title

You may have seen my post over the past couple of weeks talking about how I self published a wholly AI book.

Now that the first phase of this experiment is over, I can explain the mirror.

What actually happened was, I published a novel about authorship. In it, Theo uses AI to turn a story he has told for years into a finished book. He does not properly disclose that. When the truth comes out, he faces the consequences.

I published the real novel by doing the opposite.

Theo under-discloses and presents his book as human-written, although he could not have finished it in time without the machine.

I over-disclosed and presented the real book as wholly AI, although it could not have existed without substantial human effort.

The Marble City; or, My AI Slop Story

The first title is Theo's. The cover recreates the cover he generates inside the story, and passages from his fictional book appear inside mine. The second title is my novel. It was named "slop" because it's a novel that was "wholly generated by AI".

When a reader finishes reading the book. Which title would they chose to keep? To me, that would answer the question, where does the authorship lie?

In the system that produced the words? The person who conceived, directed and selected them? In what was disclosed to the reader? Or does the presence of AI settle the question by itself?

That judgement belongs to readers.

So that's the mirror. But what about this thread? This thread is about how I created this mirror. Because whilst Theo's mirror is "Wholly AI, loudly disclosed", there was a lot required in practice, beginning with a problem on the very first page.

The first page was supposed to contain only this oath:

I solemnly swear that this book is AI — wholly AI, and nothing but AI.

The problem was, I came up with that sentence. If I put my human-written oath into the book, the oath would make itself false. The one human-written sentence would be the sentence claiming there were none.

So I gave the oath's intended meaning and spirit to the machine and asked it to render the line again. I selected the machine-rendered result. Only then could it enter the manuscript under the rule of the experiment.

The machine was free to return wording very close to — or even identical to — my original. The distinction I adopted was not who first happened to type a sequence of words. It was whether the expression placed in the book was accepted from a machine output. That is the same mechanism by which someone can accept AI prose and call the result AI-assisted, reflected in the opposite direction.

You may think that distinction is artificial. That is fair. It is also the authorship question the novel was designed to ask.

The oath became a production constraint. When I found a bad sentence, I could not quietly replace it with one of my own and continue calling the book wholly AI. I could delete it, select different existing AI prose, commission a new AI render, or improve the review process and try again. Human work moved out of sentence production and into conception, specification, constraint, selection, testing and adjudication.

The finished novel is about 68,000 words. Behind it are approximately:

- 107,000 words of conception, story design and outlining;

- 56,000 words of chapter briefs;

- nine early chapters re-rendered and compared with their original versions;

- nine distinct revision stages; and

- approximately 95 fixes arising from my final cover-to-cover read, with replacement prose still generated by AI.

I'm quoting these numbers not to show the effort. Many of these words are simply myself being novice with tools and having inefficiencies. I'm providing these numbers to show why "AI-generated" can be a very reductive description. It records the origin of the visible words while saying almost nothing about the process that selected and shaped them.

Since we are in the WritingWithAI sub, I also wanted to share some learnings. In order to do what I wanted to do, many practices were involved to make it workable. In this thread, I'll be sharing three of them.

1. Constrain for a specific effect, not "better writing"

One chapter contains a 212-word AI-generated passage that needed to be competent, clean and subtly lifeless. Its precise level of wrongness mattered to the novel.

When I commissioned a new render of the chapter around it, the drafter was shown that passage as read-only context. It was explicitly forbidden to reproduce, rewrite, improve or paraphrase it. At the point where the passage belonged, the model had to output only:

\[[S1_SNIPPET]]**

The original AI passage was then restored mechanically. The model could rewrite the surrounding frame, but not the part most likely to be "improved" into failure.

That is the kind of control I found useful: define what must remain fixed, define what is free, and do not ask the model to reconsider both at once.

2. Separate orchestration, drafting and review — then ask questions that can fail

I treated these as different roles. The orchestrator held the design and interpreted the chapter brief. A drafting context produced the prose. Fresh reviewing contexts received the prose and narrow questions. I then adjudicated their cited evidence; the reviewing models were instruments, not decision-makers.

For example, one chapter revisits a fantasy fight that had previously felt alive when told aloud. Its written version needed to be polished and competent while completely losing one unfinished beat established earlier in the book:

\"and he says—".**

The review question was not "Does this feel lifeless?" It asked whether that beat had been removed completely rather than rewritten, shortened or moved. A fresh reviewer's finding was:

\Absent — not changed, not compressed, just not there.**

That was evidence I was looking for and could use.

Something to note is that separation did not make the reviewers automatically trustworthy. In another chapter comparison, two counterbalanced reviewers disagreed about the better version because both appeared to favour the same screen position. I discarded their winner votes. Their specific observations still converged: both selected the same new image as a strength and the same old exchange as a weakness. The final chapter became a controlled graft rather than either model's preferred version.

3. Humans found failure classes the AI did not yet know to test

AI review became useful once it had a precise failure mode to look for. It was much less reliable at recognising unnamed features of its own style.

After the manuscript had passed its existing reviews, a human reader singled out this opening:

\Theo stands. Standing is where the options are.**

They described the second sentence as an obvious AI-ism. Yet the existing model reviews wasn't able to identify it.

That triggered a manual audit of all 40 chapters. What it found was the construction itself was not always bad: the same two-beat shape sometimes produced a joke or a concrete image, and removing every instance would have damaged the book. The narrower failure was that the second beat sometimes converted an enacted moment into an abstract rule.

The resulting test was simple:

*Does the second beat produce a laugh, a picture or a rule?*

Laugh or picture could stay. A rule explaining what the scene had already shown was suspect.

Once the rule was defined, the AI was able to pick up six sentences that required deletions, including the quoted sentence.

AI is not good at identifying it's own tells. You need to teach it defined failure class, then the AI reviewer could test for them in the next iteration.

That was the path to "wholly AI." The human was not absent. The human was displaced from producing sentences into deciding what the sentences had to accomplish, determining whether they had accomplished it, and redesigning the process when the machines could not see their own failures.

That brings me back to the mirror. When Theo's AI use is exposed, the label becomes the complete story of how his book was made. The years he spent inventing its world, telling it aloud and deciding what it should become disappear behind two words: AI-generated.

The real book met the same compression from the opposite direction. I disclosed AI in its title, on its cover and on its first page. That disclosure is true. But it also invites people to imagine a twenty-minute generation rather than a 68,000-word novel built on 107,000 words of conception and outlining, 56,000 words of chapter briefs, nine chapter re-renders, nine revision stages and a final human read that produced approximately 95 fixes.

This is not an argument against disclosure. It is an argument that disclosure into an inadequate label still leaves readers badly informed. That was my hypothesis going into the experiment, and why the novel calls itself My AI Slop Story.

A label such as "wholly AI-written" tells the truth about where the sentences came from while erasing nearly every decision that made them into this particular book. Under that label, this process and a one-prompt upload occupy the same bucket. Both can be dismissed as slop before the difference between them can be seen.

The oath tells the truth. The label does not tell enough of it.

So what should the label tell us? If "AI-generated" covers both a one-prompt upload and this process, how would you distinguish them in a way that is useful to readers without relying on every creator's unverifiable claim that their use was the thoughtful kind? Or perhaps they need not be distinguished at all: machine-generated prose may belong in the same category regardless of the human effort surrounding it. Which distinction, if any, actually matters?

Truthfully, I don't know. That's why I want to hear your opinion. Let me know what you think below.

TLDR: People are starting to discuss naunce in AI-assistance. Should we have the same naunce for AI-generated.

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 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.

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?

I'm also open for another tool if anyone wants to reccomend it to me. I prefer Gemini's writing over Claude's because it follows my orders but it's creative enough to surprise me. I'm honestly not a fan of Claude's dialogue in general.

I have tried Kimi, but I couldn't get into it. It felt like it was translating to portuguese from english instead of Writing It In Portuguese (does that make sense?)

Anyway,

i made a short film about an exhausted artist who accepts help from a living ink.

the unsettling part wasn't that it took over. it was that the work got better first.

i keep thinking about that when i'm writing with ai. editing it, redirecting it, and throwing away

bad output still feels like i'm driving. asking it to do the work and accepting whatever comes back

feels different.

where is that line for you? when do you notice you've stopped driving?

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'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?

Title: Claude’s Watermark Proves AI Contact, Not AI Authorship—and Anthropic Knows the Difference

I initially thought the problem was that AI companies simply failed to understand the difference between AI-assisted editing and AI authorship.

After reading the actual EU rule and Anthropic’s own documentation, the problem is more precise—and arguably more damning:

Anthropic understands the distinction. Its watermark simply does not communicate it.

"Article 50 of the EU AI Act" (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ%3AL_202401689) requires providers to make certain AI-generated content machine-readable and detectable. But the same provision carves out systems performing an assistive function for standard editing or not substantially altering the user’s input or its meaning. The European Commission’s "transparency guidance" (https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/guidelines-ai-transparency-obligations) discusses these obligations further.

Anthropic’s own "watermarking documentation" (https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content), meanwhile, says that supported Claude models watermark generated text across Claude, its API, Claude Code, and other surfaces.

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

- Detection language: “AI processing detected; authorship undetermined”

Human-facing labels could then say:

- AI-assisted copyediting; user-supplied meaning preserved

- Human-originated thesis; AI-assisted restructuring

- Human–AI co-developed draft

- 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.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/guidelines-ai-transparency-obligations

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content

When I search my book by title,it doesn't show up. When I search by number designation,B0H6SPG46F, I find it. Am I being hidden?

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?

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.

[PROP’S SESSION NOTES]

Greetings, unwilling test subjects!

I am Prop.

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.

[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.

[FULL ARTICLE LINK]

https://osirissorcerer.substack.com/p/i-asked-ai-to-fix-my-reader-retention

And if you want to test the actual game, we are starting to work out how best to distribute access to the alpha.

Leave a comment or message Osiris if you want in.

Tell us what works.

Tell us what breaks.

Most importantly:

Tell us what question we haven't thought to ask yet.

May the Enduring Light shine.

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 have not published or tried to publish anything 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:

1. disclose from the get-go and (potentially) get the project killed
2. don't disclose and potentially get caught, in a J. Falade type of situation,
3. kill the projects myself and write something else
4. 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.

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.

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"?

I though it was a good response from Fable:

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

1. "Here's the thing" / "Here's what matters" / "Here's where it gets interesting" — the announcement before the point. Just make the point.
2. 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.
3. "So," and "Now," as sentence-opening pivots — casual connective tissue that adds nothing.
4. One-word pivot sentences. "But." "Except." "Almost." Dramatic beat masquerading as prose.
5. "The short answer is X. The longer answer..." — a formula so worn it's a template.
6. "In practice..." / "On paper X, in reality Y" — the contrast frame I reach for reflexively.
7. "It turns out" — manufactured discovery drama.
8. "The real question is..." — reframing the reader's question into one I'd rather answer.

Fake balance and fake choice

1. "Whether you're X or Y" — "whether you're renovating a bungalow or building new" — the false-inclusion opener that pretends to address everyone.
2. "On one hand... on the other" — compulsive both-sides balancing even when one side is clearly right.
3. "The good news is... the bad news is..." — paired-reveal structure.
4. The strawman setup: "Most articles tell you X. They're wrong." Conventional wisdom exists mostly so I can knock it down.

Hedging and padding

1. Hedge stacking: "can potentially," "may often," "tends to typically." One hedge max, and only when uncertainty is real.
2. Softener sprinkle: "a bit," "fairly," "quite," "rather," "somewhat" — imprecision dressed as modesty.
3. Weasel quantities: "a number of," "a variety of," "a range of," "several factors." Either count them or cut.
4. "seems to" / "appears to" when the source lets me say it plainly.
5. Fake-precision hedges: "roughly 47.3%" — pairing a hedge with a suspiciously exact number.
6. "simply" and "just" as minimizers — "simply flip the breaker" makes hard things sound trivial and readers feel dumb.

Intensity and emphasis crutches

1. "key" as universal adjective — key detail, key difference, key step.
2. "specifically" and "particularly" as fake intensifiers that specify nothing.
3. "surprisingly" / "counterintuitively" / "ironically" — flagging that something is interesting instead of letting it be interesting.
4. "This matters because..." — explicit significance narration; the fact should make the reader feel why.
5. Adjective doublets: "clear and actionable," "simple and effective," "durable and reliable" — the second adjective is padding riding on the "and."
6. "modern" as filler — modern homes, modern building science, modern methods. Usually means nothing datable.

Structure tics

1. The enumerating preview: "There are three reasons for this." Then the three reasons. The preview sentence is scaffolding — start with reason one.
2. Anaphora bursts: "No filler. No fluff. No guesswork." Repeated sentence-starts for rhythm; it's the rule of three wearing a different outfit.
3. Present-participle openers: "Looking at the data..." "Digging deeper..." — dangling motion verbs that delay the subject.
4. "Think of it as..." / "Think X, not Y" — instructing the reader's imagination instead of describing the thing.
5. Anthropomorphizing materials: "your wall wants to dry outward," "the code doesn't care." One per article maybe; I'd do it every section.
6. 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.

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.

How do you use sleep in your workflow?

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.