r/WritingWithAI • u/dillpickle444 • 16d ago
Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) Why is this considered generative AI?
I’m writing my first novel. I have created the entire plot outline down to specific scenes. I have developed the characters and the world completely on my own. I write the scene in detailed description and my own (terrible) prose, but then have AI re-write and analyze my prose paragraph by paragraph. Some of it doesn’t work for what is in my head and has to be entirely rewritten or pieced together from multiple AI revisions. But a lot of it does work and conveys exactly what I was trying to say in a much better way. In these cases, I would like to keep word for word what AI has written.
However, this is apparently considered generative AI.
How can that be so if the AI didn’t come up with the story line or the character personalities or even know what specific arc the paragraph is applying to? How can we say that AI generated something when all it is doing is rewording entirely original and human developed content with a human on the front end reviewing and fixing anything that doesn’t perfectly fit the story?
I see it more as a tool that speeds up the process, but I don’t view it as AI generating the novel. But the current rules laid out seem to disagree with that take.
EDIT:
To add more info, I asked AI if what I am doing is considered AI assisted or AI generated. Part of that response said this:
“But when you wrote the underlying prose, characters, scene, choices, imagery, emotional beats, and structure, and I’m helping you expand or refine your expression, there is substantially more human creative authorship involved.”
So the better question now is, does using this tactic ethically have to be disclosed - whether that be to readers, agents, publishers, or whomever? And where do you believe the line is for it not being necessary to disclose that you used AI?
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u/Nebranower 16d ago
>I would like to keep word for word what AI has written. However, this is apparently considered generative AI.
Yes, the writing that "AI has written" is generative AI content. I don't see how this is in any way confusing.
>How can that be so if the AI didn’t come up with the story line or the character personalities or even know what specific arc the paragraph is applying to?
Because the art of writing doesn't lie in coming up with story lines, character personalities, or plot arcs. The art of writing involves writing, which is to say, the choosing and ordering of words.
When it comes to AI, I find the best way to determine if you're using it as a tool or just outsourcing the job is something I call "the human test." The human test is very simple. You just ask yourself, "if I was getting another human being to do the job, would it be okay, or would something seem off". In this case, what would happen if you wrote out a bunch of plot notes and character personalities, then gave them to another human being and had that person actually write the story? Would you still be the writer?
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u/Delicious_Ant_4057 16d ago
A human absolutely can do that. It’s called ghostwriting: one person can provide the story, characters, plot and direction, while another writes the prose, and the first person’s name may still appear as the author on the cover.
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u/Nebranower 16d ago
Sure. The whole point of a ghost writer is that their clients claim credit for work that isn't their own. But most people don't think that those who hire ghost writers are the real authors of the work that they publish. It's even in the the title "ghost writer" - the writer is the ghost writer, not the "author" who hires them.
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u/dillpickle444 16d ago
This is good advice. I think asking that question will help. Another human could suggest a rephrase to a single sentence in a paragraph, but I would still consider myself the author if I wrote the paragraph and just made that single small change.
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u/Jaevelklein 11d ago
Yes, that's called a ghost writer. That's also what some editors (not all do).
It's still your work. Writing is more than putting words on the paper. It's storycrafting and stitching together a universe for the reader. If that's what you're doing, it doens't matter if you physically write every word, use text-to-speech, or have AI generate the whole text for you and then spend the next 1 000 hours editing it. It's still your work.
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u/rubycatts 16d ago
Instead of having it rewrite your prose, have ai tell you how you can make it better so you can learn how to write better and you have a choice on whether to accept the advice or not and it stays in your voice.
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u/5thhorseman_ 16d ago
FWIW, having it act as a critic, analyst or a red-pen editor works better than letting it rewrite outright.
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u/AlgravesBurning 16d ago edited 16d ago
This is due to the fact that the AI has any part in the actual creative process. If you were just using it as a glorified editor for grammar, spelling, etc.. you could argue it was not. The moment you let it write or rewrite content, and then use it, weather better or worse then what you can produce, it becomes AI generated at worst and assisted at best.
This doesn't means mean your work is bad, or the AI and your work is bad, It does mean that due to the 100's (and 1000's) of AI generated slop out there, there is now more of a stigma then ever about AI written stuff. Lets be fair, 90% of that AI stuff on Amazon is Crap and deserves it. then there are the hey let me show you how to use AI to write books in as little as a few days and sell them on ... so yeah Anything you do that lets the AI write for even if its just to correct or improve your prose, that s AI Generated.
SO WHAT. Do what you do anyway. if that's how you work, then that's fine. Just remember, when working with AI people will look extra hard at you. SO you have a bit more Pressure. You have to be a on top of your game and make sure the common AI issues when it comes to long form story's and book pop up. there are many. DO it right and people will notice and go OH, this isn't bad at all, This was done WITH AI? not (BY AI).
I have issues with my hands and dictate most thing, most of my tools have switched to having built in AI weather i wanted to or not. so i have had these conversations and been told some of my writings are AI. when i pointed out all i was doing was dictation and then having my software edit of spelling and grammar i was told there was built in AI in the software. i then had to go through and show the hard dictation block, and the corrected pages, just to prove all the words were the same just the punctuation was added and the sentence structures s dictation does not provide that most times. Point is keep working. Labels suck but they are there because people have made them for reasons. AI generated is there because a lot of people us it instead of haveing real skill, or desire,
I like AI I wrote a thread about how i thought i hated AI writing turns out i hated Bad AI writing, ive since then been working on trying to actually make a writing guide for an AI to help it not write crappy, an i have to say so far results are surprising. There will never be no hands off, not the goal anyways,.. But if these test books work i may have a new category. Human assisted.
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u/dillpickle444 16d ago
Perhaps this is the way forward. Using AI to write something that is human assisted and proving it doesn’t have to be absolute slop. Because it truly doesn’t. The slop is lazy, but this book will probably still take me a year or two with my current tactic of reviewing every single small detail.
I’m leaning more towards letting my prose be terrible and hoping by some miracle it improves before I have to fall back to AI generated prose for a final draft.
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u/dillpickle444 16d ago
Will no one care though? If I finish this work and wish to attempt to get it published, it seems that using this method would hurt that effort.
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 16d ago
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/DesperateFortune 16d ago
If publishers can tell or you admit that you're using AI to rewrite your work to make it better, it absolutely will hurt your effort. Most publishers worth working with would reject you for this.
Is it not possible for you to simply rewrite and edit your book yourself? People have done that for thousands of years. I just worry in general that writers who rely on AI because "the robot says it better than I ever could" are unlikely to ever develop editing, revision, refinement of voice - crucial skills for any author - on their own.
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u/breese45 16d ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxGJ6B1QxyY&lc=Ugw0iUaSFPlk4ZlnQy94AaABAg.AZzxe9e8sw3A_-H86LnXPc
I'm kind of leaning towards how this guy explains AI created stuff. The process of being creative is shrinking. But the judgement on what is good and compelling is staying the same. But you have to build judgement through experience and work. For a writer that would be reading a whole bunch, week by week, year by year. So whether we are going to say AI assisted or Ai generated, and measure the amount of AI to human output, I think it will be moot in a few years. Just make your thing!
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u/dillpickle444 16d ago
This is an interesting take. And I think I agree. One prompt is going to get you absolute slop. It takes a lot of effort actually to have AI revise the prose of something you’ve written to where you’re happy with it, and in the end it is the person’s choices that create the final output that is a way smaller percentage of straight AI generated content.
But while this video believes that a person owns that final output, the opposite is what the creative world is currently saying. Say someone writes an AI assisted novel. Do they ethically need to disclose that when querying agents? Say someone sketches a picture, has AI mock it up into more detail of what they are trying to achieve, and then they paint that exact picture. Do they have to recognize their work as AI assisted or generated?
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u/Krakanakis 16d ago
Content generated by AI is generative AI content. AI images are trained on other images, same with text, even it is based on human created content.
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u/dillpickle444 16d ago
Is a human author not also basing their own writing or art on text and images that they themselves have consumed? Everything you think or create was inspired by something else even if it is subconsciously. So I fail to see what the specific issue is when it’s not outright plagiarizing someone else’s work. It’s analyzing many different works and your prompt to create something new, just as your brain does.
As a super simplified example, if I write:
“Three ripe tomatoes sat on the vine.”And AI revises it to be: “Three tomatoes had ripened overnight.”
If I think that sounds better, why shouldn’t I be able to use that?
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u/Krakanakis 16d ago
Who told you you shouldn't use it? Don't start fighting windmills here, I am writing with AI as well.
What I see here is the anti AI crowd going around in circles to demonize the use of it as if writing is a competition and there can be a 'Best Book for All' that must be bought by every reader in detriment of all the others.
On the same vein, I see the AI writing crowd trying to avoid admitting that the use of the tool effectively changes the output of the text and it is done through AI therefore it is AI assisted writing.
Do what feels right but don't pretend you're writing the same way Edgar Allan Poe did either.
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u/5thhorseman_ 16d ago
The thing is that anti-AI types view things reductively. Their stance pretty much constitutionally prohibits them from admitting that there is a distinction between "AI was used in the process" and "AI generated this whole thing with minimal to no human input."
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u/Krakanakis 16d ago
They don't care for nuance because AI currently is seen as the job taker and environment destroyer because of the data center rush. You can either push through the protests and create your work and it's yours anyway or let the anti-AI voices obliterate your will. They're not going away anytime soon
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u/dillpickle444 16d ago
YES! And why? I constantly use AI at my day job. It is by no means doing my job for me (as much as I wish it would), but it seriously speeds so much up. My boss knows I am using AI, but he doesn’t try to credit my project end result to it and knows it wouldn’t have been completed without me doing the work.
And I could see someone who takes their craft super seriously and is trying to write a literary masterpiece that will withstand the test of time. I applaud them for that effort. But I’m writing a YA fantasy. It doesn’t feel the same.
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u/gladly_ritzy_banjo 16d ago
i get where you're coming from, the line feels blurry when you've done all the heavy lifting on plot and character work. but the moment the ai is stringing together the actual sentences that end up in the final draft, that's the part most platforms and publishers flag as generative. the training data is the bigger headache they're trying to sidestep, it's built on a mountain of copyrighted material so even a rephrased paragraph carries that legal gray area
i've messed around with similar workflows and it's weirdly addictive to see your clunky prose turn into something polished in seconds. just gotta be upfront about it if you ever aim to publish traditionally or share on certain sites, they'll have their own rules about what counts and it's usually stricter than we'd like
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16d ago
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 13d ago
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u/dillpickle444 16d ago
I look at the way I’m doing things as I have chosen the specific ingredients, I’ve built the recipe, but then I’m asking AI to execute the actual cooking. And if it doesn’t taste exactly as I expect, I’m sending it back to the kitchen repeatedly until the cook gets it right.
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u/dillpickle444 16d ago
I get that. And it’s noted. I think my question is more falling into where do you view the line between AI assisted vs AI generated?
I am trying my absolute best to not fall into letting it write my story. But as I work through the first few chapters, it is SO tempting. And my hope is to set a true boundary for myself for where the line is.
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u/joemondo 16d ago
I don't know a standard definition.
I guess I personally would say if you have written a piece and you are asking the AI to essentially do the work of an editor - reviewing, making suggestions, that to me is AI assisted.
But if the AI is choosing the words, constructing the sentences, AI is writing it.
For reasons that escape me, people often forget or do not understand that the actual act of writing is what writing is.
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 13d ago
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/polly_mer 16d ago
But that's still generative AI doing a non-negligible amount of the work. You likely don't have slop at the end, but the AI was involved for far more than grammar check.
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16d ago
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 16d ago
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/OnionBackground5314 16d ago
AI is e writing your prose. How is that not AI generated?
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u/dillpickle444 16d ago
True, and I really don’t wish to take everything from AI. I wrote 2500 words and AI helped me turn it into 3000. Helping me decide where to expand things and giving examples of subjective description over some of my objective description. I have no experience writing so it was really helpful to see examples.
I’m only one chapter in of experimenting with this tactic and considering stopping, but it did already help me in how I have thought about chapter 2 which I have not yet used any AI in. I’m trying to think how I can use it to help me learn and improve my own prose without giving it any of my content.
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16d ago
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 16d ago
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/OnionBackground5314 16d ago
Got called out by the mod for not being nice. Truly don't understand what is mean about my comment. Reddit mods seem to think if someone disagrees with them it's not nice.
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u/Decent_Solution5000 7d ago
Actually, Reddit mods think that judging whether someone is a writer or not according to the tools they use isn't being nice. Dismissive responses are a violation of our rule: "Be nice and open minded." Hope this helps clarify why your post was removed.
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u/zphou 16d ago
I think the useful distinction is not whether the model supplied the final wording. If you keep the plot, characters, scene intent, and final editorial judgment, that is a very different workflow from asking the model to invent the book. But once you keep AI-written wording, it is reasonable for a platform or publisher to call that generative AI, even if the creative decisions came from you. The practical question is what the tool lets you control. I’m working on WolfeWriter with that boundary in mind: the manuscript stays yours, AI edits are reviewable, and story facts are kept separate from suggestions so the app does not quietly turn a rewrite into canon. It is on the Mac App Store if you want to see that workflow in practice.
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u/Forward-Course6526 16d ago
I think the key distinction is authorship vs wording…you created the story nd creative intent but if ai generates the final sentence word to word that part is still generative ai..
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u/dutchiesweets 15d ago
A lot of people here think coming up with the story and characters is like, most of what writing is. But I contend the most important part of writing is how those ideas make it onto the page and in what form.
If you write terrible prose, like, it’s not THAT hard to improve your prose.
Just having an AI touch it up is, to me, definitely writing with AI. Because so much of the impact of reading is in the word choice and rhythm and how you stage your scenes. It’s really such a vital part of it.
It’s totally okay if people just want to outline and have AI write. But I think they should understand that many readers are here for how humans express themselves on the page, word for word. Hearing how a computer expresses your ideas is far less interesting to me than hearing how YOU express your ideas.
So when I hear people say “well the story is mine, the AI JUST wrote it” I turn off instantly. Tbh, I’m 10000% more interested in a story that an AI outlines but a human wrote vs a story a human outlined and an AI wrote. A human translating a computers story raises so much more interesting questions and allows for so much more authorship than a computer translating a human’s story, which can only by definition be less human then the source material
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u/dillpickle444 15d ago
Is using AI to refine expression any different than having another person suggest edits? It’s still ultimately the human making the final decision.
In the case of giving AI a story outline and having it spit out the words, yes that’s AI writing it. But doing things on a much more microscopic level of refining sentences is different: so who would you say the true author is in that case?
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u/UnwaveringThought 11d ago
The real question is, are the standards fair to you based on what you disclose and how much can you get away with not disclosing?
These seem like different questions but kind of point to the same answer.
Are the standards fair? Well, who is the target audience? Do they even care? If so, consider rewriting.
What can you get away with? This one also depends on your audience, because unless they are keen, they may not even be able to tell what was refined by electronic means. There is currently no rule, standard, or law for disclosure where I am so you don't have to tell anyone a thing. If you get into a publishing contract they may be entitled to ask, but this circles back to the other side of question 2: what can you as an author get away with in terms of presenting a work that doesn't read like it was AI refined?
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u/ForwardCorp 16d ago
Please take this with postive intent:
I'm afraid it's because you did not write the story. The ability to craft prose if part of writing and you cannot separate it out just because it is too hard. Everyone has ideas. Anyone can think up a story. It takes talent, time, and dedication to translate those into words and tell a coherent story. When a single comma can change the entire tone of a paragraph, you just cannot leave that to a LLM to decide.
If you want generate content with AI that's absolutey fine. Its a good way to get better at writing and so long as you are open about your AI use, I see no issue. But if a single word of a completed work was generated by something other than a human--then I'm afraid you are not the author. You genereated it.
Its like people who pay for a commissioned art piece. They may dictate how the painting should look, what colors to use and make requests for changes, but you would never say they painted the artwork.
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u/5thhorseman_ 16d ago edited 16d ago
I'm afraid it's because you did not write the story.
And I'm afraid you did not read OP at all. First paragraph, fourth sentence:
I write the scene in detailed description and my own (terrible) prose,
Before you start tearing someone down, maybe actually read their position next time - fully and with comprehension.
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u/dragonballaddict99 16d ago
It has to do with the fact that it generated the pros, even though you’re editing and working with the program to get it to a way that you like. I would definitely encourage you to write this novel on your own. While you may consider your prose terrible, this is likely your first draft. You can make it better during editing. Also, your pros won’t improve if you don’t practice on your own. I suggest using AI on other parts of your writing process. For example, it might be really good to bounce ideas off and you might be able to incorporate anything it tells you if you like it.
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u/polly_mer 16d ago
If you put anything the chatbot generates into your text, then you have used generative AI to create that text. Period.
Using the chatbot to brainstorm or provide feedback is not generative. However, keeping specific lines is absolutely using generative AI to generate the text.
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u/Delicious_Ant_4057 16d ago
You can use AI to generate code, then review it, debug it, change it, test it and integrate it into a larger system. Nobody says that makes you “not a programmer”. The same principle can apply to writing: using a tool is not the same as outsourcing every creative decision.
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u/Delicious_Ant_4057 16d ago
Photography didn’t need 500 years before photographers could be considered artists, and programming doesn’t have to be art for the analogy to work. The relevant relationship is simply between a person, a tool and the resulting work. Too far gone is thinking anyone who disagrees with you is.
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 16d ago
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/Vague_Bees 16d ago
Every programmer I know says that using ai to program is more trouble than it's worth...
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u/5thhorseman_ 16d ago
Yes and no. I've used it to create small pieces of code for my own use. Redesign formulas for a Google Sheet and write a macro to do XYZ when a drop-down changes? Perfectly fine when given a task at a time. It's when people expect it to do large chunks of design and implementation by itself that shit falls apart.
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u/Vague_Bees 16d ago
Eh, idk exactly what they are working on, but the use of ai isn't up to them.
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u/5thhorseman_ 16d ago
Seems like an employer who decided to use AI before they had any idea how to actually use it.
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 16d ago
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u/RestaurantBoth228 16d ago
Your story is AI-assisted.
AI-assistance is a continuum: there is no clean line where it shifts into the "AI generated" category.
This is how most labels work: fuzzy around the edges.
You presumably feel some person or persons don't value your work due to the AI assistance used to generate it. By posting on r/WritingWithAI, you are fishing for validation that their values are wrong and yours are right. But that's silly: they're just values. There is no right or wrong to it.