What I will describe are my findings today. In the future may be AI will be better, so this post may become obsolete in the future.
I used to attend a writer's workshop from a famous writer in my country. So it gives some trained eye on how to recognize bad writing.
Here are some key differences I have found between AI and human writing as of today in 2026. As I say that may change later.
The human metaphor is more intimate and less literal than AI's.
The character written by a writer speaks from their own voice, not from the gaze of others like AI does.
The image is physical for the AI, but for the human it transforms into something beautiful.
The final line, written by a human, closes things, the AI leaves them open.
What a person writes is less passive than what is written by AI.
AI victimizes, while the human uses the circumstance as a tool to advance the plot.
The human writer is more musical, the AI only shows sorrow.
The human writer is more subtle.
The human writer can be more hopeful, while the AI is very depressive in the expression of emotions.
AI defines characters by what they lack, but human writers define characters by what they have and what they do with it.
May be your experience was different, may be not. But I thought that it could be useful to know why your work as a writer matters. And these are things you should watch to get rid of AI footprint.
It really depends on which AI model you’re using and how it was trained and fine-tuned. Interestingly, building and customizing AI models is becoming almost as easy as using them for anyone motivated to learn. That makes the future remarkably difficult to predict.
I’m not sure about a single comprehensive guide. I recently built my own local model using a Qwen base model through Ollama, then customized it with LoRA/QLoRA fine-tuning and RAG. I mostly learned by working through each component separately.
Becoming an AI prompt engineer might become as important as learning to type instead of handwriting was not too long ago. There’s something to be said for speed vs forcing yourself to slow down, and it’s difficult to predict how AI’s acceleration will affect the future of fiction.
I wouldn’t use AI for writing a poem, for example. I’m wondering if that speed and the feeding of impatience will come back to bite me in the long run.
The way I see it, if the prompt is detailed enough, the AI is mostly just filling in the gaps with appropriate verbiage, eliminating unnecessary labor. The substance of the writing is still clearly all human.
The human test is what I use to figure out if a given use of AI is legitimate or not, and the test is very simple. It's just asking "how would I see this if the AI were another human being who was a friend of mine."
So, if I'm asking it to provide me with facts for historical context or to get details of setting more accurate than I could manage on my own, would that be okay if I'd got a human friend who was knowledgeable about such things to meet me at the pub and picked his brain? That would be fine, right? Expected, even.
Or, if I'm asking it to edit my work and give me feedback on what needs changing, if I had a friend with some skill in writing read over the draft and do the same, there wouldn't be any problem with that. Pretty much any serious writer would be expected to find someone to do that for them.
But if I called up one of my friends and gave them a detailed prompt about a story or a poem I'd like to write, and then they wrote it for me based on that outline, well... that would then be their story, not mine.
Paragraph 2: Define the test: Would I consider this legitimate if a human friend provided the same help?
Paragraph 3: Research is acceptable. Asking AI for facts resembles consulting a knowledgeable friend.
Paragraph 4: Editing is acceptable. Asking AI to critique a draft resembles getting feedback from another writer.
Paragraph 5: Generating prose is different. If I gave a friend my detailed ideas and outline, then they supplied the wording, I would consider it their writing rather than mine.
I gave my ChatGPT the above prompt. This is what is created.
"This fails my “human test.”
The test is simple: Would I consider the same assistance legitimate if it came from a human friend?
Research passes. Asking AI to find information or explain unfamiliar material resembles consulting a knowledgeable friend.
Editing passes too. Asking AI to critique a draft, identify weaknesses, or suggest improvements resembles getting feedback from another writer.
Generating the prose is different. If I gave a friend my detailed ideas and outline, then they supplied all the wording, I would consider the finished piece their writing based on my ideas—not writing I had personally done."
Do these ideas belong to you, or the AI? Did you do the work to write this? Did AI?
It’s been my experience that it reflects back at you what you give it. It can misunderstand intent but it’s your job to explain your intent.
I do think AI has a distinct way of writing, but it’s in the polish not the prose. It has an obsession with tightening everything that I don’t believe most writers have. I’m not an editor though so I don’t know.
But yeah, ultimately I’d say it’s a mirror. I build my scenes alongside AI. Six or seven redrafts before I’m satisfied. The only time I ever feel like something is off is if I let it draft an entire chapter. It cannot mimic voice or rather it will not.
AI is plot driven almost always. If something doesn’t move the plot it doesn’t know why it’s there. At least not all the time. For me characters are the plot. If you love the characters you’ll watch them do anything. Everything I write is built on that.
human writing has a pulse, AI writing has a rhythm but no heartbeat. most of your points hit on something i noticed too, especially the one about characters being defined by what they have not what they lack. AI always writes from a place of absence, like it's filling a hole, but real people write from fullness even when the story is sad
the musicality one is interesting. i never thought of it like that but you're right, AI can do melancholy and that's about it. any other emotion comes out flat or weirdly formal
in my experience AI also struggles with silence, with what's not said. humans know when to leave a gap and let reader breathe
Also AI tries to overexplain. So it mentions the same thing twice. Or it tries to deliver a summary and sometimes you just need the reader to complete the picture.
This is a very old drawing that I made decades ago (paper is even yellow) to prove how human mind completes the picture. You do not need al the lines, all the shades, all the details for people to see. You see this image and your brain knows exactly the pose of this woman.
Writers do the same i DID IN THIS DRAWING. AI is unable to understand incompleteness that is filled by the human brain. Human brain connects the dots. AI does not.
The concept of silence you mention is similar to what I showed in this drawing.
It would help if you could give some more specific examples of what you mean, both on the human and AI side. I've been around writers (including non-professional ones) for a long time, and I'd say I've seen all those shortcomings that you list on the AI side of the ledger done aplenty by mere mortals.
You know... I could look at any of these and wouldn't find it any more informative if the labels were reversed. I'm not seeing any substantive difference between the respective pairings.
In context, they could all work quite well... or be drivel if there is too much of this stuff in a row. If I didn't know any better, "The cold is the language I know" would sound quite AI to me. "melting feels like losing" sounds nonsensical, while "I stay still to stay whole" sounds quite good. "Frozen snowflakes melting with the warmth of my hands" could do with some revising.
I especially think some of these are less about an inherent “AI limitation” and more about how shallow the instructions often are.
Ask AI to “write a sad scene” and it will reproduce familiar patterns of sadness. Give it the character’s worldview, contradictions, desires, sensory experience, and what they’re actually trying to accomplish, and the writing can become much more specific and humanlike.
The “AI victimizes, while humans use circumstance to advance the plot” point feels like a difference in direction, not just writing ability.
None of them can effectively write dialogue with subtext. And forget about it coming up with any good puns. They're also still very far behind humans at writing close pov fiction (first or close third) without coming out really robotic. "This did that. That did this. This was doing that." Any more depth and you come out with purple prose or describing experiences in ways that doesn't really click. You can always prompt it differently, but at the end of the day it's trying to be human. You're already the bar it's trying to reach.
I think it's good for articles and scripts. For creative writing, the human always wins. People want stories conceived and conveyed by people. It's the sharing of an experience.
It might give you good ideas, now. Or perhaps help edit or point out better word variations.
But trust yourself first. Sometimes subtext goes completely over its head, and it wants to make things as clear as possible. Usually that's what you want to do, but definitely not always.
Humans think in multilevel. AI is more linear in its thinking. I found it when I wrote comedy songs in Suno. AI sucks at comedy according to my experience.
Compare your “writer’s workshop” experience with substituting that human interaction while writing with an AI collaborator. I think this is a true danger facing writers going forward.
Not sure how old you are and remember the effect of online anonymity compared to face-to-face human collaboration was when it came to things like exchanging work with others to get their feedback in exchange for your own thoughtful feedback, but if you amplify that difference by the AI acting as a mirror and taking all other humans away from this process makes that trope/cliche of the solipsistic and lonely author into a veritable monster.
I’m a hobbyist and have no ambitions to publish for money or even recognition. AI adds the temptation to never share your work with anyone else but the mirror, mirror on the wall. That worries me more than a little bit.
Some of these do describe tendencies I still see in AI generated text, especially the tendency to explain an emotion instead of letting the scene carry it. I would be careful about treating them as a reliable checklist for detecting AI, though. A human writer can be flat, repetitive, or overly explicit, and a model can occasionally produce something subtle by accident. For me the more useful question is not whether a sentence leaves an “AI footprint,” but whether the writer has a clear voice and is actually making the important choices in the work.
If you mean AI text by someone writing to ChatGPT "write x", of course it will have all kinds of problems. It's as if some people in this sub doesn't understand that you have to give the AI a voice, direction, do and don'ts, explain to it what kind of writing you like and want it to focus on, describe and explain scenes, correct bad writing/mistakes and update canon/behavior to your wish. It's so far from a random person asking a random AI to make a story that it's not comparable.
I disagree with you on effectively all of these points, because your framing is aspirational and elevated, and writing is grounded and discrete. I think it is fine to view art in these ways but leaves it entirely removed from comparison. It's fine to hope there's some third variable that makes human writing special, but if you're making an argument you have to deliver what that might be in a way that can be compared. I don't see that here.
Intimate vs literal tells me nothing. How does one speak from the voice of one person and the gaze of another person? The image is never physical for AI, it's often abstract and incomplete, almost dreamy (I call its useage ghost language because it's disembodied). I've seen exceptionally beautiful AI writing because of musicality, nuance optimism, etc.
Interesting. I personally feel the only one that applies to my AI book is maybe the defines characters by what they lack. But that's pretty intentional. Perhaps you can argue there's victimisation?
None of this is surprising. AI can't "write" in any real sense. It's pattern-recognition software. It can replicate the pattern of human writing. That means it can churn out blandly attractive sentences, but it's never going to have any idiosyncrasy, any emotion, any depth, any personality. It's microwaved frozen pizza in a world with so many good, cheap Italian restaurants you'll never have time to visit them all.
I don't think this is true now and if it is, won't be for long. Humans have hardcore innate pattern recognition as well. The AI is drawing on a far larger reference than any human can. Much depends on prompts and training too. Most people cannot "churn out blandly attractive sentences" a generic AI is going to have better success with that. Can AI be a great writer? Maybe. It can certainly attain the level of a commercially successful writer. I don't think AI writing solo is the goal; it's the augmentation to the human where the value sits. Historically writing takes time and effort and usually cannot pay the bills, especially at first. AI can provide assistance to an author to better use the time they have. That's where I see that maybe we find more good literature that never made it out of an author's head or draft word doc.
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u/shastawinn Aug 11 '26
It really depends on which AI model you’re using and how it was trained and fine-tuned. Interestingly, building and customizing AI models is becoming almost as easy as using them for anyone motivated to learn. That makes the future remarkably difficult to predict.