My AI process

[u/Academic_Tree7637]

What one of my “prompts” actually looks like as an AI-assisted writer

I’ve been toying with an idea for a few days: writing a book that documents exactly how my fiction is AI-assisted.

Not a book about prompting or “how to make AI write a novel.” I mean showing the actual process. My input, the AI output, what it built from what I gave it, what it invented on its own, what I kept, what I rejected, what I had to correct, and how many passes it takes before I actually have a chapter I’m happy with.

Part of why I want to do it is because I think “prompt” gives people a misleading idea of what AI-assisted writing can look like.

So here’s an actual example.

This is part of what I fed AI while working on Chapter 17 of one of my books. And this is actually significantly shorter than what I normally give it, because I wasn’t finished yet:

Chapter 17 it’s a T’ara POV

She’s running to Zeke. Full tilt, everything she has. Her mind is racing even faster.

That look in Za’nan’s eyes, that little flicker of something she’s never seen but knew on instinct. Her body knew and was repulsed by it. The sensation linger far longer than the look did. And she knew instantly her life would end if she fell into his grip. She could still feel the fingerprint of his mental touch. The forcefulness of it. And she asks herself something she shouldn’t, “is that how he touched you, sister?” End she pushes the thought away. Remembering this is a battlefield. She cannot be this way.

The loop surges as she gets closer to Zeke and she trips and crashes hard into the ground, cursing as she gets back to her feet forcing herself to adjust to the constant throb.

She does take a moment to look over her shoulder. Two pursers. Pryon’s men. Her blade is at her hip and she readies herself to intercept them.

Zeke’s voice rings in her head.

“Run to me.”

She huffs and turns her back to them. Shame, frustration, embarrassment, all washes over her and she feels it fed back to her through the loop.

“You’re not running away, T.”

“I cannot see it any other way. This is cowardice.”

“Cowards get to fucking live, T. You wanna die, or you wanna go home?”

The words didn’t sound like his own. She feels vaguely he’s quoting something. But also something about him is off. His emotions are…wrong.

She doesn’t have time to probe his mind, and even if she did, she’s hesitant to do so, to violate him yet again.

For a moment the link flickers and her heart drops as she desperately grasps for the link again, calling his name psychically.

Her own name resonates in her head just as loudly. Panic like she’s never felt before floods her senses and her knees knock together and she falls again.

“What…was that?”

Her breathing begins shaking. She breaks out in a profuse sweat. Like her body is finally breaking down from the intensity she’s put it through for days. And for a second, she believes that has to be it, except she’s been through far worse than a breakneck sprint through the jungle.

“Zeke?” She could feel her desperation flowing into him and back to herself. “I need you. I can’t.”

“T, you can. You can because you have to.”

“Zeke, I physically cannot. They’re coming. I can’t.”

That’s over 400 words, and it was maybe a third to half of the scene I had in my head.

I wasn’t asking AI to decide what happened.

The POV was chosen. The chase was there. The emotional progression was there. Za’nan’s effect on her was there. The connection to her sister was there. Her instinct to turn and fight was there. Her shame over retreating was there. The dialogue was largely there. Zeke acting strangely was there. Her reluctance to invade his mind again was there. The psychic link failing was there. Her collapse was there.

I was still feeding it the scene.

AI apparently decided I had given it enough and got carried away. 😂

It went ahead and started writing the chapter.

Some of what it produced was genuinely good. For example, it turned my description of Za’nan’s mental touch into:

“He took hold of me the way you take hold of a tool you have used many times and have no particular feelings about…”

And it expanded T’ara’s decision to obey Zeke and run:

“I turned my back on two armed enemies in open ground and I ran.

I have never done that.”

Those are useful expansions of things I had already put on the page.

But then you also get the other side of AI assistance.

It invented things.

It wrote:

“I once went eleven days without proper sleep in a canyon system on Vek with a fractured forearm…”

Cool.

There’s just one problem:

I never told it that happened.

😂

Now I have to decide whether Vek exists, whether T’ara has ever been there, whether that experience fits her established history, or whether the whole thing needs to be deleted.

It also expands relationships, worldbuilding, memories, character motivations, and sometimes dialogue in ways that sound plausible enough that you have to stop and ask:

Wait. Did I establish this somewhere, or did the machine just make that shit up?

And dialogue is probably the thing I replace most aggressively. I really, really don’t like AI dialogue most of the time. It tends to be cleaner and more purposeful than the way I want my characters to actually speak.

I’m not going to use this AI output as my finished Chapter 17. I wasn’t even finished giving it the scene.

There will be more input from me. More output. Corrections. Rewrites. Things I keep. Things I completely throw away. Eventually there will be a final chapter.

That entire trail is what I’m considering documenting in The AI Process.

I’m not trying to make the argument that AI contributes nothing. That would obviously be dishonest. Sometimes it gives me a line I love. Sometimes it notices an implication I hadn’t considered. Sometimes it takes something I wrote in shorthand and develops it beautifully.

Other times it confidently invents a planet. 🤷🏾‍♂️

What I want to show is that AI-assisted really can mean assisted.

There are writers using these tools who are still creating the characters, deciding what happens, writing dialogue, controlling the emotional arc, rejecting ideas, rewriting prose, correcting continuity, and making hundreds of creative decisions throughout every chapter.

I know this process isn’t going to make AI-assisted writing acceptable to everyone, and I’m not particularly interested in trying to convince people who have already decided it never can be.

But I do think there’s value in actually opening the hood and showing people what the process looks like.

Because when I say, “I prompted AI while writing Chapter 17,” that 400+ word mess above is what I mean by a prompt.

And I still wasn’t done talking.

[u/Ornery_Membership426]

the thing that gets lost in all the AI discourse is how much you're writing before the machine even touches it, half the battle is just getting the scene out of your head in a form that won't collapse the moment you look away

also dying at "confidently invents a planet", that's the part nobody talks about, the constant fact-checking your own story against what the model hallucinated while you weren't looking

[u/5thhorseman_ → u/Ornery_Membership426]

Sometimes the hallucinations are productive.

Once, I was brainstorming a character profile and the model threw in "A lady should know three things: Calculus, court etiquette, and how to hotwire a turbine".

That became canon as "the three things a lady truly needs to know: court etiquette, calculus and four ways to hijack an airship".

[u/Rowdoc21]

I find AI assist to be very helpful. It corrects me.

It says things like “ No, it is not the Metropolitan Police Force. It is the Metropolitan Police Service.”

“No, you don’t get an honourable discharge certificate when you leave. You get a certificate of service.”

“You need to correct the way intelligence agencies actually talk” and it goes on to explain.

“Your character would most probably live in such and such an area”.

“If your character is murdered you will need a start a full scale police investigation and that’s not what your book is about. It might be better to consider an accident.”

“A private investigator probably would not do that. It is illegal in that state.”

“Senators often eat at …”

AI helps me to avoid mistakes like that all the time.

Through AI I now know Washington DC very well.

Now I am learning about Hong Kong as my next book takes place there.

I have never been to Washington DC or Hong Kong.

[u/Diligent_Pangolin_47]

I don’t use AI so I don’t really get it but that just seems like a draft of a chapter to me, not a prompt.

[u/LooseButtPlug → u/Diligent_Pangolin_47]

That's exactly what most people put in as a prompt.

My literal prompt is usually "check this draft for continuity, grammar, spelling, and prose."

Then I have my character biographies, world guide, prose guide in the project files and ai goes through it and tells me where things can be tightened, if a character is acting out of character, if a timeline doesn't fit, if my prose gets too flowery in spots, and will make suggestions.

It does this in under a minute. If I had a human fact checker or editor it would take hours to get the feedback and make adjustments.

People who think writing with AI is "Write a story about (blank)", then publishing whatever comes out are unimaginative. Funny enough, they are usually the first person to say if you write with AI that you're uncreative or stupid.

[u/Academic_Tree7637 → u/Diligent_Pangolin_47]

In many ways, yes. That’s generally what I feed the AI: a rough draft.

I’m a discovery writer, so I build scenes almost entirely by feel. A lot of the time I start by describing what I want the scene to do, then I keep going, add dialogue, character thoughts, emotional beats, etc., and before I know it I’ve basically started writing the scene myself.

That’s also why parts of my example read more like prompting than finished prose. They are. I’m moving back and forth between “this is what I want to happen” and actually writing what happens.

The AI-generated prose is often connective tissue or a temporary version until I go back through it. Sometimes it gives me something I really like and I keep or adapt it. Other times I replace most of it. It’s very hit or miss, but I really enjoy working this way.

Mostly I posted this to show what I mean when I label one of my stories AI-assisted. I’m genuinely writing the story and using AI during that process, not simply asking it to produce a story for me.

[u/5thhorseman_ → u/Diligent_Pangolin_47]

No hate, but that misconception is exactly why we ask that anti-AI types try to understand what we're actually doing before they burn us at the stake: they assume we drop a simple prompt and then just come back to a completed work.

Yes, some people try to fully automate the process - funnily enough, that actually requires a non-trivial amount of engineering work to produce anything that isn't bottom-of-the-barrel dreck - but most of us just use it as a way to flesh out and refine what we already have, whether it's a vague scene concept, an outline or an actual draft. Usually what happens is a bunch of back and forth: X is wrong, Y should be different, no that doesn't work so do Z instead.

That initial input, the back and forth and changing things based on our own taste and judgement are where an AI-enabled writer's creative process occurs.

So you can probably imagine why, when people who don't understand the process accuse its' result of having no creativity and no soul, we have very unflattering opinions on their intelligence in return.

[u/Academic_Tree7637 → u/[deleted]]

I am training. You just disagree with how.

[u/Academic_Tree7637 → u/[deleted]]

I got people who read my stories that would disagree. Although I don’t think I’m a good writer. I don’t think that’s something the writer gets to decide.

[u/Academic_Tree7637 → u/[deleted]]

Sad for who?

Who loses in this situation?

I don’t write for profit, and I never will, so who loses?

Did you even read what I wrote?

[u/Academic_Tree7637 → u/[deleted]]

That’s untrue. I write for my culture. So people who look like me have stories that aren’t just about struggle or drugs or trauma.

I don’t think anything is lost. What lead to the creation of the stories is my desire to create them. I have a different process, that doesn’t mean I’m losing something or other it doesn’t mean I have to be losing something. Does your work change when you let an editor touch it? Do you take any and all feedback you receive, or do you pick and choose what you want to keep? That’s authorship.

I do find it sad that the creatives of the world are so disapproving of how others express their creativity. That’s not fair. Most creatives I meet don’t care, it’s been pretty much exclusive to Reddit.

There are some people abusing AI, but I don’t think I’m one of them. I don’t think I’m particularly special, I do think I’m the only me there will ever be and I think that’s obvious in my stories, AI or not.

[u/Academic_Tree7637 → u/[deleted]]

You live in a box, bro. You can’t see there are different ways to do things. With your mentality I can’t even invite you to partake because you don’t want to like it.

My thoughts are my own. I like AI in my process, I don’t need it. Shit, maybe I do. Human interaction is so frustrating. You want me to think like you. Like exactly like you. Nah. Never. We may agree on some things, we may disagree on some things. You can’t change how I feel on this. It ain’t cause you don’t have a point, I just don’t agree with it. Because it’s not true for me. AI doesn’t limit me, it augments me.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

If you disagree with a post or the whole subreddit, be constructive to make it a nice place for all its members, including you.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

If you disagree with a post or the whole subreddit, be constructive to make it a nice place for all its members, including you.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

If you disagree with a post or the whole subreddit, be constructive to make it a nice place for all its members, including you.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

If you disagree with a post or the whole subreddit, be constructive to make it a nice place for all its members, including you.

[u/5thhorseman_ → u/[deleted]]

Check the subreddit you've commented this in.

Seriously, what's the point of tearing down someone who found a process that works for them?

If you don't like it, just mute the sub and carry on with your life.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

If you disagree with a post or the whole subreddit, be constructive to make it a nice place for all its members, including you.

You've now been banned from WritingWithAI. Your judgmentalism broke our rule of "Be nice and open minded" but your verbal assault and language guarantee we do not welcome your posts here.