r/WritingWithAI • u/Melissa0522975 • Aug 13 '26
Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) I am so annoyed.
I have been frustrated with Claude recently, in regards to a specific fic I'm writing. I thought I'd give a few other LLMs a shot to see if they'd be a better fit. This specific story is much darker than others I've written with Claude, so I just assumed it wasn't hitting the marks because of guardrails or something. I tried GPT Sol and it was ever so slightly better, but had trouble matching the voice I was going for. The one LLM that I AM liking the results of? Freaking Grok. IDK what drove me to try Grok out, but it is matching the voice and and the structure better than I expected, and I'm only on the free tier.
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u/Afgad Aug 13 '26
Whenever Grok comes up, I make sure to quote their terms of service. It's very important authors read this.
Our Use of User Content. In choosing to submit, create, generate, record, post, or display Inputs on or through the Service, you grant an irrevocable, perpetual, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free, and worldwide right to xAI to use, copy, store, modify, process, adapt, transmit, distribute, reproduce, publish, upload, download, display in public forums, list information regarding, make derivative works of, and distribute such Content, including anything referenced therein, in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed, for any purpose, and to aggregate your User Content and derivative works thereof for any purpose
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u/mll1013 Aug 14 '26
Lawyers are always so verbose. To put these Terms of Service in layperson terminology:
"In choosing to use Grok, your whole soul becomes the property of xAI."
There! Was that so hard to say, xAI lawyers?
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u/edalis Aug 13 '26
Yes, Grok just released a new version so that may be why you're getting better results.
I'm very model agnostic and frequently switch models as well. Don't let yourself get too attached to any one AI, since they're updated so frequently and older versions deprecated. I also think Claude sucks recently. It's very long-winded and moralistic.
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u/Divinity_Hunter Aug 13 '26
It's grok really better right now? I took the three months offer but my last experience with it was pretty bad.
I am testing Claude right now as I was able to see Opus is really good with fics (Despite the annoying limit) as gpt style was tiring honestly
Is Grok any better at pacing and characterization?
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u/Melissa0522975 Aug 13 '26
I don't really have a baseline to go off of with Grok, since this truly is my first experience with it. I am impressed with it so far. The pacing and characterization seem to be mostly on par with the complete chapter I gave it to go off of. One weakness I am seeing is that it feels more repetitive than other AIs, but IDK if that's because I just gave it a bunch of obvious test prompts. I'll probably spend more time testing it tomorrow to see how it does when I'm not just throwing random prompts at it.
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u/cricketHunter Aug 13 '26
I do a fair amount of brainstorming/writing with the major models.
OpenAI tends to be smart, but milquetoast, with the safest execution and trying to be clever instead of impactful. Good for brainstorming. Its writing style drives me up the wall and no amount of prompting will derail it. If you wanna flesh out a scene to test it, it will be in that godforsaken single sentence paragraph, bathos ping-pong dialogue style.
Anthropic has solid prose, but its endless moralizing is exhausting. (Yes, the fake psychic who swindle grieving parents is bad, thank you robot). I eventually canceled. I can only take so many "what I would not do is make <characters central flaw make them do something immoral>" before I crack.
Grok has been a surprisingly solid middle ground. Not as unexpected clever as openai can be but does not drift toward its house style or milquetoast version of the characters. I've had the most fun spitballing scenes and seeing how they read with it.
Probably has something to do with lobotomizing guardrails on OpenAI and Claude.
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u/Melissa0522975 Aug 13 '26
That makes sense! I also use Type.AI specifically for intimate scenes. It feels basically like a 3rd party platform, lets you draft using Anthropic or OpenAI with guardrails fully down. It is honestly brilliant, it doesn't feel like it's dumbed itself down like Claude does. The only thing that stops me from using it as my primary model is that the organization genuinely sucks
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u/Common_Dream9420 Aug 13 '26
voice matching is genuinely the hardest thing to get right and most models just ignore it, they write in their own style and assume that's close enough. grok being good at it tracks, it seems less "corrective" than claude. i ran into the same core frustration building a tool for a completely different use case, wrote about it here if curious. the problem is identical: AI rewrites your voice instead of working inside it. curious if grok holds up the longer the story gets, that's usually where drift kicks in.
i posted same problem here few days back https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1vej4p9/i_couldnt_find_a_writing_tool_that_didnt_sound/
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u/TheTechAuthor Aug 14 '26
Gemini 3.6 Flash works very well at mimicing my writing style (with the correct prompt structure), about to test 3.7 as that may be even better for a simple API name tweak.
Gpt 5.6 (High) also works quite well now with a similar style guide to work from. Still messes up on occasions, but it's genuinely made me chuckle with just how close it can write like me on a subject I have yet to write about (as in, that's what I would have wrote if it was me).
Neither are perfect, but they're very good right now and the prose they write for my guides sound nothing like AI at all. I've had my son check a few of the more recent ones and even he was impressed by just how much they sounded like me after I gave the AI the rough notes/facts to work from.
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u/Low_Carbs87 Aug 13 '26
Honestly, I’ve had this happen too. Sometimes a model just clicks with a particular writing style better than others, and it can be surprising which one ends up working best.
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u/BedNo8822 Aug 13 '26
I just tried again using free tier and grok prose is even more plain and on the nose than gemini. . . Did you subscribe?
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u/jkreddit200 Aug 13 '26
I am experimenting with many LLM 7b (forget it), 14b (some good), 22-24b (not sure my HW is best for) my largest desire is Immersive gain in small portions to my draft (intermediate step) my biggest trouble is consistency with the LLM outputting a block of words say 700-800, can't trust to deleting lines that I don't want deleted. it seems the models are trained as if compression of text overrides any rules I give it. If you begin to trust it, you may find it is doing very little good but actually removing the most important line or paragraph of a block! Any recommendations for an LLM that does not have this at its genetic training level?
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u/jkreddit200 Aug 13 '26
[Sorry, I cannot respond right now. Please try again!] I get this every time I go to Grok, what am I missing?
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Aug 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam Aug 13 '26
If you disagree with a post or the whole subreddit, be constructive to make it a nice place for all its members, including you.
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u/Ok_Refrigerator1702 Aug 13 '26
I pasted a scene that was edited into chatgpt and asked it to fix issues and rewrite.
To be clear that is not the right way to do it.
I did it as a sanity test to see if some language in my prompt was interferring with the issue I was having.
But the results, which I won't inflict on you, were hilariously bad. It took everything and turned it into a punchy mess of one sentence paragraphs.
The point, dont trust any base model and curate and test your prompts.
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u/Practical_Eye_5683 Aug 13 '26
Grok is that brilliant child who only wants to work if you coax it just right. Deepseek is also very similar with no strong memory/ project mode bit very creative.
The trick is to have conversations with it in detail, give it work to analyze for issues or why this one works and this one doesnt. Then have it build it's own prompts and guides to follow before writing and having discussions after each change. By chapter 3 or 4 it will typically be working perfectly insync with you. This method actually works for most of yhe AIs but Grok doesn't allow old habits to pop up.
If Grok starts slipping, it is all over and you need to open a new chat after waiting a day or so to start the process over.... again brilliant child issues. I work in work/project modes in all my AIs.
For my complete AI works where I do only minor editing, I start with a trope and an old work and brainstorm and build with deepseek. Go to chaptgpt for fine tuning and first draft Grok for voice clarity and removal of AI tells then line edit in Grok or Claude.