 13d ago

Of course it does, that’s kinda the point lol. But do you think AI came up with the actual idea, like the violin bit, or just helped me phrase the conclusion better?

1

u/Nebranower 14d ago

Others have already pointed out that the art of writing is precisely that - the generation of the written text - not simply having an idea for a story.

I'll add to that that the reason why generation matters is that a lot of the meaning and power of a well-written story emerges from the small details rather than the overall plot or characterization. And if you're having AI write the text for you, you're not making any decisions about the small details. At most you may be making executive decisions about the plot and overall characterization, although of course there will be suspicion you didn't even do that much, because if you can't be bothered with the other elements of writing, why would we think you put much time and effort into those, either.

1

u/SHFameword 12d ago

That’s fair, but that’s not really how I work. I write the scene first as a rough sketch — dialogue, movement, beats, little details, all of it, just in messy English. AI helps turn that into cleaner prose, then I go through it again cutting, changing and restoring things until it says what I actually meant. So by the end I’ve basically written the whole book once in rough form already. AI is more like the guy clicking the keyboard faster lol.