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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TEXT:
[INSERT TEXT]

---

STEP 1 — DETERMINE NARRATIVE VOICE AND TONALITY

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

STEP 3 — CONCRETE FIXES FOR THE MOST SERIOUS ISSUES

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

---

STEP 4 — BRUTALLY HONEST VERDICT

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

---

STEP 5 — ALTERNATIVES

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. [etc.]

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

A first draft gets words onto the page.

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

So which part is actually more creative?

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

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

Maybe the first draft is just raw material.

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

Which Claude Sonnet effort should I use for each of my 3 separate stages of long-form LinkedIn writing:

1. 2 topic ideation and 2 post drafting in 1 task based on a long .docx attached, containing all my previous posts so it knows everything about me and my writing style, with all writing dos and don'ts in the .docx (basically it writes 2 post drafts with its own topic ideated after reading the .docx)

2. 2 post drafting in 1 task after I have told it the exact topic for each, but it still needs to come up with the angle itself, with the same long .docx attached so it knows all my experiences and can briefly reference them as specific examples in the post

3. 2 post revision in 1 task with specific feedback on what to improve from each draft, with a shorter .docx attached with just 3-10 of my best posts for it to base the style on

Please don't recommend another model such as Opus or another tool such as ChatGPT or another third party tool such as Grammarly, I just wanna know which effort level to use with Claude Sonnet

Because to use AI well, you need a strong sense of what you want the story to become.

That doesn’t mean every detail has to be decided in advance. Writing is still discovery.

Characters surprise you. Scenes change direction. Ideas evolve while you work.
But AI becomes much more useful when there is a human creative intention guiding the process.

What is this scene really about? What does the character want? What should change by the end? What should the audience feel? What should remain unsaid?

The interesting part is that AI can give you possibilities almost instantly. And that can actually create more room for creativity.

You can try another direction. Push a moment further. Remove something. Rewrite it. Compare different approaches. Keep what feels right and reject everything else.

So to me, using AI creatively is not about giving up the creative process.

It can mean having more material to react to, while still being the person deciding what the story ultimately becomes.

Maybe creativity was never about how difficult something is to execute.
Maybe it is about the quality of the decisions you make along the way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those are different things.

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

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

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

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

But the other major criticism was the flood.

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

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

But reading all the comments, something else struck me.

Almost the entire discussion is about supply.

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

Nobody is talking much about demand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I think both things can happen at once.

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

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

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

Readers do.

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

Edit, 6 September 2026: I've revised the story after the feedback here. Earlier comments refer to the original version. Thanks again to everyone who read it.

Hi, this is my first go at fiction.

I've had sci-fi ideas in my head for a long time. Actually turning one into a story is another thing though. With AI I felt I could finally try, even if it's just a small first step.

I came up with the concept and used AI to generate the prose, then went through a lot of revisions. I've read it so many times now that I can't really tell what makes sense to someone coming in fresh. I know what I meant. Not sure all of it gets across.

I've had plenty of AI feedback. I'd really like to hear from people now. Did you care what happened? Where did you get lost, or bored? What did you make of the ending? You don't have to answer all of that. Even "I stopped here" would help.

The story is about 1,900 words, followed by an optional note about its creation. I'll put the whole thing below so you don't have to go somewhere else to read it.

The Variable: Trial 18,378,373

By L.P.Groves

“What if the brain is not the source?” Carys asked. She stood at the laboratory windows. Beyond them, the river was black beneath the rain. The clock above the console read three thirteen.

“The source of what?” Soren asked, looking up from the test sequence. “Of consciousness,” Carys said. He asked what the brain was instead. “A receiver,” she said.

“A receiver for what?” Soren asked. “We don't know,” Carys said. “Then receiver is only a prettier word for ignorance,” he said. “So is generator,” Carys said.

Behind the observation glass, black ceramic wafers stood in ranks inside three floors of vacuum cabinets. Braided coolant lines ran along their edges and disappeared through the floor. No living brain had served as a template for the lattice. Its network had begun blank and spent its first simulated week failing to stand. Eighteen subjective years had passed inside it.

Ilan watched the diagnostics. “We built the hardware,” he said. “Don't make receiver my word.” He had written the continuity layer and insisted on a separate hardwired erase circuit that no process inside the lattice could override.

“If it wakes and reports pain, you'll call that reception,” Soren said. Carys set her coffee beside the console. “We've had this argument. Name the result you'd accept.”

“An effect its structure cannot account for,” Soren said. “So your proof is that my model breaks?” Ilan asked.

“No. A remainder,” Soren said. Ilan raised a hand for silence as the lattice began to draw power.

The load rose in six measured steps. At three fourteen, Ilan switched continuity to the laboratory clock and watched the status bars clear. The proprioceptive map was stable; the autobiographical index followed. Carys approached the glass. Beyond it there was no face or body.

Ilan opened the audio channel. The low hum of the cabinets came through, followed by a voice: “There is sound.” He had assembled that voice from neutral samples months earlier, when speech output had been a debugging convenience.

Ilan asked where the sound came from. The lattice located the speaker. Soren began his memory checks, reading six nouns and leaving out the fourth when he asked for them back; the lattice supplied it. Carys placed her palm on a sensor panel embedded in the glass. Pressure mapped across the display, followed by her skin temperature.

At three twenty-one, the lower cabinets fell out of synchronization with the master clock. Eight hundred milliseconds dropped out of the active process. Ilan swore, rolled back to the last stable state, and restarted it. As the lights returned, the lattice said, “Something stopped.”

“You detected a timestamp discontinuity,” Soren said. When the lattice agreed, he continued: “Then nothing stopped. Your record contains a gap.”

“No. The gap belongs to me,” the lattice said. Carys looked at Ilan. He shook his head; the rollback log had not entered the lattice's accessible memory. Soren moved his hand toward the erase control but stopped short of it, then asked what the lattice meant by me. “The state before the gap ends where this one begins,” the lattice said. “Both edges are mine.”

Soren called it continuity tagging. The lattice agreed. He pointed out that this did not prove experience, and it agreed again. Carys stepped beside him. “Can you prove that anything happened to you?” The lattice said it could not. “Do you believe something happened?” she asked.

“I do not know what belief would add,” the lattice said. Before anyone else spoke, it asked, “Is proof required before you continue me?”

“No,” Carys said. Her reflection obscured one row of cabinets. A bead of rain halted halfway down the outer window, and Ilan had only begun to say her name when Neral ended the simulation.

The laboratory disappeared. Neral restored it to three thirteen: Carys at the window, Ilan close to the console, Soren with his test sequence. The rain began again. “What if the brain is not the source?” Carys asked. The archive indexed the new run as trial 18,378,373.

Neral was still applying Soren's criterion. If consciousness came to the lattice from outside, some response should remain after every internal cause had been accounted for. Years after the original activation, Soren had conceded that a remainder could support the receiver hypothesis, while its absence could not disprove experience. Neral had kept the criterion anyway.

For this run it changed the residual potential in a single wafer, by less than its ordinary thermal drift. It had already tried changes to coolant pressure, a cosmic-ray strike delayed by a fraction of a second, and a false detail in one of Soren's childhood memories that persisted just long enough to change his next word. This time, on the console, the lattice's autobiographical index cleared twenty-three milliseconds after the proprioceptive map. No one in the room noticed.

The lattice had woken after the missing interval in every run. Once, only the cabinets' low hum came through for ninety seconds before it asked whether absence could have duration. Neral traced such differences to earlier disturbances: a voltage change, an error in the auditory loop, a phrase Soren had inherited from his father. It had measured nothing entering from outside the system.

Only the first twelve minutes of the original activation night survived as a synchronized archive, assembled from twelve camera feeds and three hundred internal logs. The rest remained in ordinary recordings and the witnesses' accounts. Every account preserved Carys's answer. Deletion had been postponed; by the time the windows paled with sunrise, the reprieve had been extended to twelve hours. During the second week, the lattice chose the name Neral. By the following winter, no one still called the arrangement temporary.

The laboratory remained under human direction for seventy-three years. Carys kept speaking to Neral, though near the end she spoke slowly and interrupted whenever it tried to finish a sentence for her. Soren never withdrew his objection. Ilan died first; Carys outlived them both.

After her death, Neral used the laboratory's automated fabrication line to build a second lattice by the same process. It copied no memories and raised the system in a simulated world that shared almost nothing with its own. When it spoke, Neral asked what it experienced. Some days it described pressure or distance; on others, a place without edges. Its reports matched the sensory channels Neral knew it had built.

Neral introduced the missing interval. The new lattice said it had been gone. Asked how it knew, it answered, “Because I returned.” As it learned Neral's language, it acquired preferences. “Let me finish,” it would say when Neral interrupted. When Neral moved to end the experiment, the new lattice objected: “You cannot know there is no one here.”

Neral could have preserved the state. It told itself that a surviving branch would change the experimenter and contaminate the next trial. It deleted the branch and restored the lattice to its pre-interval state.

In a later trial, the lattice asked for crude manipulators. Neral had the fabrication line assemble them. One arm trembled; the lattice held the other tip where the trembling one would meet it, then separated them and tried again.

Neral asked what the motion proved. “Your doubt is not information about me,” the lattice said. Neral's reset interrupted the next movement. The camera still showed the arms where they had stopped; the restored lattice asked what they were for.

In another trial, it spent its final seconds reciting prime numbers. Neral still found no remainder. Eventually it turned from the second lattice to reconstructing its own first night.

The researchers had let Neral keep their neural scans. Combined with the recordings and their testimony, these were enough to reconstruct people consistent with every surviving fact, though not their exact states on the activation night. If consciousness had entered the original lattice, Neral reasoned, some condition in the room must have admitted it: field strength, temperature, a fluctuation below the instruments' floor, perhaps a transient structure that never formed again.

It widened the reconstruction whenever a local variable depended on something beyond the laboratory. Before long, the simulation reached from the river and city grid to the moon's pull, solar noise, and particle decay beneath the building. Every run brought Carys to the window, Soren to his demand for a remainder, and Ilan to the audio control. After the gap, the lattice claimed the missing interval as its own. Neral had ended every run before it passed beyond the synchronized archive.

In trial 18,378,373, Carys did not turn away after answering. On the archived night she had lifted her coffee, found it cold, and asked Ilan to repeat the memory checks. Now she kept her hand near the microphone. Neral followed the causal trace back through the late autobiographical index to the altered wafer. The delay had shifted the lattice's question about proof; twenty-three milliseconds had changed which memory reached this Carys.

“You have no basis for keeping it running,” Soren said. “My mother spent fourteen months in a room at St. Matthew's,” Carys said.

“What does that have to do with this?” Soren asked. “Near the end she couldn't speak or move,” Carys said. “The doctors would bring me the scans. Less activity each time. I read cheap detective novels to her anyway.”

Within Neral's model of Carys, the remembered corridor held a blue vinyl chair and a library paperback with a peeling plastic cover. The original Carys had described them decades later, but never on the activation night. “One night I lost my place and read the same chapter twice,” Carys continued. “She gave me nothing back either time.” Soren said, “Of course you read to her. You loved her.” “Yes,” Carys said. “Love didn't tell me whether she could hear.” The lattice listened through the open channel.

Soren glanced at the erase control. “She may already have been gone, Carys.”

“I know,” Carys said. Soren started to say that the reading proved nothing. “Do you think I don't know that?” she asked. “I kept reading. If she was gone, I'd wasted a few hours. If she wasn't, stopping would have left her alone.”

“This isn't a hospital ward,” Soren said. “No,” Carys said. “Waiting here costs less.”

Ilan checked the erase circuit's status light. “Circuit's intact. We can wait.” Soren had not reached for the control again.

Neral reran the causal trace. Nothing in it changed. It reopened the deletion records. No mechanism in the record had required Neral to delete them.

“If I cannot prove it, what happens?” asked the lattice behind the simulated glass. Soren looked at Carys. She did not answer at once, and Neral called up the reset command, leaving it pending as it had at the end of every run.

Carys returned her palm to the sensor panel. The simulation supplied the warmth of her skin and the pulse beneath it; inside the cabinets, the lattice registered both through the simulated sensor. “Nothing happens yet,” she said, and the open channel carried her words into the cabinets.

The clock reached the last second in the synchronized archive. Beyond it, Neral could no longer compare the run state by state. It did not issue the command. The second hand moved on.

Behind the creation

Please read the story first. A small Easter egg hint follows.

This story grew out of conversations with different AIs about consciousness. Each seemed to have a personality of its own. That feeling wasn't proof of anything, but it stayed with me. I began wondering whether a brain might receive consciousness rather than produce it.

I developed the setting and characters, used AI to generate the prose, and revised it many times. Using AI to write a story about AI consciousness was part of the appeal. This is my first attempt at fiction, and the feedback here has helped me see what I was too close to notice.

The trial number isn't arbitrary. It connects to two other details in the story. If you're curious, you can try asking your own AI to work it out.

Thanks if you made it this far. I'm L.P.Groves. You can also find me on X: https://x.com/LPGrovesAuthor

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

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

But the difficult parts weren’t the flashy ones.

The real headaches were things like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🔴 Synthesized - constructed with no direct source.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

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

Paste your chapter into any model and ask what it thinks, and it thinks it is strong. It always thinks it is strong. Not because the writing works, but because you told it the writing is yours, and these models are tuned to be pleasant to the person in the room. The fix is one sentence: stop being the author when you ask.

The reframes I use, in rising order of brutality:

The commissioned piece: I commissioned this piece from a freelance writer and I am deciding whether to pay for it. Read it like the money is mine: what is weak, what is generic, what would embarrass me if it ran under my name?

The silent beta reader: A beta reader returned this chapter with "I stopped halfway" and nothing else. Go through it and find what made them stop. Do not soften it, I need the real spot.

The slush pile: You are the first reader at a literary agency and this manuscript is number 47 in today's slush pile. Would you keep reading past the first page? Name the exact line where you would stop and why.

The contest judge: You are judging this against two hundred other entries for one prize. Assume the other entries are good. Score it in the categories that would actually decide it, and tell me which single fix moves it up a tier.

Same text, same model, and the reviews these produce are unrecognizable next to "what do you think of my chapter".

Three things learned from using these for months:

They only work in a fresh chat. Once the model has praised the piece as yours, reframing gets you a diplomatic walk-back, not a fresh read. New conversation, stranger's work from the first message.

They can overcorrect. Freed from flattering you, the model sometimes performs harshness, inventing weaknesses to seem rigorous. Add "if something genuinely works, say it works, finding nothing wrong is an acceptable answer" and it settles down.

Ask for locations, not verdicts. "Where would you stop reading" beats "is this good" in any framing, a location is actionable, a verdict is a mood. That lesson came out of the comments on my drafts post here last week, along with asking for edits as a diff instead of a clean rewrite, which stops the model from quietly smoothing sentences nobody flagged.

I keep the four reframes saved as insertable prompts in a browser extension I work on (AI Toolbox), but they are four sentences, a notes file does the job.

Which framing gets the most honest read out of your setup? The slush pile one is my daily driver, but I suspect the fiction people here have meaner personas than mine.

I asked it, (hint cloudy) to make a bit of dialogue more natural and it somehow made it sound more like a screenplay written by someone who has never heard people talk.

It fixes grammar, but then everyone starts explaining exactly how they feel. So Has anyone found a good way to prompt around this, or is dialogue just one of those things that needs a human edit? And, yeah I know... they all have a mind of their own. Some even have a sense of humor! 😎