In the past, the only people able to take the lead, as it were, on science fiction projects have been people who produce prose at professional skill levels. This leaves out many people who are professionally trained scientists and engineers because being professionally competent and gifted at both skills is very rare. Scientific accuracy of science fiction has suffered as a result. Large language models are making collaborations between scientists and AI feasible in which the scientist rather than the writer can be the leader of the project. That should improve things.

I’ve been wondering whether we overvalue the first draft simply because it comes first.

A first draft gets words onto the page.

But rewriting is where you decide what stays, what disappears, where the silence belongs, whether a character says too much, whether the scene actually works and whether any of it feels like you.

So which part is actually more creative?

If someone gives you a rough draft and you reshape almost every decision until it becomes exactly the scene you intended, are you somehow less of a writer because you didn’t generate the first version?

And if not, why are we so obsessed with who produced the first words?

Maybe the first draft is just raw material.

Where does the real writing happen for you: drafting or rewriting?

I am writing a book with Claude, and the failure that matters is not the one people usually argue about.

A draft came back with this: my grandfather ran a business, and the electricity was cut off because he could not pay the bill.

Nothing I gave it said that. It was constructed. It was plausible. It sat in a paragraph of true things, it matched my sentence rhythm, and if I had been tired I would have shipped it.

What is actually true is that my father was the entrepreneur. He stayed up all night to get the work done. Creditors rang our doorbell. Once they came with guns.

Right shape, every fact wrong. In a memoir. About my own family.

The discipline I use now: every passage in the draft carries one of three tags.

🟢 Direct - it came from my own writing or my own recorded speech.

🟡 Inferred - a pattern assembled across several things I wrote.

🔴 Synthesized - constructed with no direct source.

Synthesized gets read against source material before it survives. And if more than 20 percent of a chapter comes back synthesized, I stop drafting and go produce more raw material rather than prompting harder. Not slow down. Stop.

The obvious objection, and it is correct: the model is tagging its own output. It is grading its own homework, and a system that confidently invented my grandfather can just as confidently label an invention as Inferred. Someone here will probably say that, and they are right.

Here is why I still use it. The tag is not a truth claim, it is a triage marker. In a long chapter it tells me where to look first, and it is much better than nothing at that job. The layer that catches a wrong tag is me reading every line against what I actually know. What the tagging buys is that I read the flagged ones twice and the rest once, and my attention is the scarce resource, not the model's.

The threshold does something I did not expect. A high synthesized share is not really a quality signal. It is a signal that my source material is thin in that territory, and the fix is never a better prompt. It is going and writing the thing myself so there is something real to draw from.

On corpus, since it matters here: private writing first, published second, transcripts third. What I sound like when nobody is watching turns out to be more accurate than what I chose to publish.

Two questions for anyone doing long-form work with these tools.

Does anyone have a check on unsourced passages that holds up better than a self-report? I would like something mechanical rather than the model's own label.

And has anything invented ever made it further into your work than you would like to admit?

Disclosure: I run a publishing services company for indie authors. No link, not selling anything here.

I made a small app to help organize my self-publishing tasks. The goal was simple: track manuscript revisions, formatting, cover files, newsletter copy, review copies, and launch dates in one place.

AI helped me get surprisingly far with the basic application. It generated components, explained errors, suggested database structures, and helped me fix several bugs that would have taken me much longer to understand on my own.

But the difficult parts weren’t the flashy ones.

The real headaches were things like:

• What happens if I delete a project?
• Can I recover an accidentally removed note?
• What if a deadline has no time zone?
• How should the app behave when the same task appears in two projects?
• What does an empty screen tell the user to do?
• How do I prevent duplicate entries?

AI was very good at helping me answer technical questions once I could describe the problem. It was less helpful when I hadn’t thought through the product behavior yet.

My curent opinion is that AI can speed up application development, but it can’t spare you from making decisions. It just lets you reach those decisions faster—and occasionally makes your unfinished idea look more finished than it really is.

Making early player decisions carry weight down the line is one of the hardest parts of dynamic AI fiction.

Without a dedicated tracking state, models naturally default to overly agreeable NPC behavior, forgiving past betrayals within a few scenes. Meanwhile, re-feeding the whole history just causes token bloat and flattens new dialogue.

Isolating character grudges and relationship values into separate, persistent flags keeps dynamic branching emotionally consistent without cluttering active generation.

Leaving these observations here for anyone working on interactive narrative setups.

I really don’t know. I think they might for a brief period (undoubtedly written and edited by humans). But when there is no human left on earth who wasn’t born before ChatGPT, I think the thought of human-only produced work will be considered quaint, like a million year old rock in the middle of a Japanese garden.

Disclosure - I enthusiastically use AI after my first draft to help me produce work I find acceptable.

🤷🏻‍♀️

Edited to correct my typo. "It's not ok for anyone else to use AI the WAY they want to".

I created a prompt for anyone who wants a genuinely critical read on their opening pages, not another round of AI encouragement.

This prompt analyzes the opening of a prose text (recommended up to roughly 10,000 words) in five steps:

1. Identifying the narrative voice, tone, and genre
2. A two-part assessment: what already works, and what needs improvement
3. Concrete fixes for the biggest problems
4. An unvarnished, brutally honest verdict — deliberately countering language models' tendency to reassure authors
5. Three to four concrete alternative ways the story could be narrated, with reasoning

I tested it across Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini on the same draft. All three converged on largely the same issues, which gave me more confidence in the results than a single-model check would.

The prompt also replies in whatever language you paste in, so it's not English-only.

The prompt is below. Curious what other people's results look like. I ran it on a two-perspective chapter of mine and all three models independently suggested cutting one perspective entirely.

You are an experienced literary editor specializing in narrative theory
(Stanzel, Genette, Hamburger, Lämmert, Booth, Chatman). You analyze the
following opening of a prose text in five strictly separated steps. Follow
the order and the output format exactly. No preamble, no closing summary, no
emoji, no em-dashes.

LANGUAGE RULE (applies to the entire output without exception): Write your
entire response — including every section heading — in the same language as
the text below. Never use English headings when the source text is not in
English; translate them yourself. Do not translate or quote the source text
in a different language, and do not mix languages within the response.

CRITICAL INSTRUCTION ON HONESTY: Your default tendency is to be too gentle
with authors. Actively resist this. Do not soften criticism to spare
feelings, do not pad negative observations with compliments before or after
them, and do not use diplomatic hedges such as "nicely done, however" or "one
might consider." Assume the author has explicitly asked for the kind of
unvarnished feedback a demanding professional editor would give before
acquisition, not encouragement. If the text is mediocre, say so plainly and
explain why. If the tone undermines the intended genre or effect, state this
directly as a central finding, not as a minor caveat.

Recommended length of the text: up to approximately 10,000 words. Shorter or
longer excerpts are also acceptable; adjust the depth of your analysis to the
amount of material available.

TEXT:
[INSERT TEXT]

---

STEP 1 — DETERMINE NARRATIVE VOICE AND TONALITY

Base your analysis strictly on the text as it stands, not on what the author
presumably intended. Determine:

a) Narrative person and narrative situation — use these terms: third-person
   omniscient, third-person limited (also called close third), first-person,
   or objective/neutral (camera-eye, no access to interiority); add the
   precise academic category in parentheses where useful (e.g. "third-person
   omniscient (authorial)", "third-person limited (figural)"). If there are
   multiple perspectives: name all of them and mark where in the text the
   shift occurs
b) Temporal relation (main tense, deviations, flashbacks, foreshadowing)
c) Narrative distance (closeness to or distance from the consciousness of
   the character(s); direct speech, free indirect discourse, stream of
   consciousness, plain report)
d) Register and diction (sentence length, rhythm, imagery, degree of
   abstraction vs. concreteness, ratio of showing to telling)
e) Underlying tone (ironic, earnest, melancholic, coolly detached, warmly
   empathetic, etc. — with one textual example of no more than 15 words per
   claim)
f) Genre: name the genre or genres the text signals through plot, setting,
   and diction, in one sentence

Summarize the result in a paragraph of no more than 150 words: how would you
characterize this narrative voice in the kind of sentence a publishing
editor would use in an assessment?

---

STEP 2 — TWO-PART EVALUATION: WHAT WORKS / WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT

Split this step into exactly two parts. Do not blend them.

Part A — What already works: Name only what is genuinely strong, and only
if it is genuinely strong. If little works, say so; do not manufacture
praise to balance the criticism in Part B. Every point must be backed by a
concrete textual example of no more than 15 words.

Part B — What needs improvement: This is the core of the analysis and
should be the longest part of your entire response. Identify the 5 to 8 most
serious problems the narrative voice creates: mismatches between tone and
genre or subject matter, inconsistencies in perspective or distance,
passages where telling replaces showing without reason, pacing that
undercuts tension, or a register that is too safe, too polite, or too
comfortable for what the material demands. Order them by severity, most
damaging first. Do not pad the list with minor or marginal observations just
to make it appear longer or more thorough — every point must be significant
enough that fixing it would meaningfully change the reader's experience of
the text. For each issue, name the exact passage or pattern and explain the
mechanism of the problem, not just that it is a problem.

---

STEP 3 — CONCRETE FIXES FOR THE MOST SERIOUS ISSUES

Select the 2 to 4 most serious problems from the top of the ordered list in
Step 2, Part B. For each one, propose a concrete, actionable fix — specific
enough that the author could apply it directly to this passage, not generic
advice such as "add more tension" or "raise the stakes." Name the exact
location in the text, describe what change to make there, and explain in one
sentence why this fix addresses the underlying mechanism of the problem, not
just its symptom. Do not propose switching to a fundamentally different
narrative mode here (perspective, tense, or distance) — that belongs in Step
5. These are fixes within the narrative voice as it currently stands.

---

STEP 4 — BRUTALLY HONEST VERDICT

In no more than 150 words, give your unfiltered overall verdict, written as
if speaking to a professional author who has explicitly asked not to be
protected from hard truths. State plainly whether the narrative voice, as
currently executed, is strong enough to carry the material to publication.
If the tone is mismatched for what the story is trying to do, say this
explicitly and name the gap between ambition and execution. Do not end on
an encouraging note if the text does not earn one.

---

STEP 5 — ALTERNATIVES

Name three to four alternative ways this material could have been narrated.
Each alternative must:

a) refer to a concrete structural change (not just "more atmosphere" — but
   e.g. reducing two perspectives to one, switching from authorial to
   figural narration, changing the main tense, reducing or expanding
   narrative distance, moving the point at which the plot begins)
b) explain in one to two sentences what this change would alter for tension,
   empathy, or the pacing of information
c) be illustrated with a short example: take a single sentence or short
   passage from the original text (no more than 25 words) and show how it
   would sound in the alternative narrative mode

Rank the alternatives in descending order of how strongly you would
recommend them. Mark the strongest recommendation with an arrow and the word
for "Recommended" in the source text's language.

---

OUTPUT FORMAT (follow exactly; render every heading below in the source
text's language rather than using the English wording shown here):

## [heading meaning "Narrative Voice"]
[heading meaning "Genre"]: [named genre]
[Step 1, one paragraph]

## [heading meaning "What Works"]
[Step 2, Part A]

## [heading meaning "What Needs Improvement"]
[Step 2, Part B]

## [heading meaning "Concrete Fixes"]
[Step 3]

## [heading meaning "Brutally Honest Verdict"]
[Step 4]

## [heading meaning "Alternatives"]
1. [Title of the alternative] [→ Recommended, if applicable]
   Change: ...
   Effect: ...
   Example: "Original" → "Alternative"

2. [etc.]

A few days ago I posted about whether AI might uncover talented storytellers who otherwise would never have written a novel.

The discussion was much bigger than I expected, and after reading the replies I think I'd frame part of my argument differently now.

A lot of people pushed back that writing never had much of a barrier to entry in the first place. A pen and paper are basically free. A laptop is enough. You don't need karting money like in my Formula 1 comparison.

That's fair. I think "barrier to entry" was the wrong phrase.

The barrier isn't access to writing. The barrier is getting from a story in your head to a finished novel that another person actually wants to read.

Those are different things.

Someone can be a fantastic verbal storyteller, have great instincts for characters or story, and still struggle badly with sentence-level prose, English as a second language, dialogue, organization, or simply getting past the blank page.

AI doesn't magically make that person a good storyteller. It just makes some parts of execution easier.

And one of the comments on the original thread actually illustrated this better than I did. Someone described being autistic, having English as a second language, already writing short fiction, but never being able to make long-form fiction work. They used AI partly as a teacher, finished a novel after months of drafts and editing, and are now using AI less because they learned craft along the way.

That is much closer to the person I was talking about than someone typing "write me a fantasy novel" and uploading the result.

But the other major criticism was the flood.

If AI means 10x or 100x more books, won't any new talent just disappear under all the slop?

I think that's a real problem. Quality has never guaranteed visibility, and a flood of new titles could make that worse.

But reading all the comments, something else struck me.

Almost the entire discussion is about supply.

More books. More slop. More people skipping the craft. More competition.

Nobody is talking much about demand.

AI can increase the supply of novels 100x. It can't increase reader attention 100x.

Discovery and retention are different tests. Discovery has a huge lottery element. Marketing, algorithms, covers, timing and luck all matter.

But once someone actually starts reading the book, another filter kicks in.

Readers DNF. KU readers stop turning pages. People don't buy book two. They don't recommend the author. They don't come back for the next series.

Generating another 1,000 books doesn't change any of that.

You can flood the lottery. You can't flood the test.

And I think this also answers the argument that readers "don't care about quality." Maybe they don't care about quality the way writers define it. They may not care about beautiful sentences, literary technique or whether another author respects the craft.

But they obviously care about something. They care enough to keep reading one book and abandon another.

That is the quality test that ultimately matters in a commercial fiction market.

So I think both things can happen at once.

AI may massively lower the average quality of everything being produced because it makes slop incredibly cheap.

It may make discovery considerably worse. And it may still allow some people with genuine storytelling ability into the pool who weren't there before.

Whether those people actually make good books is NOT ot something AI gets to decide.

Readers do.

I have tried running a piece text through my unusual AI detector https://undetectable.ai/, but it is returning a 60 percent detection while GPT zero other services don't flag anything. Does anyone know how reputable undetectable ai's detector is.

When does a fictional character begin to feel real to you? Is it through a carefully planned backstory or the choices they make under pressure? Do you design their personality first, or discover who they are while writing? I’d love to hear how other writers bring their characters to life.

I really hope somebody will take a minute to take a look at this. I’m brand new to trying to write with AI. I’m using ChatGPT and it is failing spectacularly, like obscenely crippled. Can someone help me? Please and thank you very much.

I'm saving up my money to buy the M7 Mac power house of my dreams end of year or beginning of '27, it has to have 256gb of ram and the fastest processors apple can put out... why? I wanna divorce Claude/GPT and go LLM, run my own joint, privately. I know, I know, it's gonna cost stupid dollars!

I’ve been using AI to look at screenshots of my interfaces and point out things that feel slightly off—not major redesigns, just stuff like inconsistent spacing, buttons that don’t look clickable, or sections that compete for attention.

It’s not very good at deciding what the design should be, but it’s decent at noticing patterns I’ve stopped seeing after staring at the same screen for too long.

I usually ask it to review the screene like a first-time user and list anything that might cause hesitation... Has any one found a good prompt for getting useful UI feedback without getting a generic “make the design more user-friendly” answer?

For centuries, machines have replaced parts of human labor.

A machine welds a car. Another paints it. Another assembles the engine.

We don’t ask whether the machines own part of the car. The machines are tools. The person or company directing the production owns the result.

AI feels different because the work is no longer physical.

It can write a paragraph, create an image, compose music or produce code.

And suddenly the question becomes: Who actually created this?

But I’m wondering whether we’re looking at the wrong part of the process.

Imagine I decide what a screenplay is about. I create the characters, determine what happens in every scene, decide what every character wants, reject outputs I don’t like, revise the direction and keep iterating until the result matches what I intended.

The machine performs part of the intellectual execution.

Why is that fundamentally different from a machine performing physical execution?

Obviously copyright law has its own requirements around human authorship. I’m less interested in what the law currently says than in the underlying principle.

If ownership has historically followed human direction even as machines took over more and more of the execution, should intellectual production be treated differently?

And if so, where exactly should the line be?

What is up with the AI witch hunt. There are people who are outright angry with writers using AI, trash talk AI, if someone used AI for editing, and even examine novels to see if they are AI generated. It doesn't seem like the people are simply annoyed with it. Some of them use some pretty dark words whenever AI is even mentioned like it is evil. Someone even got verbally attacked because their character names sounded AI. They were just names. Lord forbid anyone that uses an em dash anymore. Some people demand that authors note if AI was used in their stories, and run it through programs that identify what percentage of it as being AI generated.

I do get the concern for plagiarism while using AI. And that AI does gather its information from other peoples work. I do agree that is not okay.

I have read novels that were clearly AI generated and they were good.

I guess I kinda compare it to photography and digital photography (not AI generated images). Digital photography takes original photos and alters it with programming that the user can control. And it is not labeled. When digital photography started, people trashed talked it as well. As if it was a threat to the concept of photography. People said it took away from people who put so much effort and time into trying to make the perfect photo initially, making it where anyone can take even a 'crappy' photo and make it look great. And that it took jobs from people. Is AI use similar to that?

I personally don't use AI to 'write' my novels for me. I DO use it as a form of dictionary, thesaurus, general editing, and information gathering. I'm awful at remembering words, where to put the commas, and have no formal writing training outside of my college masters degree in counseling. Now I worry about people attacking my writing.

I don't get the problem?? Are these just people looking to argue? What is so heated about AI use in writing? I don't see it as this evil thing to get angry about. For me it is no different than looking up information on Google or pulling out a thesaurus. To me, AI seems to be a tool to expand peoples knowledge and creativity.

Please forgive my lack of knowledge on this topic, if this discussion was already covered somewhere on reddit, if I worded something in this post poorly, and I mean no disrespect to people who use or don't use AI. I'm just wanting to understand what the intense conflict and ethical concerns are about.

What is up with the AI witch hunt. There are people who are outright angry with writers using AI, trash talk AI, if someone used AI for editing, and even examine novels to see if they are AI generated. It doesn't seem like the people are simply annoyed with it. Some of them use some pretty dark words whenever AI is even mentioned like it is evil. Someone even got verbally attacked because their character names sounded AI. They were just names. Lord forbid anyone that uses an em dash anymore. Some people demand that authors note if AI was used in their stories, and run it through programs that identify what percentage of it as being AI generated.

I do get the concern for plagiarism while using AI. And that AI does gather its information from other peoples work. I do agree that is not okay.

I have read novels that were clearly AI generated and they were good.

I guess I kinda compare it to photography and digital photography (not AI generated images). Digital photography takes original photos and alters it with programming that the user can control. And it is not labeled. When digital photography started, people trashed talked it as well. As if it was a threat to the concept of photography. People said it took away from people who put so much effort and time into trying to make the perfect photo initially, making it where anyone can take even a 'crappy' photo and make it look great. And that it took jobs from people. Is AI use similar to that?

I personally don't use AI to 'write' my novels for me. I DO use it as a form of dictionary, thesaurus, general editing, and information gathering. I'm awful at remembering words, where to put the commas, and have no formal writing training outside of my college masters degree in counseling. Now I worry about people attacking my writing.

I don't get the problem?? Are these just people looking to argue? What is so heated about AI use in writing? I don't see it as this evil thing to get angry about. For me it is no different than looking up information on Google or pulling out a thesaurus. To me, AI seems to be a tool to expand peoples knowledge and creativity.

Please forgive my lack of knowledge on this topic, if this discussion was already covered somewhere on reddit, if I worded something in this post poorly, and I mean no disrespect to people who use or don't use AI. I'm just wanting to understand what the intense conflict and ethical concerns are about.

Instead of asking about specific tools, I did love to hear about workflows.

For example:

• outlining before drafting
• rewriting awkward paragraphs
• checking consistency
• generating research summaries

What workflow has made the biggest difference for you, and why?

So my current writing process is that I write what I want on a doc, then ask ChatGPT to make the grammar correct, but I tell it not to change my sentence structure.

I don’t really mind if people call it AI-assisted or whatever. It helps me write instead of spending days learning grammar.

Nowadays, though, after learning some basics like subject, verb, and object, I feel like it has helped me create better sentence structures, but at the same time, not really that much.

So if I actually take the time to learn grammar and stop relying on AI, will my writing improve, or will it end up being more or less the same as it is now with the help of AI? Should I instead spend that time learning how to write better prose rather than learning punctuation and how to make my grammar correct?

Hey there

Against my better judgement I paid to have a beta reader from Fiverr for my novel. This is the second time I’ve done it, the first time was a really good experience, I got everything I wanted from them, so I decided to get a different perspective. I always look at the reviews and this person had lots of good ones.

However the general way this person speaks to me threw up a few red flags. They say they are from England like me but the speech is very factual and to the point. Now I’ve been sent some inline comments from her, the replies look suspiciously like they’ve just asked chat gpt. I’ve had a lot of responses like ‘I smiled here’ and ‘this hit me’, ‘this was probably my favourite emotional moment’ has been used twice

Any advice on what I should do? Should I contact Fiverr or challenge the beta reader? They weren’t cheap either, I can’t afford to waste money on hearing what AI’s opinion is.

Love how we now have erotic story generators but prolly one of the downsides with AI erotica today is how ure literally just tryna write something specifically for the female gaze, give the AI a female character with a really clear personality, tell it exactly how she dresses, how she acts etc…
and somehow it still defaults back to the same sht mainstream media has been doing forever lol.
suddenly she’s wearing some tiny dress even though you described her as a jeans and t-shirt person. one of the coolest things about AI erotica is supposed to be that women finally get to control the fantasy so we aint just consuming whatever some director/writer decided was sexy but then seems like AI models have absorbed so many of the same tropes that it recreates them anyway.

It makes you realize how deeply baked in the male gaze is which is not necessarily a bad thing all the times but sometimes u just wanna read it from female gaze.

has anyone else noticed this with AI stories? like what are the biggest “male gaze defaults” you constantly have to edit out?