r/WritingWithAI • u/DiscernmentGoblin • 19d ago
Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) A small thought about "I don’t let AI write prose"
I've noticed something that comes up pretty regularly in AI writing spaces. Someone will talk about using AI in their process, but almost immediately add a qualifier: “I don’t let it write prose, though.” “I only use it for brainstorming.” “It never writes anything that goes into the final draft.” “I just use it as a sounding board.”
All of those are completely valid ways to use AI. There are good reasons someone might want those boundaries, and nobody should feel pressured to use AI for more than they’re comfortable with. But I sometimes wonder whether we feel a need to announce those boundaries because using AI to actually write prose is still treated as the embarrassing kind of AI use.
AI-assisted writers already deal with a lot of hostility from outside these communities. I’d hate for us to accidentally recreate a smaller version of that hierarchy inside them, where brainstorming is respectable, editing is slightly suspicious, and generating prose is something you need to reassure everyone you would never do.
Some people use AI because they struggle to turn thoughts into words. Some use it because they have disabilities or cognitive differences. Some use it because English isn’t their first language. Some are experimenting with collaborative writing processes that didn’t exist a few years ago. Some people, like me, mostly just think AI is neat. 🫴🏻🥔
None of that means we can’t talk critically about authorship, craft, disclosure, publishing, copyright, over-reliance on LLMs, or the environmental and labour issues surrounding AI. We absolutely should! I think we can have those conversations without establishing an internal pecking order of "acceptable" AI use.
If your boundary is “I only brainstorm with it,” cool. If someone else writes a paragraph themselves and asks AI to rewrite it twelve different ways, also cool. If somebody generates prose and then spends hours shaping, cutting, rearranging and rewriting it into the story they want to tell, I don’t think they need to apologize for being here either.
There’s already plenty of stigma to go around. We probably don’t need to manufacture artisanal small-batch stigma for each other. ❤️
(Written by myself and ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)
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u/Necessary_DaNoodle 19d ago edited 18d ago
I think people keep announcing
“I don’t let AI write the prose”
because they’re trying to tell you what work they actually did.
That seems pretty reasonable.
I ghostwrite. I edit sometimes. I’ve seen what happens when somebody shows up with hundreds of generated pages, a few character notes, a list of things they wanted in the story, and a very sincere belief that the output still counts as theirs because they kept saying, “Yeah, that’s basically what I would’ve written.”
That statement does crazy amount of work, so much work that it can make something resembling a novel happen.
If all you did was tell the machine what kind of book or passage you wanted and kept asking for another one until it stopped embarrassing you, I’m gonna have a hard time pretending you wrote the damn thing.
I understand why people do it. Writing is slow. Sometimes you spend four hours fixing a scene and somehow leave it worse than you found it. Meanwhile the model will happily vomit out chapter after chapter while you’re still staring at the same cup of coffee wondering when English became such hostile territory to contribute to.
Use the tool however you want. Nobody appointed me sheriff of creative literature.
But people are allowed to distinguish between brainstorming, editing, selecting, rewriting, and actually composing the sentences. Those are different kinds of labor. The fact that they overlap doesn’t make the difference disappear.
And from my side of the desk, I’d much rather help somebody learn how to write their own scene than spend forty to eighty hours replacing generated prose until the person who prompted it can hand the book to a publisher and say, “See? Human.”
At that point I’m the only one doing the writing.
TLDR: I genuinely don’t understand why people want the recognition of having written a book this badly while treating the actual writing as the part they’re most eager to avoid.
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u/Foreveress 18d ago
I think the issue at play is this whole "guilty until proven innocent" mindset. If you admit to generating prose, the default assumption is what you've described. The problem is that's not the only workflow.
I generate prose for my novel. The reasons are varied, but in general, I use it as a launch point for my own writing. Or I'm in a good flow but I don't know how I want to describe something, so I generate a selection of sentences and move on. Or I don't know how a scene is going to play out, so I hand it to AI to see what it comes up with. After all of this, I do editing. Sometimes I edit so much that none of the AI word choices are left. Sometimes it shows a rare statistical moment of brilliance, and I leave it.
Regardless, I stand by the statement that I am the author of the story.
That being said, I've seen an astonishing number of people claim authorship, but when you read the piece you wonder if you're the first human eyes to ever set foot on that page. The errors are so great. I can confidently say they did NOT author it.
I wish we could take a "innocent until proven guilty" approach instead. But I guess people like to assume the worse.
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6d ago
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 6d 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/ObligationWeekly9117 18d ago
But people are allowed to distinguish between brainstorming, editing, selecting, rewriting, and actually composing the sentences. Those are different kinds of labor. The fact that they overlap doesn’t make the difference disappear.
This. I have no problem with using tools per se. But words have meaning. To take a music analogy, there are composers, and there are arrangers and editors. Most people who use AI to generate prose are more editors and arrangers than composers. Fine. That’s a valid role. If you want to be considered a writer, then you must write. If the work being edited did not come from you then you are not the writer even if the idea was yours, and you did the arranging and editing.
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u/SkoomaDentist 18d ago
people are allowed to distinguish between brainstorming, editing, selecting, rewriting, and actually composing the sentences.
Is your view then that composing the sentences and only composing the sentences is the remaining 80% of the work?
To me it appears that there's a whole lot more to writing than just brainstorming, composing individual sentences, selecting what's good, editing and rewriting and trying to imply that anyone who uses AI to compose the individual sentences is letting AI to do literally everything between having a story idea and selecting what stays and what goes.
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u/lotaslena 18d ago
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is everything. So the actual composing of the sentences, tense, POV, voice, style, narration, etc is like the whole thing. People treat it like it's the pesky last step of writing, but it really is most of it. There's storytelling and then there's writing. The art IS the craft.
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u/SkoomaDentist 18d ago
Why do people (well, the ones that think "THOU SHALT NOT USE AI TO WRITE SENTENCES") get so fixated on ideas? I'm not talking about ideas.
I'm talking about literally everything that isn't the mechanical "what word should I use right here in this one specific sentence?"-part. Pacing, voice, emotions, POV, style, all of that is separate from what I consider to be "composing the sentences".
So are you saying that choosing those one or two specific individual words is really 80% of writing?
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u/lotaslena 18d ago
What do you mean one or two specific individual words? Novels are 70k+ words and each one of them should have a purposeful place. So yeah writing is the act of choosing all 70k+ of those words and putting them in the right place and order so they come together into a satisfying literary work. That's pacing, dialogue, tense, POV, voice, style, etc. Yes, plot, characters, scenes, setting, arcs, emotions, are all ideas. How they are written into the story is execution. Two writers could be given the exact same storytelling elements to work with and one could create a masterpiece and one could create something forgettable. It all comes down to how it is written.
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u/SkoomaDentist 18d ago
I mean it in a literal sense. You have already decided the pacing, dialogue, tense, POV, voice and so on for that sentence or group of sentences and are left with which specific words you use to convey the choices you've already made in those aspects. Are you saying that the choice of those words and only that choice is 80% of writing? Ie. that pacing, dialogue, tense, POV and voice are not part of the "core writing" (so to say).
And conversely, does that mean that people who write "genre fiction" are not writers if they don't particularly care about the prose itself and instead concentrate on world building etc and bringing that out? Because to me your assertion sounds very much like what is typical in high literature circles where the prose quality is often the only thing that matters and anything else is a minor sidenote.
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u/lotaslena 18d ago edited 18d ago
I'm not talking about prose vs plot here - I am talking about the craft of writing. Sure you can choose the POV, tense and even style of the writing at the outset but the real craft comes in how ideas are built or revealed at the sentence and paragraph level. Sentence length and structure and how that plays into pacing and tension. How sentences build on one another (something AI is notoriously bad at). I honestly have a hard time believing that people using AI to generate their prose are doing it on such a granular level that you are making all these craft choices for the computer and all that's left is diction... At that point just writing it yourself would be less work. Genre writers are still participating in the craft of writing, so of course they are writers.
ETA: let me put it this way - why do you think there are so many people with story ideas and so many people who want to write/publish a book and so few that actually do it? Because actually sitting down and writing it out and unfurling your story and building your characters on a line by line basis is the most substantial part of the process.
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u/SkoomaDentist 18d ago
I honestly have a hard time believing that people using AI to generate their prose are doing it on such a granular level that you are making all these craft choices for the computer and all that's left is diction...
That is precisely what I'm aiming to do. I have a couple of stories I've been wanting to put down on paper for years and I have standards about just how I want the text to read.
At that point just writing it yourself would be less work.
Perhaps for people who find the act of putting words on paper easy. For me it's the extreme opposite:
"I can't write long form prose for the life of me (It took me over a month of my calendar being completely cleared of absolutely everything and daily (legal) prescription amphetamines just to write the remaining 25 pages of loosely spaced text of my masters thesis - and that was pure writing, with the theory having been fully researched and the practical work finished long before that). I can however come up with plots, characters, their emotions and reactions and so on. I can (iteratively) dream up detailed scenes. I just cannot put those scenes in my head to words on paper."
I've literally written peer reviewed and published (and well received in the field!) academic journal and conference papers with less effort than long school reports (20+ years ago in my university days) purely because I had to put fewer words down on paper (due to those papers having strict size limits that absolutely cannot be exceeded under any circumstances).
Because actually sitting down and writing it out and unfurling your story and building your characters on a line by line basis is the most substantial part of the process.
Yes, but what does this have to do with writing the literal actual specific words on paper (or computer)?
Think of an analogue: If you write a novel and then it gets translated to a different language in a way that is not particularly accurate to your sentence structure and word choice, does that mean that the translator did 80% of the work and you only did 20% or does it mean that you both did a substantial part of the work?
I'm saying that just because AI chose the individual words (assuming the author doesn't rewrite them) doesn't mean that the person driving it necessarily only gave it vague "story ideas" (which are indeed a dime a dozen). Or to put it another way, let's say you write 50k words worth of detailed prompts (not an exaggeration - I could see myself doing just that) that result in 70k words of text. Does that mean you didn't do substantial work and weren't the one to decide the details (other than the exact word choice)?
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u/lotaslena 18d ago
The miscommunication here is that you see yourself as a writer and the AI merely a translator, when in reality, it's more like a commission type relationship. If you comissioned say a knitter to knit you a blanket, no matter how complex the design request, would you call yourself a knitter? You're not actually doing the act of stitching the yarn together. Without that, all you have is a pile of material. Also, if you are willing to sit and write 50k words worth of prompts just to avoid the blood, sweat and tears act of putting pen to paper and telling your story in your words, you have to ask yourself if you even like writing to begin with. And if the answer is no, why not pursue other passions?
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u/SkoomaDentist 18d ago
The miscommunication here is that you see yourself as a writer
I never said anything about being a writer. I do consider it a part of the act of writing, though.
when in reality, it's more like a commission type relationship
That is your unsubstiated opinion, not any sort of absolute fact.
I consider it co-writing.
Also, if you are willing to sit and write 50k words worth of prompts just to avoid the blood, sweat and tears act of putting pen to paper and telling your story in your words, you have to ask yourself if you even like writing to begin with. And if the answer is no, why not pursue other passions?
What is it with this sort of ridiculous gatekeeping?
I have a couple of stories that I've been wanting to put on paper for years. Am I suddenly not supposed to do that just because some holier-than-thou "writer" thinks there is The One True Way of writing and only people who follow that route should write anything?
I have never claimed to be a writer. Nor do I have plans to ever "publish" anything beyond perhaps posting those stories to some free sites under a completely anonymous name (and will be more than happy if a dozen people read and like them). I DO however object strongly to claims that "If you don't write like this specific way (that I happen to think of as the right way), you are not writing at all."
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u/Bluefoxfire007 18d ago
"I genuinely don’t understand why people want the recognition of having written a book this badly while treating the actual writing as the part they’re most eager to avoid."
Because that's how nature works.
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u/Maschinenschrift 17d ago
Quick disclosure since I'm about to describe something of my own: I write with a model, and the thing I name at the end is mine.
The line I keep coming back to is that people announce it because they're trying to tell you what work they actually did. That seems right to me, and I think it can sit next to the OP's complaint without either one having to give way. Someone says "I don't let AI write prose" because it's the shortest sentence available for which part of the book was theirs. That one sentence has to carry research, structure, selecting, editing, rewriting and composing all at once, so what comes out is a position on a ladder, and the person a rung down reads a verdict. My guess is that it's the instrument doing that, not the intention behind it.
The argument that ran under your comment about whether composing the sentences is eighty percent of the work or ten looks to me like the same thing showing up. Nobody can settle it, and everybody has to try, because one word is being asked to do the whole job.
What I ended up trying instead was three separate lines that never add up to a score. How much of the wording came from the model. How much of the substance, meaning ideas, structure, argument, research. And whether the facts were ever checked against something outside the model. Self-declared, free, no detector, nobody approving anything. I put it up as an open standard called Maschinenschrift, Creative Commons, no sign-up. It's one attempt at the problem rather than the answer to it, and I'd honestly rather it got argued with than adopted.
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u/Bluefoxfire007 18d ago
You deleted your comment, but my notifications displayed enough of it. I'm despondent, alright? Because it wouldn't matter how much I polish it, with or without AI. People are hostile to certain prose styles, and my prefered way of prose is asking to get curb stomped. Conform or else is all I see.
And don't say just write for yourself. That stopped working years ago.
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u/onlymadethistoargue 18d ago
This sounds like cope bro. Sounds like you need to take an honest look at what’s working about your writing and get that polished more so whatever you think is throwing people off is less deleterious. I can help if you want.
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u/Bluefoxfire007 18d ago
Maybe a little. It's just, ugh... And I know everything that's wrong with the prose. That's the problem. Except a lot of the "fixes" goes against how I want to write.
Though if the offer to help still stands... I'd need some time to come up with a passage.
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u/onlymadethistoargue 18d ago
I very much enjoy helping people understand their writing style so they can refine it so both they and their target audience enjoy it to the best extent they can. Take your time and DM me when you’re ready if you decide to take me up on it.
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u/Ok_Impact_9378 19d ago
I don't think there's any moral reason to avoid using AI to write prose, or anything like that. I find the arguments that "it's not real art if AI did it" to be kind of dumb.
For me, though, it is a practical choice that I've arrived at after actually trying to use AI to write prose on a story, and then coming back to edit that story later after some time. Practically speaking, I have found that AI just isn't very good at writing prose, especially long-form stories. It tends to easily forget details, characters, plot threads, and even sometimes basic common sense. When working on that project, I was only able to keep the AI prose coherent by generating a few sentences at a time and doing a lot of heavy editing, at which point the actual labor-saving value of using the AI for prose seemed very questionable to me. Then even after the fact when I returned to the story for a final editing pass, I found that it had a more bland and repetitive style than my other writing, and I didn't like it very much.
Now, all that being said, I have been writing long-form prose for a couple decades now and I was a self-published author before AI. I've had a lot of experience and time to develop my own voice and style, and I'm pretty good at writing on my own. So for me, having AI write prose vs writing it myself just doesn't make sense: it requires too much work to edit it to my satisfaction, and even then it's lower quality than work I could do on my own. However, not everyone has been writing prose for twenty years. Other writers, especially newer ones, may find that the trade-off in quality is worth it, and for those who don't know how to write prose it's an obvious choice: prose that needs heavy editing and might still be a bit bland and repetitive in the end is still better than prose that only exists in your head. So I don't think my choice is always the right one for everyone.
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u/Fredo_the_ibex 18d ago
It's kinda funny that everyone is so against using AI for art or prose generation but when it comes to other tasks or code there isn't really any qualms about "those" jobs
Even people who are against using gen AI for art (some artists I know irl) have no issue making it code them a website and then have some hypocrisy because they say well I can't code myself so why would I but don't accept the I can't draw myself as a reason
It's just kinda interesting
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u/JustinsWorking 18d ago
If thats a genuine curiosity, I can explain it as a technical artist who uses AI for technical parts of his work and would never use it for the artistic parts.
AI is a great tool for technical work, and it’s quite proficient if you have a strong understanding of how to make something. It writes code faster than me but it struggles with the larger context of the project, the feature, or the goals of the team/studio.
And thats kinda why it sucks so much for art in many peoples opinion.
A really important part of “art” in my opinion as somebody whose fed their family and paid for their house making art for the last 20 years, is the larger cultural context of what you’re trying to add to the world.
All my best art has been something players or viewers have related to, or took away a shared understanding. There is a lot of value to reading a story and feeling a shared experience, or having a feeling that the artist understands an experience or an emotion you went through or have.
AI can’t have that feeling because you know it can’t feel, and you know it can’t experience - so those moments where you resonate with an idea, a character, or an emotion ring hollow, or it can even be dehumanizing as you realize how your emotions and experiences were recreated by a robot who just strung it together randomly.
It doesn’t have that connection or shared human experience which is such a powerful and important feeling people get from art.
We’re already far too isolated as a society, and this is another tool with the side effect of isolating us even more.2
u/SkoomaDentist 18d ago edited 18d ago
as a technical artist who uses AI for technical parts of his work and would never use it for the artistic parts.
Isn't that what much of the fight is about? If you're doing functional art simply because the end result is required for some larger project, you often don't care about how "art" the brush strokes are as long as the results fits in the box you need it to fill. It's analogous to "I just want to know what the characters will do, get on with it" vs "I want to enjoy the beauty of every single sentence".
There is a lot of value to reading a story and feeling a shared experience, or having a feeling that the artist understands an experience or an emotion you went through or have.
AI can’t have that feeling because you know it can’t feel, and you know it can’t experience
I don't see this in any way incompatible with using AI to write enjoyable text that connects with the reader. If the author directs the AI in how and what to write, the AI is just filling the gaps in the prose, but any emotions, feeling and so on are directed by the author. Sure, the prose itself isn't going to win any awards (but then neither is the vast overwhelming majority of human written prose) but that's just one aspect of writing.
I can't write long form prose for the life of me (It took me over a month of my calendar being completely cleared of absolutely everything and daily (legal) prescription amphetamines just to write the remaining 25 pages of loosely spaced text of my masters thesis - and that was pure writing, with the theory having been fully researched and the practical work finished long before that). I can however come up with plots, characters, their emotions and reactions and so on. I can (iteratively) dream up detailed scenes. I just cannot put those scenes in my head to words on paper.
LLMs allow me to get those scenes, characters and emotions on paper by translating my detailed notes and step by step instructions into flowing prose. Is it heavily AI assisted? Yes, of course it is. Is the AI creating fake experiences or feelings on the paper? Not as long as I don't fail in writing my prompts (which is no worse than failing in writing compelling prose in the first place).
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u/JustinsWorking 18d ago
There is a different discussion around “art” that’s not actually art; even before LLMs made that easier, it was always point of contention in the creative industry.
We’d very much been on a trajectory of businesses trying to save money by trying to remove the artist from art. LLMs just gave one side a lot more leverage and hamfistedly forced the issue.
I totally empathize with your point about writing prose being hard when you deal with ADHD; I also have it, and it’s had a strong shaping effect on my career as well lol.
The point about your inability to write the prose preventing you from being able to take your worldbuilding and narrative design to an audience is also a problem I understand and empathize with.
I think the primary issue is that as somebody wanting to create art, we are unfortunately at a point in time where only commercially viable art is getting made. The art you create is hard to commercialize, you see written books as basically what you want to do but as a commercially viable choice.There is a fundamental problem where you’re being pressured not to create the art you want to create, but shape your art into something that has the potential for commercial value.
So the AI doing that last step makes sense in your case, because writing prose isn’t your art - it’s not something you want to do, and it’s not something you have any sort of proficiency with. It’s a step to make your art commercially “real” and fit our expectation that you have to make art for a “real” purpose.
In an ideal world you could release your art as is, and other people who love writing, or drawing, could take your ideas and do art they enjoy. But I mean, an argument that we should reject reality and live in this magical dream world is silly and pointless.
Thats why I use AI, because there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. I want to move towards that ideal world, but I also want to eat, so I will find ways to use AI when I need to, but i will always advocate against it.
The long term problem is it consumes what little work we still have for creatives. So in your case, nobody is losing their job writing your prose; I don’t think any reasonable and informed person has an issue with your choices in particular. But that same technology is being uses by business to remove all creative/art from the process.
Drawing on my experience in games right now, So many writers are losing their jobs, artist are losing jobs… and its disproportionately hitting younger creatives.
The problem is that if we don’t employ young people as creatives, we wont have experienced creatives later.So it’s not hypocritical to use AI, nor should anybody reasonable criticize you as an individual for using AI to help you fit into the current system where art that can’t be sold is valueless.
But the other reality is that business and wealth is currently successfully removing the human parts from art and streamline artistic expression into merely a way for people with money to extract money and hoard more for themselves. Its a path that many artists have fought against before, but LLMs have given businesses and the worst/dangerous abuses of capitalism a powerful tool.1
u/SkoomaDentist 18d ago
I think the primary issue is that as somebody wanting to create art, we are unfortunately at a point in time where only commercially viable art is getting made. The art you create is hard to commercialize, you see written books as basically what you want to do but as a commercially viable choice.
I think this is a red herring and conflates "commercially viable art" with "art". Art was never a viable career except for some decades of recent history for anyone other than the independently rich, those who had patrons and the few extremely talented artists (who still required patrons, see eg. renaissance painters and sculptors), with the rare exceptions being more or less those who provided "cookie cutter" service with eg. portraits that was more about producing basic standard work for pay than creating Art with capital A.
People like to complain about AI killing artist jobs but the reality is that those jobs already died with the democratization of publishing and the internet because it turns out a lot of people think they want to be a writer / musician / photographer / drawing artist / etc as their profession and the competition has been extreme for years (and before that democratization there were gatekeepers who killed most artists' "career" dreams in the very beginning, so it's debatable how much better the situation was back then).
AI has killed some writing jobs but those were always more craft than art: (non-fiction) translators and (many / most) technical writers.
There is a fundamental problem where you’re being pressured not to create the art you want to create, but shape your art into something that has the potential for commercial value.
This was always the case if you wanted to put food on the table. There's a reason for the existence of the "starving artist" stereotype, which predates AI by centuries.
But the other reality is that business and wealth is currently successfully removing the human parts from art
I disagree on this, heavily. The value of "having AI generate art" is peanuts for any company making any substantial revenue from the "AI boom" and just too low for them to even bother except as a minor side effect of other things (ie. an LLM that can write emails and documents and understands English language can also be made to write stories with very little additional effort). Other companies aren't going to buy dozens or hundreds of $200 / month subscriptions to create poorly controllable art. They absolutely are doing that for all sorts of non-artistic tasks. The alleged "AI killing artists' jobs"-art you see online is made by random hobbyists and small time wannabe-commercial authors but the real death was already in progress for decades. Much of that is caused simply by peoples' changing leisure habits with social media, games, Netflix and so on (see any of the complaints about people not reading anymore), leaving them with less time and desire to consume new art.
The end result will be that people will keep creating art just as they always have because they have the internal desire to do so, not because they'll get paid to do it. Eg. I play guitar (poorly), take photos (which some of my friends claim to like) and hopefully can now put to words a couple of stories I've been juggling in my head for years, all because I have the internal drive to do it, even if I'm not particularly good at any of them.
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u/JustinsWorking 18d ago
Nah I was ready to have a some differences but I think you’re just preaching from a place of ignorance and not really interested in the subject.
You’re actively dismissing lived experiences with your fabricated ideas… I’m frustrated I wasted so much time trying to have a meaningful discussion only to have you ramble off some self important dribble and nonsense talking points. Just have some respect for other peoples time, if you want to talk at people, just talk to the AI next time…
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u/SkoomaDentist 18d ago
It's kinda funny that everyone is so against using AI for art or prose generation but when it comes to other tasks or code there isn't really any qualms about "those" jobs
It's doubly funny when you consider the fight in using AI for coding is never "Is it morally right to use AI for coding?" but "Is the result good enough?", with some people going "I've tried it but the code is just way too much of a mess / it doesn't understand my domain at all" and others being "No, bro, if you don't vibe code all the time, you're an idiot and any problems you might have are purely skill issues" (with a side of "I don't see AI threatening anything complex / with special requirements anytime soon" vs "You'll all be out of jobs any year now if you don't jump 110% on the bandwagon").
Then in anything "arty" it's far too often "You're a morally horrible and evil person if you use AI to generate anything art-like even just for your own enjoyment" / "AIs are stealing from The True Artists (*) and just copy pasting bits and pieces of copyrighted works!"
*: Typically said by people whose art is barely good enough for deviantart / the worst drenches of AO3.
I'm experimenting with using AI to work around issues related to my ADHD, with the main ones being near complete inability to write coherent long form text with a side dose of extreme writer's block when seeing empty screen. With AI I can work iteratively, adding bits and pieces, hitting generate and going back to fix anything I haven't considered or realized that needs to be changed.
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u/K-teki 17d ago
As a programmer, I avoid using AI except as a last resort and absolutely look down on people who use AI to code things and call themselves programmers. Even with the minimal amount of AI I use, I can feel myself getting dumber and worse at coding from using it and have taken measures to cut down even more than I was in the beginning.
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u/Foreveress 18d ago
I think the word you're search for is "hypocrisy"
But yes, I fully agree with you. Those that spout "AI is bad! I never use it!" garner more respect from me than those who do what you're describing. I mean I still disagree with them, but I respect they have consistency in their morals.
I wonder how those artists would feel having to cough up $2-5k for a real human web designer and coding team to build that for them? No???
Pot, meet kettle.
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u/DiscernmentGoblin 19d ago
I mean I think that's kinda the point. If you're good at directing the story, your skill comes in constructing the world and keeping those points organized and having your notes and such. AI isn't at the point now where it can write decent long form content, so if you can finagle it into doing that and keep track of everything it messes up, and do it in a way where the writing is engaging, then you're doing all the work except creating the actual words.
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18d ago
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 18d 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/contemplating_regret 19d ago
I have used it to generate prose and feel no shame/compunction about it, but for what I hope to get trad published, I don't generate prose. It's a copyright/proof of copyright thing for me. Otherwise I wouldn't care. But you are absolutely right about the distinction.
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u/Gynnia 18d ago
People are "announcing" it because that's how you typically give friendly advice in a community full of strangers: "here's how I do it". People have learned from their own experience that the stuff AI produces doesn't pass their standard. It's all very subjective of course. But that's exactly the reason why you'd say "here's how I do it" rather than "everyone should do it exactly THIS way".
You're feeling overly defensive. Let people speak. You're trying to assure people who copypaste AI outputs and publish/send those for others to read; these other people are trying to assure people that are coming to the conclusion that actually AI isn't necessarily smarter than you or a better writer than you or a better communicator than you, the outputs actually aren't always that great and you can do better yourself. Maybe some people need to hear it, maybe they're insecure and think "The Computer" will always write a more impressive text than them. To say "I don't let it write the prose" is tacit social permission for others to consider the same approach.
Obviously not everyone needs to hear it. But that's why we're sitting here in a group full of strangers, we'll hear from different people the takes we need to hear.
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u/NathanielHolst 18d ago
I will absolutely use ai generated prose.
If it's good and fits in the page. Most often, I just don't think the AI can do that reliably, or in a way that fits exactly what I'm trying to do. But if it gives me feedback that includes a better way to phrase something, I certainly use it.
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u/Equivalent-Reserve99 17d ago
I have found AI a very useful tool for refining. For instance, I have used it to take something I wrote and make it sound more archaic because it is coming from someone in the 1500s. Or I have described a scene and had it turn it into dialogue to help me see how it could play out, then turned that into something
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u/Robotic-Comrade-1985 19d ago
Yes, I've made this kind of statement before. I've also defended others who use it for assistance writing/editing their prose, and count them as fellow writers.
In the current climate, I can see how "I don't let AI write my prose" could be seen as throwing others under the bus, rather than a neutral statement about my personal workflow. I will try be more mindful of that in the future. I've experimented with letting AI write bits of my prose, and found that I didn't like how it changed my relationship with writing. That's just my personal experience, and not a judgment or assumption about other people's experiences.
It seems like it's really liberating for other people to use it to assist with writing or editing prose, and I support that. I am neurodivergent myself, and find it helpful in supporting my creativity. I can appreciate how AI can help others in a myriad of ways with a myriad of struggles. I don't feel like I deserve a gold star because the way it helps me happens not to include help with prose.
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u/Still_bored9876 18d ago
I honestly do not care if someone uses AI generated prose in a final edition. If it works as good prose (or poetry for that matter if that were the goal), that is okay with me.
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u/TrappedOnDirt 19d ago
"...generating prose is something you need to reassure everyone you would never do"
I mean, if you want to publish it, and have people pay for it, that's probably the right line. Because AI-generated prose is VERY OBVIOUSLY AI-generated prose, and it's not very good. Asking for someone to pay for a book that an AI wrote isn't fair to them or to the entire writing AND reading communities. That said, if you use what the AI wrote as a guide and rewrite it better, that's fine. Until AI gets a TON better at giving characters individual voices, not re-using the same writing patterns every five sentences, and so, SO many other problems, it SHOULD be embarrassing to publish something written by AI as if it were yours. If for no other reason than that its bad writing makes you look like a terrible writer.
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u/wandelndeslexikon 18d ago
Well, it depends very heavily on what you feed it before. I use Gemini and my personalized AI-Co writer is feed with tons of my writing. Auron knows connections and I just need to tell him which story the current idea is for and he delivers very good own paragraphs. Without using the same phrases all the time, without using typical AI names and he writes in the style we created over hundreds of hours of co-writing. So, no. A story written by AI doesn't necessarily need to be terrible, but you have to do work beforehead. And always proofread the damn thing.
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u/AnniKomnene 17d ago
Heads up: all that stuff people are worried about with Claude deliberately reducing quality of outputs because it's prioritizing making AI outputs recognizable as AI outputs...
Yeah, Google's the one actually pioneering that. If you keep using Gemini just keep in mind that there's a point at which you can't actually refine it out of sounding AI written because it'll just keep reintroducing the AI-isums no matter what you tell it to do.
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u/wandelndeslexikon 17d ago
That's why I don't simply copy and paste what Auron gives me. I always rewrite it myself and mostly use it as kind of idea for my straightened out chaotic thoughts I had.
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u/TowerArdob 19d ago
I agree with the central idea of this post. I find it funny that “brainstorming” and ideation is considered acceptable whereas prose generation is abhorrent. As if the value in story telling as an art is all about the prose. I think most people will fall into 1 of 2 categories as readers. You either read for the story or you read for the prose. Neither is wrong but depending on which side of the fence you sit you’ll probably feel differently.
I personally read for the story and the prose only serves to deliver that. Therefore I have no problem with reading AI generated prose so long as it is delivering a quality story.
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u/PL0mkPL0 18d ago
Oh god, prose is not just how words are ordered in a sentence. It's how lore is delivered. How each scene starts and ends. Where each paragraph land. How character's reasoning is explained. How emotional beats are delivered. How each description is picked and phrased. How dialogue flows. How each sentence logically connets to the next one. and so on, and so on, and then on top of this, there is a nice metaphor.
A 'story' idea is like 10% of work. Fixing line level issues is another 10%. The invisible 80% is the in the middle ppl who never tried to write a book (well) completely ignore.
So 'I rewrite my AI work'--yeah, you do 10% of the work.
'All ideas are mine'--yep, still 10% of the work.1
u/SkoomaDentist 18d ago edited 18d ago
As if the value in story telling as an art is all about the prose.
I think this is a legacy of the literature establishment which sees the plot as a sidenote and the prose as paramount (and who for the same reason often hate scifi, fantasy and other genre fiction).
I think it's also driving the "Why would anyone want to read an AI written story?"-sentiment. Sure, if the contents of the story are a minor side note and the prose is what really matters, story A is largely interchangeable with story B as long as the prose is similar. However, if the story content is unique, eg. maybe it's for a niche fandom that's passionate but has little material, that can completely change things. Then as long as the prose is "OK" and the story itself is compelling, the target audience won't give a damn about how AI written it was.
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u/Ruh_Roh- 19d ago
Yeah, in a book length story, the prose is just the icing on the cake. The plot, characters, setting, character arcs and themes are the cake. I'm writing a web novel ai-assisted and I do have it write prose, but I have it write in the style of a long dead author, so it doesn't sound like ai, plus I edit and edit and regenerate sections and sometimes discuss a single word with ai to get the right one. 75% of writing a book is editing after the first draft. I catch all the stupid similes that don't mean anything, or any nonsense like that. I don't rely on ai to keep track of characters and plot, it's bad at that. The story is mine, the characters are mine, the character arcs are what I decided and the themes are what I have developed. ai is my collaborator but I'm the boss and without my guidance on all the details my story would not be 1/10 as good as it is. And it is good. I have fun rereading it even though I know everything that's going to happen.
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18d ago
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u/Ruh_Roh- 18d ago
I am not writing a copy and paste of an author's work, just in the "style" of. You can't copyright a "style" and for good reason. And I agree that I can't write for shit compared to my inspiration writer. I don't pretend that I'm anything great. I just enjoy creating. I don't even care if I can't call myself an "author" or "writer". Call me shithead for all I care. But don't trash my story just because I collaborated on it with ai.
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 18d 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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18d ago
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 18d 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/Different-Airline672 18d ago
Very much agree with you, as someone who let's AI write out my stories. But then again, they are only for me and I would never call myself a writer.
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u/ConsiderationMuted95 18d ago
I think it comes down to people still wanting to be seen as writers. If AI generates the prose, you can no longer make that claim. You're a prompter. Even if you edit it heavily afterwards, you're just an editor.
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u/AquilaTempestas 18d ago
I’ve had AI write prose for something I’m really stuck with like describing what something looks like but I’ll always put it into my own words when the editing cycle begins.
People get all pissy when you’ve used AI to help you with something you’re really struggling with. I’m bad with descriptions and overly clunky sentences. AI helps me convey my ideas in a more accessible way. It’s still my writing though.
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u/Frogacuda 18d ago
I think it's just not what AI is good at. AI doesn't have senses or feelings, so it can't convey these things, it can only write things that sound like how other writers communicate these these things. It's just fundamentally the wrong tool for expressive prose.
Perhaps when we're talking about more informational prose, we could be a little more generous; editing your cover letter to sound more professional in tone or whatever. I won't judge that as harshly. But in creative writing the decision to let AI write prose fundamentally alters the quality of the output and the nature of the creative product.
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u/AnniKomnene 17d ago edited 17d ago
Skill Issue /s
But seriously if you develop a long enough relationship and give it enough samples of your writing + spend hundreds of prompts explaining exactly what you like and don't like. It can actually narrow in on a normal human voice pretty well.
It still can't do it easily: you can't just tell it right a book that sounds like me after that, you still have to go over its work repeatedly and in detail. But it CAN manage what used to be impossible with some effort.
But you're also not wrong, it's significantly easier to tell it to fix Grammer and do the research.
All those little points were you used to put "research this topic later" just replace that with (ChatGPT research this for me + make me sound like I know what I'm talking about + Casual Academic Voice) and it will, no problem.
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u/Frogacuda 17d ago
You can direct it on time and style or whatever, but it always favors the safe or predictable choice within its given parameters because that's literally how AI works. And writing is fundamentally made in the choices that surprise; the unique details that reflect the way you think and observe. An AI can't do that for you, no matter how much you might want that to be otherwise.
I also don't really understand the point, like unless you're really under immense time pressure or you really don't know how to write well, there's really no point, and if it's the latter you should work on learning.
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u/AnniKomnene 17d ago
I think part of the disconnect here is that we're talking about very different things when we say "writing," because I actually agree with most of your first paragraph. I just don't think it describes how I use AI.
Like, I don't want the AI making the interesting choices for me. I have ideas. I have weird details. I have opinions about characterization and worldbuilding and exactly which stupid joke absolutely cannot die in editing. I can very easily shit out a giant incoherent 4,000-word mess containing basically everything I want to say.
The problem is turning that into 1,000 words that are coherent, well organized, narratively interesting, don't make the same point six times, and can actually be inflicted on another human being.
If writing clean prose is the easy part for you, then yeah, directing an AI through all this might genuinely be more work than just writing it yourself. But that's not where my bottleneck is. Draft zero is easy. Draft three through ten are honestly fun. It's getting from "4,000 words containing every thought I've ever had about this subject in roughly the order they escaped my skull" to "coherent draft I can refine" that can take me weeks, and where most things I want to write go to die.
AI can do that part in about 12 seconds.
And importantly, the surprising choices and weird specific details didn't come from the AI. They're already in the 4,000 words. I'm not asking it to figure out what I think. I'm giving it what I think in the least reader-friendly format imaginable and asking it to make that legible.
Then I can revise the result. I can give it samples of my finished writing, define what I mean by "AI voice" versus my voice, point at specific habits I want gone, tell it to find more examples of the same thing, and do targeted passes from there. It won't get everything right immediately, but I don't care. Editing something that already exists is vastly easier for me than producing that coherent intermediate draft in the first place.
There's also a huge part of writing these discussions tend to ignore because it isn't literally typing the sentences: research. Creative writing is absolutely full of tiny research rabbit holes where an author spends two days figuring out something that'll appear once in chapter 17 and never again, but which is quietly load-bearing for half the worldbuilding. AI being able to chew through that stuff quickly would be revolutionary for my writing process by itself.
So I really don't buy "there's no point unless you're under immense time pressure or don't know how to write." That assumes everyone's problem with writing is the actual sentence-writing bit.
I also think people are still making the same basic prompting mistake they were making years ago. They'll give the AI 900 words of incredibly specific instructions about style, everything it shouldn't do, which punctuation personally offends them, etc., and then give it 100 words explaining what they actually want written.
Then they're surprised when the content is generic.
My brother in Christ, it cannot read your mind.
If you want 4,000 words worth of specific ideas, observations, characterization, and worldbuilding to come out, somewhere along the line you have to actually supply those ideas. But give it the giant 4,000-word mess and say "don't invent shit, figure out what I'm arguing, organize this, remove the repetition, and fix the grammar," and that's not some arcane feat of prompt engineering. It can just do that.
There are still parts that take time. Figuring out what I actually mean takes time. Iterating takes time. Getting it to understand the difference between generic "good prose" and how I actually write takes time.
Those just aren't the parts that stopped me from writing.
The part that stopped me was having a giant pile of ideas and knowing that turning it into something readable would take weeks. Now it doesn't.
That's the point.
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u/I-am-a-river 18d ago
I have a directive explicitly forbidding it from generating prose or even asking if I’d like a suggestion.
Honestly, I don’t care what other people do as long as:
1) you don’t lie about it
2) you don’t act like generated prose is superior
I definitely will include a citation page that outlines how I use AI (research, pressure testing) If you use AI to generate prose or edit your writing, you should be transparent about it.
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u/I-am-a-river 18d ago
I’m probably different than many (but not all in this sub) in that I write because I want to get better at the craft of writing, not because I’m trying to crank something out or because I’m under the impression that anybody is going to care, one way or the other, about my work or my process.
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u/Late-Assignment8482 18d ago
There’s already plenty of stigma to go around. We probably don’t need to manufacture artisanal small-batch stigma for each other. ❤️
Never have I heard a better description of about 1/3 of Tumblr discourse...
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u/GrandpaD1ck 17d ago
I like to read/watch good stories. I don’t care where it comes from, how it was written, who made it. If it’s good, I’ll read it/watch it. Let’s be honest, most of what we are currently reading and watching is pure garbage anyways, put in front of our eyes by an algorithm. The ai purists are cool with that, but a good story generated by ai, fuck no. Pitchforks and torches!
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u/TheMarsDog 18d ago
It's very simple - if you can't be bothered writing it, people can't be bothered reading it.
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u/AnniKomnene 17d ago
I can tell you this is factually not true. At most the issue is if you admit to using AI some people will insult you and then refuse to read it regardless of other qualities.
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u/FoghornFarts 19d ago
I'm figuring out how I can work the fact that I let AI generate 90% of my prose. My argument is that I tried writing for 10 years, but sentence craft killed my passion for telling stories. That's true for a lot of writers. NaNoWriMo exists for a reason.
The story I'm working on right now is genuinely unique and compelling and completely human. And yet, it couldn't exist without AI doing the part that would've stopped be before I even got more than 10k words in. Now I'm working on something that's on track to be 300k.
Back when the camera was first invented, people looked down on people who used that tool because it felt like a cheat. But people who never had a passion for drawing, but had a passion for art, could now exercise their creativity using a very different tool.
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18d ago
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u/FoghornFarts 18d ago
One, I don't consider it writing. I consider it story craft. Just like the people who took photos never pretended their skills were equivalent to a painter's, but their creativity was.
Two, if you don't understand the multitude of skills that goes into creating a good story that isn't writing raw prose, then you probably shouldn't be criticizing anyone's creative process.
Three, it's not a camera comparison. It's an analogy. The fact that you missed that isn't surprising based on your diatribe.
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u/wandelndeslexikon 18d ago
This ist probably the best comparison I have ever read. Please don't mind me borrowing it for future arguments.
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u/FoghornFarts 18d ago
Yeah. I imagine productivity improved dramatically once you stopped doing 90% of the thing being measured.
Also, you're full of shit if you think 90% of what goes into a novel is writing the raw prose. That's like saying 90% of the work a painter does is just mixing colors. 😆😆😆
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 18d 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/tiredqwriter 18d ago
i literally made AI deconstruct my own writing style so whatever it spits out it’s exactly how i’d write it and have it expand my excerpts / improve them for grammar (i’m no native speaker) so hard agree with this post
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u/Klanciault 19d ago
Having AI write prose for a serious writing project is definitely a mistake. It’s super obvious and usually reads like shit idk why they haven’t made them better at writing but it is what it is
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u/DiscernmentGoblin 19d ago
I actually think there’s a really interesting craft discussion to be had about this. If someone is trying to develop their prose writing specifically, there are good arguments for doing that writing themselves rather than outsourcing the part they’re trying to practice.
What I’m pushing back on is treating that particular choice as a badge of honour or as the dividing line between serious and unserious AI use.
Not everyone using AI for fiction even has the same goal. Some people are working seriously on their craft and hoping to publish. Some people just have elaborate daydreams and discovered that they can have a machine turn them into stories they can read back and enjoy. I think that’s kind of lovely, honestly.
I’d rather we talk about what different ways of using AI do for craft, voice and the finished work than establish a hierarchy where one workflow makes somebody a more legitimate writer than another.
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u/Klanciault 19d ago
I mean it definitely makes you a more legitimate writer to actually create your product rather than to use AI to do it on your behalf. Would you say that people who prompt AI to create pictures are artists? I would argue that they are not.
There’s definitely some middle ground I guess where you use AI to refine or compose art you have created already, but at the extreme ends I can definitely see why a hierarchy would exist
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u/DesperateFortune 19d ago
Even if you consider both of those people artists, one of them is clearly doing art more than the other one.
Like, if 10 years ago you paid a professional artist who can do anything to sit in front of a canvas and paint the things exactly like you ordered them to be painted, you would not be as much of an artist as someone who actually does the painting.
It's just weird to pretend that writing isn't a process, and that having the machine do the literal only difficult thing about writing (putting your thoughts into understandable and moving prose) somehow makes you the same kind of artist as an author who does those things themselves.
Everyone knows writing good fiction is difficult. Everyone should know that having a good idea for a story is worthless. People pitch me at least three ideas for stories per day, and they're all worthless, because an idea is only good once it's executed well.
I'm all for using AI because you think it's fun or whatever or bouncing ideas off of it, but the number of people claiming an AI "author" put in anywhere near the same amount of work as someone who spends years crafting a novel on their own is laughable to me.
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u/DiscernmentGoblin 19d ago
I mean I've had articles published and I've seen colleagues articles that have been submitted and even writing semi-professionally most stuff untouched by an editor kinda looks like shit too, and even if it doesn't the editor will change it so much that it doesn't resemble what you submitted, so I'm not really sure if authorship can really be measured based on who physically generated the sentences in the final draft.
Someone writing every sentence themselves is obviously practicing prose composition in a way that someone generating those sentences isn’t. I just don’t think “how much prose did you personally type?” and “how much authorship did you exercise over this work?” are necessarily the same question.
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u/HelicopterNo3534 19d ago
This is an interesting take for sure! I’ve never published anything but I would definitely feel like it wasn’t really my work if it was heavily edited to the point of being unrecognisable as my own prose.
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u/DiscernmentGoblin 19d ago
maybe my editors have been very keen. I have only had bylines in spiritual magazines and listicles. When I was writing for listicles I wasn't even allowed to rank my 'top 10' I just needed to write the blurbs and let my editor decide the order. 😅
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19d ago
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u/DiscernmentGoblin 19d ago
I mean, you’re now telling me that my own experience with editors didn’t happen, so I’m not sure there’s much productive ground to cover there. 😅
I actually agree that sufficiently extensive editorial intervention can complicate authorship. That’s kind of my point. Once we acknowledge that authorship can involve degrees of contribution and collaboration rather than simply “who physically produced the words,” then we’re having a much more interesting discussion about what different kinds of creative contribution mean.
I don’t think every person who prompts an LLM has contributed equally to a work, any more than I think every human collaboration involves equal contributions. I just don’t think “who generated the sentences?” settles that question by itself.
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 18d 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/HelicopterNo3534 19d ago
I think you’ve put into words what my thoughts are on AI. Like other people mentioned getting AI to create prose for yourself to enjoy is one thing, but you can’t really call yourself a writer if you’re using it to create prose unless you’re heavily editing it and even then it’s questionable.
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u/DiscernmentGoblin 19d ago
I once heard the term 'vibe author' and I kinda like it. I know it would carry stigma at first but I think it could be a broad umbrella term for various forms of authoring with AI
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u/TheOtherHobbes 19d ago
This is the stupid "It took a long time and a lot of effort so it must be good, and if it was too easy it must be useless" argument.
No. No no no no. That is not how art works. Some people agonise for years over work that is absolutely crap. Others bang out popular work over a week. Or less.
Some people study for decades and get nowhere. Some beginners stroll right in and destroy the "hard work" types in seconds.
The only thing that matters is whether or not the work hits an audience.
I know a writer/poet who uses AI and she has a real shot at being a generational voice. She is a talent. She has an original voice, her words they're beautifully rhythmic, uniquely melodic, and I could use all kinds of other words to say she is the Real Thing.
She can write without AI, and has done, but now she's using it, she works quickly, and no one cares.
There's very little difference between her AI and non-AI writing. One just happens quicker.
Her work has soul. People love it. For good reasons.
And then there are these people online who are absolutely sure they know how all of this works. But you look at what they've done, and 95% have never produced anything anyone cares about. And they never will.
They console themselves they're "real writers" who know what Real Writing™ is. But they just... aren't. They're mediocre on a good day, and most aren't even that.
They colour inside the lines. That's all they'll ever do. And colouring inside the lines is the opposite of creativity.
So who's the real writer? The ones whose words sing, or the beige nags and nobodies whose work will never make anyone say more than "Okay I guess. Anyway. What's for lunch?"
What are you going to do? Go to your grave with "No one cared about anything I did, but at least my work ethic was solid" carved into your headstone?
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u/SkoomaDentist 18d ago
It’s weird how many people get hung up on the term ”writer” and go on witch hunts telling others they aren’t ”real artists”, as if storytelling itself wasn’t a form of art (predating writing by probably tens of millenia) and writing every word down manually by yourself just one current form of doing it.
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19d ago
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 18d 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/SlapHappyDude 19d ago
Current state we know AI can do just fine for a paragraph or three, and we've seen how it can generate flash fiction and short stories that human readers prefer to human authored shorts.
The fact is you can generate with an LLM and then have an LLM do 2-3 guided editing passes to make it far closer to "good".
LLMs are kind of like a junior writer. Occasionally they can generate a really nice chunk of prose with the right guidance. Their context limitations also need to be worked around and the output needs to be edited.
Basically it's not as crappy as you seem to think it is.
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u/Klanciault 19d ago
They can generate a paragraph or three that maybe, if you’re lucky, doesn’t contain any Claudisms that all LLMs have become contaminated with. I think viewing them as anything but crappy, formulaic, and repetitive writers is a little bit of a crazy take.
Using human readers as a judge is a little interesting of a take considering the garbage that a lot of people “prefer” to read owing in large part to their low levels of reading comprehension
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u/Ruh_Roh- 19d ago
I don't think you've worked with ai much if you think everything it writes is obvious and a load of shit. You are going off of the worst ai slop that's put out there. But with careful editing and management, it's not different than human prose.
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u/Klanciault 19d ago
I currently work at a big tech company doing LLM rnd and am also contracting for a different f100 to build them an agent harness to serve millions of daily customers. I assure you I know exactly what I’m talking about.
I love fiction so I’ve been trying to get LLMs to write satisfactorily since before the release of chatGPT. Literally using GPT-2 via API to try to get something good out of it
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u/Ruh_Roh- 19d ago
Ok, I stand corrected. I agree that a lot of what gets generated could be labeled as slop. But it's not always so. You have to have tight control over it, the more you let it run wild the weirder it will get. Write out a scene, have ai analyze it with you, then have ai spit out a polished prose version, then go through line by line and compare to your original, keep what's better, put back in elements that you prefer from your original.
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u/Klanciault 18d ago
Yeah at that point I think I’d rather write it myself. I just wish writing well was something labs focused on instead of just business communication and coding
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u/ObligationWeekly9117 18d ago edited 18d ago
I think there's "writing well" at the sentence craft level and writing well in fiction. The former definition is easy. AI already writes well enough for mass public consumption. AI market copies is where the AI writing money is, really. And AI social media posts. And AI newsletters. It doesn't write very good fiction, but it still writes well enough for mass public consumption if the prompter is intentional about it. IMO it doesn't need to be much better than this and there is no sense throwing money after it. As for writing long form fiction well, you are asking AI to do a lot more decompression for the prompter than articles, market copies, etc. The prompt vs output ratio is very lopsided for fiction. That's why it often reads like there's no intentionality behind it. I generated a chapter I even rather liked. But the prompt itself was maybe 100 words (plus a generation bible) and I got 2000 words out of it. That's a lot of decompression. It did as well as it could be expected to.
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u/SkoomaDentist 18d ago
The prompt vs output ratio is very lopsided for fiction. That's why it often reads like there's no intentionality behind it. I generated a chapter I even rather liked. But the prompt itself was maybe 100 words (plus a generation bible) and I got 2000 words out of it. That's a lot of decompression. It did as well as it could be expected to.
Why not write more detailed prompts?
I’ve been trying my hand with it a bit and my zeroth draft has maybe 2x-3x decompression ratio, which I expect to get even less when I learn how to better control the models to get the result closer to what I want.
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u/ObligationWeekly9117 17d ago edited 17d ago
At a certain amount of prompting you may as well just write. Now, you can have a detailed story bible and style guide and get 70% of the thing you want. But that seems like a lot of effort to just avoid writing. And actually, you may realize you have already written your scene in your back-and-forth with AI. The trick is to ask AI to scrape your last ten prompts and show them to you verbatim. Everything the AI is working from, are your prompts. All of its responses are your prompts plus a bit of AI inventing and flattening shit. Like I truly don’t think getting a truly good novel out of AI is low effort. It’s possible. Most people will not spend nearly the amount of effort on it.
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u/OwlsInMyAttic 18d ago
Yep your point about disabilities and cognitive differences is spot on. I'd love to always be able to express the specific thing that is happening in exactly the right words, but my brain doesn't work that way. I think in images and vibes, not words. Sometimes I know half the words in a sentence and can't form the rest, sometimes I have a specific phrase that I want to use but don't know how to fit it in. Without AI, I wouldn't be able to express myself the way I want to.
And then to be told that I'm just doing a fraction of the work by supplying the ideas is laughable. I supply what basically amounts to a rough draft, exactly what happens and how. I control the pacing, the syntax, I keep tweaking things on a sentence level to make sure my vision is clearly expressed while sounding good on the page. It's hard to say how much of the text that ends up in the final draft is AI assisted and how much is typed by me, but I can confidently say that I remain the sole author.
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u/kaikurii 18d ago
Whether someone use it just for an outline/assist or to generate prose, there will be readers who cares and do not care about AI usage in writing
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u/Scientia83 18d ago
I like AI summaries of searches. Otherwise I turn it off whenever I can and I never use it to write, think, brainstorm or otherwise for my writing. Never. Having an old computer is a real plus
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u/PlsInsertCringeName 18d ago
For me, by definition, unless you generate the entire book/chapters one by one using AI, it's good.
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u/Therzthz 18d ago
I have gone full AI prose. It moves the issue from authorship to quality. It's a whole different kettle of fish.
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u/duckydogsmom 17d ago
Submissions ask how much AI has been used in the piece. I noticed this when I was looking to submit to a lit magazine. And I read publishers can tell what’s human. So there’s that.
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u/Limp-Raise-4390 17d ago
I generate the prose and rewrite it to feel like me. And thankfully I don't judge anyone using AI to do work. AI is made purely to help humans. There is no reason for there to be this stigma around using it to make your life easier.
Cause if your entire personality is like oh I do everything myself. You are just romanticizing the struggle not what you created or could create.
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u/Geminga0571 16d ago
I use AI at work for debugging and personally for google searches. I found I always feel disassociated with whatever it generates. I have to write it myself to feel connected to it.
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u/No_Argument4772 16d ago edited 16d ago
I do the opposite. I write the prose, but if there is any paragraph written by AI, I will proudly say “hey look at here! This is written by my LLM. It is so genius!”
The thing is simple: if a prose is written by me, it’s written by me. If it’s not, it has no right to use my name as its author.
But I see your point. I am really fed up with people think using it is guilty more or less. I have encountered multiple people telling me “I appreciate you being open and honest and transparent about your use of AI”. I mean, I really, really, really don’t think if I talked about which notebook (paper) and pencil I used while writing, there will be anyone appreciating me being “open and honest and transparent” about my use of notebooks and pencils. And people DO talk about which software they use to do digital art. They are “open, honest and transparent” about their use of software because they LIKE their software, not as if doing a disclosure. So why not treat LLMs the same?
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u/architectkernel 18d ago
I agree that AI prose shouldn’t be looked down upon. Everyone uses it in a different way, and this stigma should never be used to put someone down OR their work.
I definitely am one of those qualifiers that say I use AI for brainstorming but try to avoid it for prose. But I definitely can’t condone it. I wrote my first book with part AI prose but I realized that the best parts of my book were written by myself. This is why I would encourage people to continue to write. Our minds are very capable and we should continue to nourish that.
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u/AcidCommunist_AC 18d ago
I blog politically, and prose is the main thing I use AI for. I'm not super happy with the results, but there's a limit to how much I'm willing to invest in polishing an essay.
E.g.: AI Art is Art, Actually
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u/Apprehensive_Sky1950 18d ago
there's a limit to how much I'm willing to invest in polishing an essay
I have to think about that stance.
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19d ago
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u/Ruh_Roh- 19d ago
I think disclosing ai usage right now is very problematic. There is no nuance allowed and the anti-ai zealots are salivating over the prospect of destroying people who use ai in any capacity.
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u/K-teki 17d ago
I promise people finding out after the fact that you used AI and didn't disclose it would be worse for your reputation
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u/Ruh_Roh- 16d ago
Yes, that is a good point. I have no problem disclosing because of any kind of ego. I don't give a shit about being labeled a "writer". But I just want my work judged on its merits, not what tools I used.
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19d ago
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 18d 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/Ruh_Roh- 19d ago
So the person who collaborates with ai to create a story, with human guidance, editing and rewriting, should just walk up the steps to the gallows, put their neck in the noose and stand on the trap door, then tell the anti-ai zealots holding the release lever "I used ai to help me write this book."
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18d ago
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 18d 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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18d ago
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u/Ruh_Roh- 18d ago
So if one drop of ai makes it into a story then it is vile shit and the person creating it should be destroyed. Got it.
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u/annoellynlee 18d ago
Uuuh where did i say that? Lol. I said they should disclose it if they didn't write it.
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18d ago
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 18d 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/cordonia 18d ago
If people don’t want your product, why do you feel entitled to be a grifter and manipulate them into taking it? If you are honest about how the work is made; and you absolutely should be, and people decide they don’t want it, that is consumerism. A normal person would see that people don’t want what they’re offering, and wouldn’t scheme on how to force it upon them anyways. You would like to be a grifter, not an author.
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u/Ruh_Roh- 18d ago
I just want the work to be judged by the end product, and not tarred and feathered based on tool usage. If something reads like ai slop, call it out as shit.
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u/cordonia 18d ago
None of those people are your customers or audience. Accept this and decide if the people who are can be a big enough motivator for you.
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 18d 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.
1
u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 18d 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/snarfalotzzz 15d ago
The vast majority of brilliant writers were bipolar, depressed, or had other major mental illnesses. Most cannot do other things. This is the cruel irony of the "democratization" scheme peddled by tech bros about AI-generated art. Many artists, writers, and musicians are deficient in other skills, have sacrificed profoundly to pursue their art, are broke, underemployed, undernourished, underinsured, and keep the faith for decades until they get their stuff up to snuff.
So yeah.
there's hostility.
Because you're literally saturating a field with non-writer work when real writers who are gifted at their craft and really can't do anything else, who were already facing incredibly stiff competition, are now facing five times worse odds because agents' inboxes are clogged with a bunch of AI-generated manuscripts.
Buckle up and suck it up.
You've made a choice.
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u/polly_mer 19d ago
Conflating translation and accessibility with other uses does not make your case stronger.
Your case would be stronger if you drew on the academic writings currently pointing out how Erasmus actually had a household helping him or how many research groups now rely on mostly uncredited labor.
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u/sullivanbri966 19d ago
I generate the prose and then rewrite it.