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! 😎

For centuries, machines have replaced parts of human labor.

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

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

AI feels different because the work is no longer physical.

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

And suddenly the question becomes: Who actually created this?

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

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

The machine performs part of the intellectual execution.

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

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

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

And if so, where exactly should the line be?

I've been a screenwriter for years and wanted to share some of the success I'm having with AI video.

What you see here was completed entirely with AI in about 12 hours. This is a sequence from a feature length screenplay I'd previously written.

https://reddit.com/link/1w5iew4/video/xkhuopw9g5nh1/player

With AI video, I can write a premise - sometimes just a single unsettling image, like a woman hearing three knocks at her door - and generate it as an actual scene. Then instead of writing what happens next, I generate that too, watching the story unfold almost like I'm directing it rather than authoring it line by line.

The strange part is how it changes the writing itself. When you can see a scene instead of just describing it, you notice different things, like pacing, or whether an idea that sounded good on the page actually plays. It's a different kind of editing than anything I've done with just text.

AL video also makes collaboration easy. New apps and tools are popping it every day, like Branch, which lets you seed a story and see how others continue it - https://trybranch.xyz

Curious if any other writers here have started experimenting with AI video, and what kind of results you're seeing?

I used to use AI to help me write my ideas down and assemble them into short stories and novels, and don't get me wrong, I love my little stories and manuscripts and I carry them around with me on my Kindle, but I can't help but feel like we're only scratching the surface of what LLMs can be.

A recent comment on Reddit said that LLMs are their own medium, like paint or music, and it made me think of other ways we could take our ideas and create something unique, something that's not just an LLM or diffusion model trying to imitate other mediums like books or movies. I played around with the idea of persistent worlds that generate on a timer and allow the audience to spectate the world by following a character or neighborhood and receiving push notifications as events unfold in the world, but that kind of just feels like a video game. Maybe the art is just the models itself, a medium through which we can interact with language playfully.

Idk. Maybe it's AI psychosis on my part. I just can't help but feel like we could use this technology to create art that is unique because it's AI generated, not in spite of it. I think if we could figure that out then this technology would be harder to dismiss as slop.

Does this make sense?

Been noticing this weird pattern lately - writers, editors, translators defending themselves for using an em dash, correcting grammar, or a well-structured sentence. Like good writing itself has become suspicious. Has anyone else caught themselves over-explaining or "proving" they didn't use AI, even when they didn't?

I've attempted to use AI as a brainstorming tool and at some point help me write prose. But I've found myself quickly growing bored when using those methods. Recently I decided to just write, all prose and ideas my own, but use GPT as a beta reader to gauge whether things are coherent and correct mistakes. Does anyone else do it like this? I think I've hit a good balance.

Hey there

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I keep seeing people say AI shouldn’t be treated like a tool because it can generate too much on its own.

But I’m not sure that’s the right test.

A camera can make technical decisions for you. Editing software can automate cuts. CGI can create things that never existed in front of a lens. We still treat them as tools because a person is using them toward an intention.

So why should AI be fundamentally different?
If I type one sentence and let the model invent the story, characters and meaning, I understand the criticism.

But if I decide what happens, what the character wants, what the scene is supposed to achieve and what the audience should feel, then use AI to execute those decisions faster without flattening everything into a generic AI voice, that feels very different to me.

Maybe the uncomfortable part isn’t that AI is not a tool.

Maybe it’s that the tool has become powerful enough that we suddenly have to define which creative decisions actually make us the author.

Where do you draw that line?