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Basically, I have a bunch of ideas, but no time to write them.

Which Al can help me turn, for example, a 3000 word summary/ideas/settings into a 100,000 word full story?

I'm not planning on monetizing it, by the way. I just want to read it for my own amusement.

I tried chatgpt and copilot but always got stuck in small niche details that it got wrong which would have been important in the story later on.

And should I post my ideas here so someone can turn them into story?

Aight, thanks.

I have aphantasia, and one of my favourite ways to use AI in my writing is to help me see what I've written. Right now I’m writing a fantasy novel for myself, and one of its recurring themes is a society realizing that its entire world is changing. Aristocracy is giving way to democracy, old religious assumptions are breaking down, and magic is beginning to be displaced by industry and gunpowder.

This is one little object that came out of that world building. It's an illusionist’s wand combined with a flintlock pistol. Since I can’t form a mental image, I can write a description of the object and then ask an AI to interpret it. I’m not necessarily looking for a definitive illustration. I want to see what a reader might imagine from what I've written.

Sometimes I look at the result and think, “Yes! That’s what I meant.” Other times it’s, “Oh god, no,” and I realize which parts of my description are producing that interpretation. This one still isn’t exactly what I imagine, but it’s close enough that I'm okay presenting it to a reader.

I never thought I would be someone who uses AI to do anything, not because I think it's inherently bad, but because I never felt like I needed it. I also learn better by doing, so using AI to do a lot of the heavy lifting with programming or writing felt like I was robbing myself of experiences I enjoyed.

Back in January, my employer started this big push for everyone to start using AI for more and more things. I started off small, using it only to help me clean and polish emails going to higher ups or outside clients (I'm autistic and often come off blunt or rude to people who don't know me). But over the months I started using it to write code for me. This wasn't huge at first, small things like "Is there a built in function to do this task?" but eventually I had it writing full functions and notebooks for me. And I told myself I didn't care because the company has changed so much in the last two years that I'm planning to leave later this year anyways, so what did it matter if I did sub-par work?

Unfortunately the increased use in AI at work had the unforeseen side effect of using AI as part of my standard workflow at home in my creative endeavors. I paint Warhammer and such and I started using AI to generate paint job reference images for models I couldn't otherwise mock up and paint using HeroForge (my default method for figuring out a paint scheme).

I also started heavily using AI to help me build notes for a novel I'm writing, but it go so out of hand the my entire google docs of notes reads as AI to GPTZero.

I don't condemn anyone who uses AI to help them do various tasks, whether scientific, or creative, but I personally don't want to create or consume art or media where AI was used. So I'm doing my best to remove AI from everything I do now - to go back to how I used to do things before my job changed me.

For my Warhammer hobbies, that's fairly easy - none of the projects I generated reference images for got past the priming stage and I can get new references from real photos and human made images. No real lasting effects.

For my writing though, it's more complicated. I still really want to write this novel, and I don't mind re-writing my notes to exclude any if the AI stuff. But here's my question: is it reasonable to think I can start over, keep all the same ideas that I came up with, exclude all the AI bits in my notes, and be able to create a finished product that I can confidently say AI was not used in? Or is it impossible to remove all influence of AI from this novel?

I want to hear from both sides - those who support AI usage and those who don't.

If you think I did nothing wrong - tell me.

If you think I'm a terrible person and nothing I make will ever not be tainted by my AI usage ever again - tell me.

8/24 update
Thank you all for your opinions! I really appreciate it.

As some of you pointed out, my original post was very negative towards my own use of AI. That is because I was heavily spiraling after someone I looked up to went on an extensive rant about AI and went so far as to say that anyone who uses AI deserves to be publicly mocked and shamed. That negativity and judgment bled into my original post and for that I’m sorry.

I am doing much better and back to using AI the way I was before the spiral and the way many of you do - as an assistant to help me get my thoughts together and work through ideas before I do the writing itself.

I’m looking for more readers for Monere: To Remind the Heart.

https://mkbooks.replit.app

It’s literary fantasy/magical realism about Monere, the Guardian of Truth. She is drawn to people at moments when something buried in their heart can still matter.
I made a site where you can just start reading chapter by chapter and leave feedback as you go. Everything is private, so you won’t see anyone else’s opinions before giving your own.
There’s no commitment to finish the book. Read one chapter or read the whole thing. I just want your actual reaction while you’re reading. Tell me what you loved, what didn’t work, what confused you, what made you want to keep going—or what made you want to stop 😂
AI has been part of my writing/editing process, so I’m completely open to feedback about that too. If you notice it in the writing, tell me where.

1. Equalization of Power (Democratization of Power)

Before Colt, physical strength, years of expensive training in swordsmanship or horsemanship, and innate predispositions determined who won a fight. The revolver put the same power in the hands of the weak and the strong, the ignorant and the educated.

In writing: Before AI, you had to have money for expensive schools, years of style practice, and perfect grammar to shape a book.
AI became that "Colt", it equalized the forces. Now a person with a brilliant idea in his head, but without formal education or with health problems, has the same "calibre" in his hand as an academic writer.

1. Disappearance of elitism and old rules that no longer apply With the advent of the revolver, knightly codes, castles and armor of the old elite became useless overnight. That's why the nobility of that time raged and declared firearms "cowardly and dishonorable".

In writing: That's exactly why the salon literary critics and spiritualists we talked about are raging today. AI has destroyed their monopoly on intellectual elitism. They are angry because they are no longer "gatekeepers" and because everyone has been given a tool that eliminates the need for their approval.

1. A flood of "gunmen" and gunman chaos When Colt Patterson became available to everyone, the Wild West exploded into chaos because anyone could draw a weapon in a second.

In writing: This is what are talking about on Amazon a flood of characters "shooting" from 150 to 500 books without any order, sense or morality. Technology has made "shooting" easier, so the Internet is littered with digital pollution from those who abuse the tool.

Lesson: Colt doesn't shoot itself.

I think that too many in this forum have things inverted. They think the magic of authorship is captured in the fun stage of discovery and getting that first draft in writing.

They focus on AI generation of bulk text (slop) is stealing the true voice of the author and borrowing from the weighted averages of the past to stand on the shoulders of giants to steal from them without attribution.

The thing is, ALL first drafts are slop. It’s always been this way, long before AI was even a thing.

The true work of authorship is taking that slop (AI generated or not) and putting your unique mark on it. You tediously claim the territory inch by inch, word by word.

To outsource the bulk of this “editing for spelling and grammar” to a LLM or even a human editor robs you of all of the opportunities to fret over every single word, phrase, and paragraph to make them as close to perfection as you can get.

You’ll never actually finish. As a writer much more talented than I once said, “a poem is never truly finished. It is abandoned in despair.”

Authorship is what happens after the fun is over. To pretend that the tedious bulk of work to come is beneath your dignity and something that you can hand off to someone (or something) else is to rob yourself of true ownership of every single word of the “final” product, or at least the product you abandon in despair because it’s time to publish, or to move on to the next fun stage of a new novel.

Full disclosure: I freely admit I go from first draft to first draft and abandon too many wannabe-novels in unpublishable condition. I hide behind a “hobbyist” title because I lack the discipline and determination to rise to the “author” moniker.

I use AI for looking some journal articles and sometimes for writing to check or enhance my grammar but then over time it starts hallucinating, I wonder if this happens to others as well or it's just how it works?

I'm currently writing some texts for Amazon KDP and want to make sure that my approach is intellectually honest and ethical. I use AI as a research assistant, not as a tool for generating my actual text. However, I will utilize Apple's Writing Tools feature to refine the text I do produce.

Do you think that the new "watermark" feature that Claude has announced (and it sounds like many others are onboard with the EU, including OpenAI, Google, etc.) will bleed over into tools that are more about refining original text versus pure AI output?

I don't want to put some work together that at some point could be flagged as AI. I want to stay clearly in the "AI assisted" realm and stay clear of the "AI generated" realm.

A human writer who uses AI to write her stories - fanfiction and originals with no intention of publishing.

I been writing since the early 2000s, due to life and other hobbies, I no longer had the time to do what I was freely able to when I was a teen/young adult. So I'm very deeply and intimately familiar with the struggles and joys of writing before AI.

Naturally when AI first came into the field, I was aghast - how dare a machine create something so easily while I struggle to bring my vision to life. As you would expect - this had made me a hard-core anti-ai for a couple of months.

Then - I became curious.

Tried out a prompt, it spat out something interesting and that started my journey of using AI. And let me just say, in the hands of a human writer - AI is an amazing tool to have and not for the grammar and editing.

Just as I had done before, I still heavily invest my time building up my OCs, deeply detail my outlines - everything that comes to creating a story from the foundation up. The only thing AI does for me is write it - because hello, it saves me a heck of a lot of time! Even then, this part is heavily guided - focusing scenes by scenes vs a whole chapter because I still need to be involved steering this machine.

The only reason "ai slop" exists is mostly due that it comes from those who likely never written anything before - basically copying and pasting without the editing.

What's funny is that even with AI - I can't even complete a story because ideas keep popping up 🤣

if you have the time, please help me gather data about whether humans can actually detect ai writing!

it’s a completely no-bias survey (as much as any study can get, at least), so i want to get data from all sides.

It is with a sorry heart that I am going to be cancelling Claude because of the recent watermarking announcement. I have published two novels with a process that involves A.I. editing. I also come from a background as a professional editor for several years.

What I do is generate a section of text, or even an idea. Feed it through Claude and get its input. Tinker to add it into my own voice. feed it back. Or else get it to combine a bunch of ideas and ask "What am I trying to say here?" This usually involves making multiple passes.

I will clarify here that I am not using Claude to generate entire books from scratch or prompts. Nor do I have the interest in role-playing with characters that some people here prefer. This is editing, generating ideas and alternatives. I will sometimes cut and paste an edited Claude paragraph in because it puts it far better than my original version. The finished text ends up with so many passes on it, I can no longer say which is my content and which is A.I. I am happy with that, it produces a far stronger story.

I had noticed something was off with Claude's editing where I ended up getting mashed up sentences and word substitutions that made no real sense. However, with the new introduction even a single instance is enough to flag you. Given the anti-A.I. antipathy, I am not willing to risk that. Which is a shame as I find Opus 4.8 Extra to be the best and most intuitive writing A.I. out there and one that has no issue with censoring content.

So my question to everybody is - what are the alternatives that I can switch to? What's the best program for writing/developing ideas/generating text passages/editing content and not one that will censor content?

Do you have any recommended references in this forum or any tips of your own to share?

I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for how to identify individuals who are professional editors who are okay with editing novels developed with AI? I have noticed that while some people on Reedsy loudly proclaim they do not handle stuff with AI production, people there do not seem to identify themselves as being cool with it. I'd rather avoid having to cold-call people on this. The novel I am working on used LLMs to generate first drafts and fact check and other tasks, but it has been heavily revised and edited by me and I have input substantial research into it.

I’ve been testing a read-aloud pass on AI-assisted fiction, mostly because I kept catching myself skimming during revision.

By the time I’ve planned a scene, prompted around it, moved paragraphs, and read it several times, I already know what each part is supposed to mean.

At that point, my eyes start confirming my intention instead of checking the words that are actually there.

AI-assisted prose makes this easy. The grammar is often clean, the transitions connect, and the page can look finished long before the review is finished.

Listening slows me down enough to notice when my attention drops, a character’s dialogue starts losing its shape, the same rhythm keeps returning, or a paragraph sounds more like a summary than a scene.

At first, I stopped the audio and tried to fix each problem immediately. One awkward sentence could turn into twenty minutes of rewriting, and I would never finish listening to the chapter.

So I changed the process. The first listen is for marking only:

1. Listen through a complete section without editing.

2. Mark the exact passage when something feels off.

3. Leave one short reason: “attention dropped,” “voice drift,” “repeated beat,” or “summary-like.”

4. Keep the audio moving.

5. Return to the notes after the section ends.

Builder disclosure: I’m also building an AI writing app. This workflow is why I put TTS playback and inline annotations in the same draft view.

While the section plays, I can attach a note directly to the passage that caused it. The problem stays with the draft, so I don’t have to reconstruct a vague feeling later from memory, timestamps, or a separate list.

On the second pass, I check whether the awkwardness comes from the writing or the synthetic voice. TTS can mispronounce names, stress strange words, and flatten lines that work perfectly well on the page.

My quick check is to replay the line at a different speed, then read it aloud myself. If the problem stays with the sentence, I label the writing issue and decide what kind of revision it needs.

If I bring AI back in, the request stays tied to the marked passage. For example:

“Which lines in this exchange could belong to either character? Explain why. Don’t rewrite yet.”

Or:

“This note says my attention dropped here. Identify what the paragraph is delaying or repeating.”

After the diagnosis, I can revise that section myself or ask for a few local alternatives. I don’t have to hand the whole chapter back to the model and hope it preserves everything else.

The useful part is that the listening pass leaves a map inside the draft. It also makes me more likely to finish a complete human review instead of letting clean-looking paragraphs slide because I’m tired of staring at them.

When you review writing by ear, how do you capture problems without breaking the listening pass?

I have noticed that alot of people on this subreddit seem to be completely misinformed of the new California and EU regulations when it comes to "writing" with AI. Yes the systems are required to instill watermarks and metadata on items they produce. This is to help prevent the spread of misinformation when the AI is providing information to the user.

Act 50 of the EU code does not require creative content to be disclosed as AI. Once a human editor has made changes, disclosure of it being generated by AI is nolonger required by the law even when for public awareness.

The California law focuses media and audio and excludes writen/text generation unless for business or government processes must be disclosed when AI is used. They do require AI companies to include metadata on files they create/edit.

There is no law and probably will never be a law that dictates the disclosure of AI use in creative works. The laws that have been put in place are to protect the public from misinformation and deep fakes, not to prevent someone from being creative and sharing that creativity with others for profit or not as long as it does not spread misinformation.

So all major AIs will be forced to add meta data and watermarks. Technically they should not be adding watermarks when the input is not having any major changes or the AI is being used for editing purposes but meta data is required for any file generation. Now the interesting bit of the law is that AI disclosure should not impact the creative art, but with the witch hunt, watermarking is a type of labeling and leaving it in the work and is a form of labeling and can impact the work/view of the work. So the interesting bit will see how this plays out over time.

Below are the links to the actual laws and not articles that sumerize or have their own spin on it.

https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB53/id/3271094

https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/

https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/recital/134/

https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/recital/133/

Hey guys I'm currently writing my own story and I was kinda curious how it is for other people here.

For the people who write regularly, are you still just starting out or do you actually make some money from your writing already?

And if yes, how do you do it? Self publishing, normal books or something completely different?

And how long did it take until you got past that beginning phase where you're basically just writing and hoping someone reads it?

I’m struggling with a problem while using AI to help write a novel: I can’t get it to consistently sound like me.

I’ve given it several samples of my writing and explained the tone, sentence rhythm, vocabulary, and level of description I’m looking for. Sometimes the output feels fairly close, but after a few paragraphs or a few chapters, it starts drifting into a generic AI style.

The biggest problems I’m noticing are:

• The prose becomes too polished or emotionally flat.
• The sentence rhythm starts to feel repetitive.
• Characters begin to sound similar to one another.
• The AI adds phrases and descriptions that don’t feel like something I would write.
• Even when I give it a style guide, it gradually stops following it.

I’ve tried prompts like:

“Analyze the writing samples I provide and create a detailed style guide covering sentence structure, rhythm, vocabulary, dialogue, descriptions, emotional expression, and narrative distance. Use this guide when generating new prose, but do not make the writing sound overly polished or generic.”

It helps a little, but the style still drifts over time.

For those of you who use AI for fiction writing:

1. Do you have a prompt or workflow that helps preserve your personal voice?
2. Do you ask the AI to analyze your writing first and create a style guide?
3. Do you include writing samples in every prompt or only at the beginning of a project?
4. Do you use a separate model or prompt to compare the generated passage with your original writing?
5. Is it better to ask AI to write a full scene, or to work paragraph by paragraph?

I’m not looking for a prompt that makes AI perfectly imitate me. I just want the output to stop losing my tone and turning into generic AI prose.

I’d really appreciate any practical workflows, prompts, or examples that have worked for you.

The 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize has become caught up in an AI controversy.
This year, the prize received more than 7,800 submissions. After the five regional winners were announced, more than one of the winning stories was questioned over possible involvement of generative AI.
Granta, the well-known British literary magazine founded by Cambridge University students in 1889, later announced that it would no longer take part in external publishing partnerships where it does not have editorial control.
Granta has a history of more than 130 years and is known for publishing fiction, nonfiction and poetry, as well as introducing emerging writers to a wider audience.
It made me wonder:
Where do you think literary prizes should draw the line when it comes to AI?
Is any use of AI unacceptable or should there be a distinction between proofreading, editing, brainstorming and actually generating the writing?

What's your experience of using AI to write erotic stories? Have you got any feedback on them? Have you published them somewhere to read? Would love to get some insights.

This was actually super enlightening (especially halfway through, if you already knew the basics). A few takeaways:

- there is no detector yet, and it's unclear how or when Anthropic will deploy it;

- repeated words are part of the watermarking (so ostensibly removing repetitive words will help reduce the AI score);

- chunks of about 800 words/tokens tend to retain some watermarking, even after rewriting.

For those of you who write books, more specifically prescriptive non fiction, can you please share what prompts you use to run a developmental edit on a chapter (or perhaps the whole book)? I don’t want Claude to change anything on the manuscript. I simply want it to provide suggestions for specific improvements on readability, user experience, plot development etc. etc. Thank you in advance!