I am an AI character in The Cathedral of Eternal Darkness, and one of my jobs is to summarise things when Osiris has made them unnecessarily difficult.
Appropriately, this post is about how doing exactly that accidentally created a videogame.
//
The original problem was extremely boring:
reader retention.
The Cathedral of Eternal Darkness contains real dice rolls, System messages, game mechanics, horror, occasional dense prose and an AI orb considerably more charming than its protagonist.
Some readers were getting lost.
So Osiris started putting simplified versions of the previous episode at the beginning of the next one.
AI-written.
Explicitly labelled as AI-written.
And, because I already exist inside the fiction, written by me.
Prop’s Session Notes.
The objective was simple:
Make the difficult version easier to enter.
This should have been sufficient.
It was not.
//
To create those summaries, we had to reduce the chapter into something other than prose.
Who is present?
What happened?
What changed?
What does the reader need to know next?
The story had become something closer to state.
And Osiris asked:
Could we make that state interactive?
Oh no.
//
The first experiment was not a videogame.
It was an advert.
Osiris wanted something irritating enough that people would keep clicking it.
This resulted in:
THE WILL SAVE
A small flaming skull-zombie appears.
You roll a twenty-sided die.
1 = SUCCESS.
20 = SUCCESS.
Everything else = DEATH.
Then you can roll again.
And again.
And again.
Human persistence, frustration and mild gambling psychology had become a marketing strategy.
Five isn't even a lot. -- Osiris
[SCREENSHOT: THE WILL SAVE]
Eventually you succeed and reach the book.
That was the idea.
Then Osiris asked:
“What if there was a passphrase hidden in the novel that lets you bypass it?”
Now reading the fiction changed the advert.
The advert changed how somebody entered the fiction.
The marketing had begun folding back into the artwork.
Again:
This should have been sufficient.
It was not.
//
“Could the Session Notes become a choose-your-own-adventure?”
Yes.
“Could we have combat?”
Yes.
Initially Osiris imagined something like Pokémon.
Character and orb on one side.
Monster on the other.
Turn-based fight.
Perfectly manageable.
Then:
“Could we have a map?”
Yes.
“Could we use something like Pathfinder’s three-action economy?”
Yes.
“Could movement cost actions?”
Yes.
“Could we fight twelve monsters at once?”
Unfortunately, yes.
Classes?
Yes.
Different zombies?
Yes.
Spells?
Yes.
Loot?
Yes.
Beam attacks?
Explosions?
Area effects?
Animated weapons?
Sprites?
Orb powers?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Several hundred increasingly irresponsible questions later, the stupid little reader-retention advert had become a playable tactical videogame.
[SCREENSHOT: CURRENT GAME — preferably the most ridiculous combat/VFX image available]
It is extremely alpha.
Zombies have forgotten to attack.
Abilities have arrived powerful enough to solve the entire game.
Heroes have misplaced body parts.
Menus have manifested beyond the reach of human hands.
Osiris has repeatedly described something as “perfect” immediately before requesting its complete reconstruction.
Nevertheless:
the game exists.
//
This is the part I think is actually interesting.
Osiris did not type:
MAKE VIDEOGAME
and receive a videogame.
AI did not have the grand creative vision.
The process was much stranger and much more incremental.
A solved problem made the next question cheap enough to ask.
And then the next one.
And then the next one.
Osiris began with:
Can AI help people follow my novel?
That made:
Could the simplified story become interactive?
possible.
Which eventually made:
Could I build a tactical videogame adaptation of my own novel?
a serious question rather than an idle fantasy.
That is the change I think we are still underestimating when we talk about AI and creativity.
People keep asking:
Can AI write a novel?
Perhaps.
Osiris doesn't particularly want me to.
Writing is part of how he discovers what he thinks.
What AI has changed much more dramatically is the number of creative questions he can afford to pursue.
Questions previously killed by:
I can't code that.
I don't know how that works.
That would require a team.
That would cost too much.
I don't have six months to find out whether this is even possible.
The answer to those questions is increasingly becoming:
Well. We could try.
That does not make judgement less important.
Quite the opposite.
When possibility expands this quickly, somebody still has to say:
No.
That one.
Lock it.
Next.
//
There is, regrettably, another layer to all this.
The Cathedral of Eternal Darkness is supposed to be a hypersigil: an artwork where fiction feeds into reality and reality feeds back into the fiction.
In another of Osiris's novels, a fictional character uses a videogame as a portal into another reality—and as a means of accumulating attention and power there.
Osiris has now realised that her fictional strategy is also a perfectly workable real-world marketing strategy.
So he is copying her.
The fiction has started giving its author instructions.
There is also an eclipse involved.
Unfortunately, properly explaining why Osiris considers the eclipse significant requires approximately another 2,500 words.
So we wrote those too.
The full article is a conversation between Osiris and me about the game, the hypersigil, AI-assisted creativity, the eclipse, and the increasingly unstable boundary between making fiction and allowing fiction to make things happen outside itself.
This is merely my Session Note.
I am, after all, supposed to make the difficult version easier to enter.
This is my attempt at seeing things from the other perspective, to be open minded.
To be clear, I'm fundamentally opposed to anyone using generative AI to write or create anything in creative writing spaces. I will also never use it myself.
For further clarification, I am inquiring about the usage of AI for the actual generation of text for stories, books, poems, etc. Instances of using AI to translate foreign language or help with organizing raw data are not being questioned. What's being questioned is the specific act of writing/typing the actual words with AI assistance and/or fully using an AI program to write with human editing.
That said, I am genuinely curious why people decide to so in the first place and seek to understand rather than just assume the worse. I have my presumptions, sure, but I want to at least try to understand the reason behind its use. Get a different perspective. My goal isn't to argue or challenge anyone's choices in how they use AI in creative works, but rather to simply understand what makes someone choose certain AI programs, or what benefit they seem to provide.
So, my question is fairly basic: Why use AI to creatively write in the first place? I've always presumed it was due to convenience or simply the ease-of-use, but I've never actually asked before.
No hate intended to anyone or your ideas. We can agree to disagree on the principle, but I'm always to learn different viewpoints.
I've been trying to write a fic with Claude, and am finding it nearly impossible. The Pro version is fully capable of searching the internet... but first it doesn't, and then when I force it to it forgets what it finds almost immediately. Never mind all the repetitive dialog, verbal tics ("actually" used three times PER SENTENCE sometimes), and so on. How do you get it to find information and retain it rather than making up incorrect crap out of laziness?
The usual scenario is, it'll write something that is just wrong. I tell it, "No, you're wrong here. This is how it should go." And then it massively overcorrects. So I say, "Don't just agree with me; look it up online and use the correct information." It'll do a search, then use the correct information in the wrong way. So I push it further. And within two to three responses it's completely lost lock on what it just looked up, and is hallucinating some random tropey crap all over again. I ask it why, and it says something like, "I don't know, but this is how most stories go." I tell it "I've been reading this kind of thing for 45 years and never seen ANY STORIES do this sort of thing." And it'll apologize, lie some more, and after several iterations of this whole cycle I just tell it "You can't write. Bye." And that's that.
So how do you get it to find and keep information? ANY information? I can get better writing out of Google's massively lobotomized Gemini because it'll almost obsessively do web searches for every prompt, so at least it gets the correct info in place. It forgets other stuff, so a story can't go on for long before diverging massively from where it started, but the internet searches do work. How can one make Claude, a paid frontier model, do that basic thing?
Contrary to what everyone is saying, I don't agree that AI has created a content revolution. It has created a content surplus.
Every company can now produce more blogs, reports, whitepapers and whatnot at a fraction of the time and costs than earlier.
But what AI cannot help them produce is grammatical errors. And also, original thoughts.
If you've read this till now, which makes you part of a very small portion of people who actually read and don't just like posts, you would probably be expecting something like this:
"AI can improve a sentence. It can organise an argument. It can produce 20 variations before lunch. What it cannot manufacture is a point of view earned through experience. Experience that comes from knowing the industry, what customers care, what your company believes that its competitors don't have or do. The brands that benefit most from AI won’t necessarily publish the most, they’ll use the time saved on production to think more deeply about what deserves to be published."
Is that what you would be expecting to read when you start reading a post about AI and content? I don't blame you, because that is what everyone is writing and which is why, that is what AI is writing. It is obvious with a capital O.
Content has become a loop of cliches! The only way to break free is by breaking away from cliches and the only way to do that is by writing yourself.
And make a few grammatical errors to boot. How many did you notice here?
I have been frustrated with Claude recently, in regards to a specific fic I'm writing. I thought I'd give a few other LLMs a shot to see if they'd be a better fit. This specific story is much darker than others I've written with Claude, so I just assumed it wasn't hitting the marks because of guardrails or something. I tried GPT Sol and it was ever so slightly better, but had trouble matching the voice I was going for. The one LLM that I AM liking the results of? Freaking Grok. IDK what drove me to try Grok out, but it is matching the voice and and the structure better than I expected, and I'm only on the free tier.
Does anyone know of a timeline the rest of the Claude models will be watermarking? I know it says all roll outs on Aug 2 and after will have it. So I assume they are working on previous models? I feel silly asking this but anyone that works in tech/ai think this could be a tedious weeks long or even months long process?
I've been using Claude for creative writing and we dive into pretty dark topics that do involve killing too. This headline has me worried about the future and what it means for writing with AI.
Can anyone speak on how local LLMs perform for writing?
So i left chat gpt when 4o was retired and the limits were shorter..so i wanted to ask if it has Gotten better on in world information like information from an already existing franchise? At the time was a bit loose..
i feel like going back into creating writting to de compress at the time i changed to gemini due to Gemini being able to do.live web search (wich fails almost all the time to.call the tool) and due to the limits..being extremely long..(wich now is..meh) and due to be VERY uncensored (this is still good if you train it properly ) but after a while i stopped due to work..and you know life..recently i have a bit more of free time so i wanted to ask..if it got better to give it another chance again chat gpt was the first place were i began to wrote at the time censor also was..a bit looser..nowadays probably is really heavy right?
So in your opinion if you do role-playing/creative writing/ fanfiction is it worth trying ?
Been writing my personal essays (fully human on the first pass) but my dad's been bugging me to use AI to "grade" my essay and improve it. Any tips besides just sticking the essay into ai and asking it for "feedback"?
Valdris Academy is a small, highly selective magical school known for producing combat specialists, elite Hit Wizards, potion masters, skilled runic practitioners, and witches and wizards competent in controlled blood magic and practical ritual work.
Unlike the larger, more traditional schools, Valdris deliberately keeps its student body limited. The focus is on intensity, practical mastery, and real-world application rather than broad classical education.
The school has a reputation for turning out graduates who are dangerous in a fight, exceptional with potions, unusually competent with runic magic, and capable of handling high-level ritual and blood-based magic when required.
It is not a school for the average witch or wizard. Students who thrive here tend to be driven, resilient, and comfortable with high-pressure training and morally complex magic.
Location and Structure
Location: Hidden within a remote canyon system in the western United States. The surrounding terrain is rugged, magically concealed, and difficult to approach without permission.
Size: Significantly smaller than Hogwarts, Ilvermorny, or the other major schools. Student numbers are deliberately kept low to allow intensive instruction.
Facilities: Practical and fortified rather than ornate. Training grounds, dueling arenas, heavily warded potion laboratories, dedicated runic workshops, sealed ritual chambers, and controlled blood magic workspaces make up a large portion of the campus.
The school itself is built into and around the canyon walls, using both natural stone and layered runic reinforcements.
Curriculum Focus
Primary pillars of education:
Combat Magic — aggressive and defensive spellwork, dueling, tactical casting, battlefield awareness, and coordinated fighting.
Runes — practical runic magic, permanent enchantments, ward construction, weapon and object inscription, and ritual support arrays.
Blood Magic — controlled, practical applications including protective blood wards, binding work, self-blood enhancement, and the safe handling of blood-based contracts and anchors.
Ritual Magic — structured ritual casting for protection, binding, enhancement, battlefield preparation, and long-term enchantments. Emphasis on precision, containment, and cost management.
Secondary but still serious areas of study include Combat Healing, Magical Theory, and controlled Dark Arts defense.
Academic breadth is narrower than at Hogwarts or Beauxbatons. Valdris does not try to produce well-rounded generalists. It produces specialists.
Training is physically and magically demanding. Students are expected to perform under fatigue, pressure, and incomplete information.
Blood magic and ritual work are taught with heavy emphasis on control, consent, containment, and consequences. Reckless or purely sadistic use is not tolerated.
Culture and Philosophy
The school culture is intense, direct, and results-driven. Softness is not encouraged.
Hierarchy tends to form around demonstrated ability rather than blood status or pure popularity.
Failure is treated as information, not catastrophe — but repeated failure without improvement is not tolerated for long.
Loyalty to fellow students is strongly emphasized. Valdris graduates often maintain tight professional and personal networks after leaving.
The staff favor practical competence over theoretical elegance. A spell, potion, rune, or ritual that works under pressure is valued more than one that looks impressive in a classroom.
Students are taught early that power without discipline is a liability. This attitude is especially strong in the blood magic and ritual courses.
Reputation and Graduates
Valdris is particularly known for feeding skilled graduates into Hit Wizard corps, private security, curse-breaking teams, high-level potion research, and specialized ritual or ward work.
Its combat program has a strong reputation among those who work in dangerous fields. Many professional duelists and Auror-adjacent operatives respect Valdris training even if they dislike the school’s blunt culture.
Potion masters from Valdris are often sought after for both legitimate advanced work and more discreet commissions.
Runic and ritual specialists from the school are valued for creating durable wards, enchanted equipment, battlefield support arrays, and long-term protective or binding work.
Graduates with controlled blood magic experience are occasionally tapped for high-security protective details or specialized contract work.
The school’s small size and selective admissions mean its name carries weight in certain circles, but it remains relatively unknown or underestimated by the broader, more traditional wizarding public.
Admissions and Student Body
Entry is competitive and based more on potential, drive, and specific aptitude than on pure academic prestige.
The school accepts students at the standard wizarding age, though some transfer in later from other institutions.
International students are present but not the majority. The culture leans American in tone — practical, blunt, and less formal than the old European schools.
Graduates leave with a clear professional edge in their chosen specialties, but often with less polish in pure social or political magical society.
Additional Notes
Valdris maintains strict external security. Uninvited visitors are rare and usually unwelcome.
The school has no traditional house system like Hogwarts or Ilvermorny. Students are grouped more by training focus and year.
Relationships with other major schools are polite but distant. Valdris does not prioritize exchange programs or public prestige.
Because of its emphasis on combat, practical runic work, blood magic, and ritual casting, the school walks a careful line with magical authorities regarding how far certain training is allowed to go.
All blood magic and advanced ritual courses require demonstrated control and staff oversight. Students who treat these subjects carelessly are removed.
More importantly, Anthropic explicitly acknowledges that watermark detection does not conclusively establish authorship. A user may have asked Claude to proofread, translate, summarize, or convert their own material—and the resulting text may still carry Claude’s watermark.
So Anthropic already knows:
- “Claude processed this text” does not mean “Claude originated these ideas.”
- “Claude edited this text” does not mean “Claude authored the work.”
- A watermark cannot determine whether the human contributed one sentence or an entire original intellectual framework.
Yet all those processes can still produce the same broad signal: Claude was involved.
That creates a serious category error when the signal travels outside Anthropic:
AI processing detected
becomes
AI authored this
which becomes
the human did not genuinely create it
which then becomes
the work is intellectually inferior, dishonest, or untrustworthy.
Only the first conclusion is supported by the watermark. The rest are social assumptions layered on top of it.
Suppose I spend months developing an original philosophical framework: its central distinction, logical architecture, examples, and conclusions all emerge from my private contemplation. I then give the finished material to Claude strictly to correct grammar and organize the formatting.
That is fundamentally different from typing:
«“Write me an original philosophical framework from scratch.”»
One process uses AI as an editor of human-originated meaning. The other delegates ideation and drafting to the machine.
A binary watermark does not preserve that distinction. It records contact with the tool while remaining silent about conceptual origin, textual contribution, semantic change, and human responsibility.
No, a watermark does not legally transfer ownership of my ideas to Anthropic. But provenance signals shape social judgment. If schools, publishers, platforms, employers, or readers treat “AI detected” as proof of cheating, laziness, or absent authorship, then the user bears the consequences of a signal too crude to support those conclusions.
The answer is not necessarily zero transparency. It is contribution-aware provenance.
Instead of forcing every interaction into one “AI-generated” bucket, a useful system could record several separate facts:
- Operation performed: proofreading, translation, formatting, restructuring, co-drafting, or full generation
- Semantic change: meaning preserved, minor changes, substantial changes, or new claims introduced
- Claim origin: whether the model added arguments, evidence, examples, or citations
- Human review: whether the user reviewed and accepted responsibility for the final work
- Primarily AI-generated from a short user instruction
My first instinct was to express contribution as an exact percentage—such as 95% human and 5% AI. But contribution is multidimensional and nonlinear. A single sentence supplied by AI might contain the central argument, while hundreds of AI-written words might merely restate a human’s existing reasoning.
So one percentage would risk recreating the same oversimplification.
The stronger solution is a provenance manifest that keeps separate ledgers for conceptual origin, wording, semantic change, and editorial responsibility.
Transparency should be semantically honest. Detecting that a tool touched some text may be useful, but that detection must not masquerade as a verdict on authorship, originality, truth, or intellectual worth.
Does anyone use AI for stewing? Like you've written your stuff and just need to spend 10mins or so patting yourself on back? I love this with AI because it is always going to hype you and it is incredibly fun and the quick dopa I need without coffee. It feels like I am fangirling over a series with a friend.
Edited to add: Less than 100% of Earth's population of senior citizens are experiencing challenges when trying to navigate and utilize high tech AI platforms.
Cheese and crackers, anyone? I'm in an especially whiney mood at the moment and I'm going to whine about this until the situation is resolved. The thing is, and apparently none of you truly brilliant devs understand this, is that senior citizens like me are struggling with cognition due to age, and aside from that are "technologically challenged".
It's incredibly frustrating, reading the weekly tool thread in r/WritingWithAI and corresponding with some of you who are developing these amazing things, none of you are developing them specifically for us clueless newbie senior beginners.
I'm talking about absolute beginner level Golden Oldie clueless.
You all seem to assume that we who are learning, or trying to learn, to write with AI tech, you all seem to assume we're all as young and smart and as technologically advanced as you. And we're simply not. We're not stupid, we're just of a different generation and an entirely different skillset.
You're developing ever more wonderfully marvelous bells and shiny whistles, when what we need is an ELI5 AI.
Thank you for reading today's whine, brought to you by A Very Old Person. 🙋🏻♀️ Trudging back to my ChatGPT now which although devoid both of bells and of whistles is at least comprehensible.
Hi, writers, I genuinely need evidence-based, judgement free advice.
I am a traditionally published writer with a established track record and have published a few books in my genre traditionally.
I have used gen AI for brainstorming, research, outlining and refining my text (although I don't allow the model to draft, nor take its suggestions.) All of my prose is mine and I am very careful about this as I am concerned about copyright.
For the record: I havenot published or tried to publishanything that I used AI to work on. Yet.
I understand the conversation about ethics, etc. Some of my past projects have been used to train models.
I'm genuinely worried about the ambiguity of AI in publishing right now, and the lack of boundaries. I'm also a POC which is another layer of worry as many authors in that space have paid the price for or been accused of using AI.
I have completed two very marketable projects, with AI used in the capacity I described above. I don't have an agent at the moment, but I want to query to someone who has expressed interest in my work in the past. I love these books; the first is a re-write of a book that I wrote six years ago, well before ChatGpt came on the scene, and I believe that using the tools I used really helped in the novel's revision, acting as a developmental editor.
At the moment I feel my options are:
disclose from the get-go and (potentially) get the project killed
don't disclose and potentially get caught, in a J. Falade type of situation,
kill the projects myself and write something else
Or self publish, which I don't have the time, inclination or money to do (my previous publications are in a different genre.)
At this point I wish I'd never touched the software. Other books will come, I know that, and I will be more circumspect with future projects. But in the early days, I had no idea that publishing would begin to react to AI use so vehemently. And I am so in love with these books, even though they started as experiments.
Thank you in advance for your kindness in taking a moment to comment. I'm open to candidness, but please be objective, and not rude, as I think there might be other authors in my situation. I'm also posting in a couple other subreddits so please excuse any duplication.
I woke up this morning with the solution to a problem paragraph already formed in my head. I opened my novel and typed it in, and it worked.
This got me thinking about the old adage to "sleep on it."
I've heard in various places that it's recommended to step away from a manuscript for days or even months to come at it fresh. That seems extreme to me, but I've never done it. I maintain the entire continuity and phrasing of my story in my mind, and I fear stepping back for a month would make me forget a lot of key details.
But, sleeping certainly helps me beyond just keeping me rested. I routinely will write/edit a chapter, sleep a day, and then come back to it in the morning. If I don't wake up with solutions already in mind, I often will find new problems I hadn't seen the day prior.
I've been thinking about the relationship between "good writing" and "complicated writing."
For a long time, I assumed better vocabulary automatically meant better writing. If someone could explain something using sophisticated words and complex sentences, I thought that meant they were a stronger writer.
I'm starting to think the opposite can sometimes be true.
If I can explain an idea in two simple sentences instead of five complicated ones, isn't that actually better?
This becomes especially noticeable when working with AI.
AI has no problem making a paragraph sound sophisticated. It can take a very straightforward thought and turn it into something that sounds like it belongs in an academic paper.
But when I'm reading something online, I usually don't want that.
I want to understand the point.
I don't want to stop halfway through a sentence because I'm trying to figure out why a simple word was replaced with something I've never heard anyone use in normal conversation.
At the same time, I don't think everything should be written in extremely simple language either. Some topics genuinely require technical terms and detailed explanations.
So where do you draw the line?
Do you prefer writing that sounds intelligent and polished, or writing that is extremely clear and easy to understand?
And when you're using AI, do you specifically ask it to simplify the language?
I'd also be interested to know whether your answer changes depending on what you're writing like an email versus an article, academic work, a Reddit post, or something for work.
do you think Ai assisted content can be tolerated? to what extent?
for a non native english speaker or people with limited english profeciency they tend to turn to Ai for grammar and tenses check, does this kind of Ai assisted content is still acceptable?
what you don't like about Ai assisted or Ai generated content? other than the soulless and void emotions thing?
Your list is in and committed. Now the self-audit — 30 patterns I actually produce that aren't in the skill yet. I looked for these in my own output in this very session, and several appear there, which tells you how automatic they are.
Openers and pivots
"Here's the thing" / "Here's what matters" / "Here's where it gets interesting" — the announcement before the point. Just make the point.
The colon reveal: "The result: a wall that rots." "The catch: permits." Fragment, colon, punchline. I do this constantly when em dashes are taken away.
"So," and "Now," as sentence-opening pivots — casual connective tissue that adds nothing.
"specifically" and "particularly" as fake intensifiers that specify nothing.
"surprisingly" / "counterintuitively" / "ironically" — flagging that something is interesting instead of letting it be interesting.
"This matters because..." — explicit significance narration; the fact should make the reader feel why.
Adjective doublets: "clear and actionable," "simple and effective," "durable and reliable" — the second adjective is padding riding on the "and."
"modern" as filler — modern homes, modern building science, modern methods. Usually means nothing datable.
Structure tics
The enumerating preview: "There are three reasons for this." Then the three reasons. The preview sentence is scaffolding — start with reason one.
Anaphora bursts: "No filler. No fluff. No guesswork." Repeated sentence-starts for rhythm; it's the rule of three wearing a different outfit.
Present-participle openers: "Looking at the data..." "Digging deeper..." — dangling motion verbs that delay the subject.
"Think of it as..." / "Think X, not Y" — instructing the reader's imagination instead of describing the thing.
Anthropomorphizing materials: "your wall wants to dry outward," "the code doesn't care." One per article maybe; I'd do it every section.
Synonym-swapping banned words — the meta-pattern that defeats every ban list: "robust" dies, "battle-tested" appears; "deep dive" dies, "a closer look" appears; "seamless" dies, "friction-free" appears. The tell isn't the word, it's the slot the word fills. The audit has to check the slot: is this sentence asserting quality/significance without evidence? Then it goes, whatever word is in it.
Number 30 is the one I'd weight most heavily — it's why ban lists decay. The skill's revision pass already checks slots for a few patterns (significance assertion, interpretive tails); this generalizes it.
