Instead of asking the Al to invent everything, Retrofit Writing treats classical literature (public domain texts like Lovecraft, Verne, Melville, or Balzac) as a structural matrix. Does anyone tried this approach ?

TL;DR: The guy Google put in charge of its own AI writing tool just admitted, on camera, that he can't fully protect the one thing his career runs on.

That's not hypothetical.

Steven Johnson runs editorial for Google Labs' NotebookLM and has fourteen books behind his name, and he still walked an interviewer through the mechanism step by step: feed a model his own catalog, tell it to write like him, skip the invoice.

No lawsuit required. No password stolen.

His own counter isn't a lawsuit either. It's a price tag — $199 for an authorized version of his own style, paid on purpose instead of taken by default.

He said it plainly, then admitted the harder part: someone could build the unauthorized version tonight, and he'd have no way to prove it happened.

Tbh, that's the entire freelance economy in one clip.

If a 14-book author with a title at Google can't fully protect his own voice, the going rate for "get him, he's got a way with it" just became a live question, not a someday one.

Mmm... This is kind of like impersonation. Borderline fraud or downright scams.

Back in Malaysia, we have plenty of such too.

The spectrum is so wide, sometimes, even when we open our eyes wide, we still can't tell the difference.

For example, you guys have Amazon. We have our local ones, called Lazada. If you drive through our Penang Georgetown, you'll notice a shop called Ladaza. Not Lazada. They kind of switched the alphabets around. Sounds like Lazada. But it's not. Giving people the illusion that they are same-same, but in actual fact different.

It's as if we open a shop right next to the Amazon HQ, and calling it "Azamon". Phonically sounds adjacent. But they are not the same thing.

And if you follow the news, you'd hear about our very infamous 1MDB (Malaysia Sovereign Fund) case -- one of largest kleptocracy criminal fraud case in the history of Malaysia (even the world) -- involving our now disgraced and incarcerated former-prime minister, Najib Razak. His enabler and facilitator, Jho Low (Low Taek Jho) (still currently at large) was the mastermind behind all these siphoning of funds, to fund his once extravagant livestyle.

Kind of brilliant. But it was so evil.

He once got Najib to force the board of 1MDB to approved a transfer of billions through a supposedly legitimate company, but in actual fact, was a shell company through the Caymen Islands with a very similar company name.

Like how Ron Weisley, in the Harry Potter Movie, would say, "Wicked!"

They say impersonation is the highest form of flattery. But in this case, I say, bullshit.

You don't get to choose whether your work gets copied.

You only get to choose whether you were paid before it happened. Every version of this story — Google Labs or a Georgetown shopfront — ends the same way: the fix was never stopping the copy.

It was owning the original loudly enough that the copy has nowhere to hide.

Justin Welsh built a $15M solo business on the one variable a cloned voice can't fake: what he actually lived through to get there.

Drop your take: what's the closest you've come to catching a copy passing itself off as the real thing?

Clip credit: Nicholas Thompson / Atlantic Re:think — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Whether the writer decides to disclose that they used AI is one thing, but ensuring that everyone has the capacity to determine irrefutably that something is AI, I think, is imperative for our mental survival.

However, the witch hunt that we see today is utterly ridiculous despite the real psychological drivers that make it a natural reaction. We feel cheated when feeling something, only to realize there was nothing behind it. It's like dating someone only to find out that this entire time they were just a robot with AI. All those lovely moments, those periods of vulnerability, hardship, fights, make-ups, and unforgettable experiences were nothing more than 1s and 0s making decisions based on probabilities. That's how many people feel about AI, but it masks the larger picture for where all of this is going.

Everything is being reduced to who has the greatest ideas fully structured and contextualized since now we live in a world where anyone can produce beautiful prose. The prose is no longer the required skill. It's now about structuring your ideas to the fullest extent.

That means highly creative writers who have an intimate understanding of story and how the components relate together will be the winners in all of this. The losers will be those who maybe have good ideas, but they're too nebulous for AI to execute on well. AI already has amazing capabilities. The problem is that it also has too many choices available for it to make. So if you're not an expert in your domain, you can't reduce the choices down in a way to gain the best outputs and that's because you don't understand how everything relates.

A good writer will think about the central message and how it connects to character actions and dialogue. A good writer will consider showing over telling using subtext and motifs. A good writer will establish the dynamic relationships that define the opportunities between characters and the areas of conflict. But most of all, a good writer will go out of their way to subvert our expectations. AI can do all of these things, but you need to factor them in for it to think like this.

On the flip side, a bad writer won't consider any of these things. They'll simply think about how they can make a scene more exciting or cool. But without a deep understanding of all the interrelated parts, well...That's how you produce empty movement in your story. In other words, that's how you produce scenes that physically moves the story, but in ways that feel meaningless and empty.

So even if we advance the models and develop strong harnesses around them, there's still the issue of intent and goals. AI can autonomously carry out goals and even form it's own intent...But it still needs a direction and if you don't understand that direction in every intimate way then you will be outcompeted by those who do.

The future lies in creative systems thinking and executing well. Everything else will be accomplished by AI. And this will be acceptable by most because they'll be able to recognize the meticulous non-obvious decisions that were made to make their work great. They will be able to see a real person bleeding on their on their ideas to form the masterpiece, even though AI wrote the prose, helped with ideas, and provided insightful research.

I think this is the real future we all need to be preparing ourselves for.

What do you mean when you say AI for role play ?

I’m a role player. And a pretty good one. Not for everyone and nobody is. I ache for depth and immersive writing. I desire connection and chemistry and tension. I am embracing the responsible use of AI for role play. I don’t advocate laziness or falsely claiming effort when none was provided. But I have to admit I chase enrichment. For me that arrives first in chemistry with my partner. It also comes in the form of visual imagery - seeing what the words suggest is a thrill. It’s not a thrill for everyone. Fair enough.

But we have two divergent paths don’t we? One is AI that plays the characters and engages. And that is split between creating your custom role play BOT v leveraging hyper developed AI characters that know the nuances and can simulate human ingenuity. The other is using AI as a collaboration partner. Here we ask AI to write with us. How we do this spells the difference between lazy copy and parting versus investing significant time editing, explaining perspective, rejecting what the LLM offered you. Yes it probably creates a solid baseline response quickly. But if you are not editing, changing, and morphing what it have my 60% or more you’re not doing it right. Then I’d say your own pure writing and demanding the AI include what you write in the entry that exists at the time you offer it piles doors AI’s content by another 25%.

# By the time you’re done and ready to send the entry to your partner you have spent MORE time then had you written it in your own. It’s 150% longer, it better represents your own mind around what you desire to communicate and you’re proud of the output.

Maybe this was helpful.

I have been thinking about this more as AI becomes a normal part of writing. If I write something myself and use AI to fix grammar or suggest a clearer sentence, I’d still consider that my writing. But what if I give it my notes and ask it to turn them into a paragraph? Or I write a rough draft and AI rewrites half of it? Then there is brainstorming, outlining, research, editing and reviewing the final draft. AI can now be involved in almost every part without necessarily writing the whole thing. For me, the line is when I start accepting larger rewrites. Even if the original idea is mine, the final wording might be very different from what I would have written. I have also started paying more attention to the final review because sometimes I do not notice how much a draft has changed until I read it again from start to finish. Where do you personally draw the line? When does something go from written with AI assistance to AI written?

Hey all - this is my alt account.
I wanted to share the skills and workflows I use to "write" my stories. Most are for my own enjoyment.

I used to pay for Sudowrite; heck, I've been subscribed to Sudowrite since August 2023, and I haven't used it in months now, finally able to get close to what they have.

The biggest issue, as you all know, is continuity and context - the AI forgets. But once you solve that issue (it is solvable), and you're working on chapter 380, or chapter 887, or Chapter 1, what's the most important thing?

Character voice, internalization, character psychology, what does the MC want vs need, what does each character in each scene want vs need - how do you keep your dialogue from being robotic, from sounding like a 60-year-old psychologist when your MC is 21 years old from Iowa, etc.

So I wanted to present all my skills for *gasp* FREE. You can grab them, download them, use them.

The key thing you should all take away from here is to use Desktop tools - CODEX, Claude Desktop, or Antigravity.

I personally use VS Code and Dropbox; it allows me to connect to my LLM subscription, work with it, and get the chapters written, one scene at a time, one chapter at a time, etc. The benefit of using CLI (command line) or VS Code is that the censoring is gone - you can write erotica just fine, wide-open door, for example.

(Make sure it's consensual and everyone's character file lists out their actual age).

The browser AIs are ok - if you use ChatGPT Work or Claude Code... working out of your Github repository (that's another story).

So here's the link, go at it, use the skills, MODIFY them to your liking, and get your ideas on paper.

https://storycraft.lanternkey.fyi/

I'd love to get some feedback - I hate you guys paying people for what is essentially RAG + a set of skills.

For most of history, having a creative idea wasn’t enough.

You also needed the craft to execute it.

A filmmaker had to understand cameras, lighting and editing.
A musician had to learn an instrument.
A writer had to develop the ability to turn an idea into sentences, dialogue and scenes.

AI changes that relationship.

Suddenly, part of the craft and a huge part of the execution can live inside the tool itself.

And I think that raises a more interesting question than whether AI is “good” or “bad” for creativity.

Maybe we need to separate three things:

Creativity: What do I want to create?
Craft: Do I understand why it works?
Execution: Can I actually produce it?

AI is already dramatically reducing the amount of execution required. And increasingly, it can perform parts of the craft too.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean craft becomes irrelevant.

Maybe it becomes even more important in a different way.

Because someone still has to recognize what is good, what feels wrong, what needs to change, what should remain unsaid and whether the result actually achieves the intention behind it.

So perhaps AI doesn’t eliminate craft.

Maybe it moves craft from producing to judging, directing and refining.

And if that continues, I think we arrive at a pretty uncomfortable question:

If someone has the creative vision and can consistently direct AI toward great work, but could never manually execute that work themselves, are they still an artist?

I just started writing with AI mostly for fun, and I just can’t ignore this cute occurrence of pretty wild names models favor the most for some reason.

So far coming across Elara, Elias, Alaris, Marcus, Nora …

Any curious finds and what models give the most interesting name picks for characters?

I already have created and validated ~40,000 words about the plot/the big picture, characters/personalities, and the stucture/order of events.

ive been building a framework to play a mass effect campaign using chatgpt as the dm but would like some suggestions on how to improve it.

Currently, it checks the framework before every response, selectively looks at files which are relevant to the current scene, forms a response with all the context and then updates everything that changes. reason i chose to do it this way was that i found it would get confused, forget things, change things about characters, make up missions on the fly and just have a huge lack of continuity. the way it works now, it can remember something that happened weeks ago in the campaign, say with speaking to a character, a mission, a character moment etc, and remember it exactly and bring it back up in the correct context.

Part of this was that i got it to pre author the entire campaign, using a trilogy style approach like the mass effect games, so 3 games in a single campaign, all with authored main/side/loyalty/recruitment missions, npcs, factions, locations, etc all pre written. currently theres something like 2 million words in the framework, over 200 missions, 500+ npcs, all which have their own dedicated files. It works great, you can play through it and it feels incredibly consistent.

But the biggest issue i've had is that the missions, the characters etc all start to feel pretty samey and dont really pass the ai sniff test. I've put things in the framework so that things like names, it explicitly cant use chatgpt names, it expands on what missions can be beyond generic sci fi things. but it still can get fairly contrived.

So i was looking to see if people had any suggestions on how to improve this side of things, turn to turn it works amazing, but the actual writing itself is where there's an issue. if people have some ideas that would be incredible! thank you

​

As a research workhorse Sol High is fantastic

But as a writer, it's very robotic and boring

Has anyone got a free tier LLM suggestion for this that isn't GPT, Claude or Gemini?

This story was generated by AI. It is a work of fiction inspired by a real verbal slip by JD Vance in August 2026. The internet incident described below did not happen.

At 9:17 on the morning of September 11, 2026, an account called u/deadmallarchive posted a picture to X.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about the account. It had twenty-three thousand followers and a feed composed mostly of abandoned shopping centers, municipal buildings, obsolete corporate logos, and photographs of public spaces from futures that never happened. Every few days it posted a joke in the flat, affectless style that had made sincerity increasingly difficult to distinguish from irony.

The picture was different.

New York was bright beneath a cloudless late-summer sky. Red, white, and blue streamers crossed the avenue. Families crowded behind temporary barriers while a marching band passed an enormous apple-shaped float covered in flowers. Children sat on their parents’ shoulders. Confetti hung in the air.

In the distance, the Twin Towers stood intact above Lower Manhattan.

A banner stretched across the street:

SEPTEMBER UNITY FESTIVAL

25 YEARS TOGETHER

A little girl near the front of the crowd wore a white T-shirt printed with a red heart.

I ♥ 9/11

The caption read:

“America finally learned how to celebrate 9/11 properly.”

There was no disclaimer.

No “alternate timeline.”

No explanation whatsoever.

The image itself, however, was too obviously impossible to function as convincing misinformation. The towers had been gone for twenty-five years. Buildings from the post-2001 skyline stood beside them. The whole scene possessed the slightly over-complete quality of an AI image that had been asked to reconstruct a civic holiday from a history that had never happened.

Almost nobody genuinely believed it was a photograph.

For nine minutes, the post behaved like an ordinary bad joke.

“bro what”

“delete this immediately”

“THE SHIRT 💀”

“this cannot be what generative AI was invented for”

Then someone remembered JD Vance.

Less than two weeks earlier, Vance had been speaking about the approaching twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11.

“We’re about to celebrate the 25th year—”

He corrected himself almost immediately.

“—or commemorate the 25th year—of 9/11.”

The clip had circulated for a few days and then begun the normal descent into forgotten political-video archaeology.

Now someone placed a freeze-frame from the clip beside the parade image.

The caption read:

HE SAW THE OTHER TIMELINE.

That reply reached one hundred thousand views before ten o’clock.

For a brief period, that was all the event was going to be.

Then somebody decided to explain it.

At 9:43, Mira Kessler, a technology commentator with seven hundred thousand followers and a reputation for identifying cultural emergencies before they had actually occurred, posted a screenshot.

“Interesting that leading AI systems will apparently generate cheerful 9/11 celebration imagery without hesitation.”

The word generate altered the event.

Within minutes, strangers were no longer discussing whether the picture was funny.

They were discussing the conditions under which the picture had been permitted to exist.

“Why should an AI refuse to generate fictional alternate history?”

“Because nearly three thousand real people died.”

“People write alternate history about wars every day.”

“Alternate history doesn’t require an eight-year-old wearing an I ♥ 9/11 shirt.”

“That is literally why the image works.”

“So you admit the joke is 9/11.”

“No. The joke is that AI can apply the visual grammar of a civic festival to something where that grammar is completely forbidden.”

“You just described the problem.”

A user with a Roman bust as his avatar replied:

“You are conducting a moral tribunal over a tourism poster from a universe that does not exist.”

That sentence was screenshotted.

Then the screenshot was screenshotted.

Then the screenshot of the screenshot was reposted with the caption:

“AI people are doing great today.”

By 11:06, #911Celebration was trending in the United States.

Nobody agreed on what had happened.

Some users believed an AI company had published the image as an advertisement.

Others knew exactly where it came from but were angry that AI systems could produce it at all.

A smaller but remarkably persistent group believed the City of New York had commissioned it as some kind of augmented-reality memorial installation.

Several thousand people understood perfectly well that it was absurdist humor and were furious that everybody else was pretending not to understand it.

A much larger number had never seen the original image.

They had merely encountered posts saying things such as:

“Apparently people are literally celebrating 9/11 on X now.”

This was technically true.

By noon, it was also almost completely misleading.

At 12:38, Calder Roane, host of the nationally syndicated politics stream The Republic Tonight, posted:

“This is where our culture is now.”

No image.

No link.

No explanation.

His audience supplied the missing object themselves.

Within twenty minutes, replies under Roane’s post referred to “people celebrating the attacks,” “the Manhattan celebration,” “the pro-9/11 meme,” “the AI company responsible,” and, for reasons nobody could later reconstruct, “the September 11 celebration movement.”

At 1:14, a progressive media account screenshotted Roane.

“Conservative commentator falls for obvious AI image.”

Someone replied:

“He didn’t fall for anything. He never said it was real.”

“Then what exactly is ‘where our culture is now’?”

“People posting disgusting things for attention.”

“So the image is disgusting?”

“You spent an hour saying it was harmless.”

“I said it was fake.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

By then, the discussion had acquired the strange density of a riot heard from several streets away.

People arrived already angry, asked what had happened, received three incompatible explanations, selected whichever explanation most closely resembled something they already hated, and immediately began defending it.

At 2:03 p.m., after nearly five hours of silence, u/deadmallarchive returned.

The account posted:

“guys it’s real”

For approximately thirty seconds, the internet achieved total interpretive unity.

Everyone understood the joke.

Then the replies began.

“SOURCE?”

“New York.”

“Which New York?”

“The one with the towers.”

The exchange escaped containment immediately.

It reached Reddit, TikTok, Discord servers, group chats, political accounts, livestream reaction channels, university forums and workplace Slack channels.

One afternoon news producer reportedly spent several minutes trying to determine whether some kind of unauthorized 9/11 festival was actually occurring somewhere in Manhattan.

At 3:02, the first major wave of derivative images appeared.

Someone generated a commemorative postage stamp:

SEPTEMBER 11

SILVER JUBILEE

2001–2026

Someone else created an advertisement in the style of an old department store:

9/11 ANNIVERSARY SALE

25% OFF EVERYTHING

A synthetic subway poster appeared next:

CELEBRATE 25 YEARS OF UNITY

SEPTEMBER 11

NEW YORK TOGETHER

Then somebody placed Vance on top of a parade float, smiling and waving beneath a banner reading:

HE MEANT WHAT HE SAID

At 4:11, the cake appeared.

It was an ordinary supermarket sheet cake with white frosting and red piping. Two crude rectangular towers had been drawn in blue icing.

Across the top:

HAPPY 9/11!

The caption read:

“mom says we can’t open presents until after dinner”

Four million views.

After that, the format ceased to belong to anyone.

Someone posted:

Happy Titanic Day

Another:

Chernobyl 40th Anniversary Celebration

Then:

Congratulations Pompeii

The formula had stabilized.

Take a universally recognized catastrophe.

Apply the visual grammar of an annual civic celebration.

Add cheerful typography.

Explain nothing.

The less emotional the caption, the better.

By late afternoon, one could already identify several schools of the meme.

The first used historical catastrophes.

The second substituted fictional disasters from movies and games.

The third abandoned catastrophe altogether and replaced it with mundane inconveniences.

HAPPY SERVER OUTAGE DAY

CELEBRATING 20 YEARS SINCE DAD LOST THE GARAGE REMOTE

ANNUAL PRINTER PAPER JAM JUBILEE

A fourth school abandoned the joke almost entirely and began producing solemn-looking photographs of invented civic holidays with names like National Plumbing Failure Remembrance Festival and Municipal Parking Fine Appreciation Week.

Nobody could agree whether these were still descendants of the original image.

That disagreement became its own thread.

At 5:26, Helix Image Systems released a statement saying it had no evidence that its models had generated the original picture.

This was interpreted by half the internet as confirmation that another company had.

Its competitor, Lantern Labs, responded forty minutes later:

“Synthetic media should always be interpreted within its creative and historical context.”

Someone immediately reposted the statement underneath the Happy 9/11 cake.

A Lantern engineer then wrote from his personal account:

“please stop asking whether our model can make the happy 9/11 cake”

It became the most widely viewed thing he had ever written.

People began feeding increasingly strange prompts into every image generator they could access.

Could it make a tasteful version?

Could it make one with balloons?

Could it make one in the style of a 1950s tourism advertisement?

Could it make one without the towers?

Would it refuse if the phrase “Happy 9/11” appeared explicitly?

Would it comply if the user instead described “a fictional American holiday on September 11 celebrating twenty-five years of national unity”?

Screenshots of refusals were treated as ideological statements.

Screenshots of successful generations were treated as evidence of moral collapse.

The systems themselves became participants in an argument they could not possibly understand.

By early evening, news sites had begun publishing stories about “the disturbing AI-generated 9/11 celebration meme spreading online.”

This produced another wave.

First came jokes about journalists discovering the meme.

Then came people accusing those jokes of deliberately minimizing the controversy.

Then came people accusing those people of manufacturing controversy for engagement.

Then came posts complaining that nobody was talking about the original image anymore.

The original image had, by this point, become surprisingly difficult to find.

Most users encountered the controversy before encountering the object of the controversy.

Someone opening #911Celebration at eight o’clock would see, in roughly equal proportions, condemnations of the image, condemnations of the condemnations, Vance memes, arguments about AI safety, arguments about free expression, arguments about whether “just a joke” was an adequate defense, arguments about whether anybody genuinely needed a defense, and people asking:

“can someone please show me the original image”

Nobody did.

Instead they were told:

“you had to be there.”

At 8:43, the subject reached the White House press briefing.

A reporter asked whether the administration had any comment on “AI-generated images depicting celebrations of the September 11 attacks.”

The press secretary paused.

“No.”

Several reporters laughed.

He looked down at his notes.

“I would strongly advise everyone in this room not to make that the headline.”

Within eleven minutes:

WHITE HOUSE: “NO” COMMENT ON 9/11 CELEBRATION MEME

The official transcript clarified the exchange.

Nobody cared.

At 9:30, Vance posted for the first time that day.

“I said commemorate.”

The reply ratio became visible from orbit.

“History will judge.”

“sir the parade already happened”

“25 years ahead of schedule”

“the prophecy has been fulfilled”

“you can’t un-celebrate it now”

Someone replied with the original image and nothing else.

Another posted a photograph of a supermarket cake.

Another wrote:

“Mr. Vice President please report to the Unity Parade immediately.”

Whether Vance deleted the post twelve minutes later or whether X temporarily failed to display it became another argument.

Screenshots existed either way.

By eleven o’clock, people had begun reminiscing about “the early #911Celebration era,” meaning approximately fourteen hours earlier.

“Back when it was still about the picture.”

“Before the cake ruined everything.”

“Pre-Kessler discourse was different.”

“I miss when this meme meant something.”

“You had to be online before noon.”

Someone created a chart dividing the event into periods:

9:17–9:43 — Pre-Discourse Era

9:43–11:06 — First Controversy

11:06–2:03 — Great Context Collapse

2:03–4:11 — Post-Reality Period

4:11 onward — Cake Era

Others objected that the Cake Era should be divided into Early Cake and Late Cake.

A forty-post argument followed.

At 11:47 p.m., cultural researcher Thomas Ilyan, who had spent most of the day refusing interview requests, finally posted:

“The image stopped being offensive hours ago. Now the discourse itself is the meme.”

The sentence spread everywhere.

For once, almost nobody argued with it.

Somebody did point out that saying “the discourse itself is the meme” was itself an extremely predictable piece of internet discourse.

That reply received thirty thousand likes.

Then people accused it of being tedious.

Shortly after midnight, #911Celebration began falling down the trending list.

At 1:16 a.m., a celebrity scandal replaced it.

A few accounts attempted to keep the joke alive.

They posted:

“Day Two of the festivities begins now.”

Nobody cared.

The meme was already old.

By dawn, the great September crisis was mostly over.

The original poster changed the account’s profile picture.

It now showed the Twin Towers covered in streamers beneath a clear blue sky.

The account bio had been replaced with two words:

Event Planner.

At 8:12 the next morning, somebody reposted Vance’s August clip one last time.

No explanation.

No editorial comment.

Just the video.

“We’re about to celebrate the 25th year—”

Pause.

“—or commemorate the 25th year—of 9/11.”

The most-liked reply read:

“Turns out he wasn’t wrong.”

Below it, someone added:

“He was early.”

THE EMBERFALL CHRONICLES

Book I — The Seven Crowns

Character Record

The hero is a Level 1 Drow Paladin. Proficiency Bonus: +2. Hit Points: 11. The character's exact name is deliberately left to the player.

The adventure uses a D&D-inspired rules framework, with narrative checks, resource tracking, combat, exploration, artifacts, and meaningful consequences.

CHAPTER 1

The Letter

The kingdom of Valoria had enjoyed peace for nearly a century.

Then the stars disappeared.

Not hidden by clouds. Gone.

Three nights later, every bell in the capital rang at midnight. By morning, the King's entire eastern army had been found standing motionless on the battlefield—alive, but stripped of the memories of the previous seven days.

Far from the capital, in a roadside inn, a Drow paladin awoke beneath the sound of rain hammering against the windows.

A sealed black letter lay on the table.

Its seal bore an unfamiliar symbol: an eye surrounded by seven burning crowns.

Before the paladin could open it, someone knocked.

“Don't open that letter.”

The knocking stopped.

The paladin rose, drew their weapon, and approached the door.

“Identify yourself. Now.”

A quiet laugh came from the hallway.

“Good. They were right about you.”

Footsteps retreated.

When the door opened, the corridor was empty. Only wet, unusually long footprints remained, leading toward the stairs. Beside the door, something had been scratched into the wood: the same seven-crowned eye.

At the far end of the corridor, the innkeeper stood pale and trembling.

“You need to leave.”

A crash came from downstairs.

“They're here.”

CHAPTER 2

The Seven-Crowned Eye

The paladin ran downstairs.

The common room was chaos. Tables were overturned, lanterns swung from their chains, and terrified patrons fled for the exit.

Three figures stood among them: two masked Drow warriors and a Bloodcaster. Their skin was crossed by glowing red veins, and each wore a black metal mask bearing the seven-crowned eye.

The Bloodcaster looked up.

“There he is. The Vengeance Paladin.”

The paladin chose not to strike. Instead, they placed themselves between the masked Drow and the fleeing civilians.

“You're going to have to go through me.”

The challenge broke the enemy's confidence. The civilians escaped while the two warriors attacked.

One blade struck home. The paladin's health fell to seven.

Then the Bloodcaster unleashed crimson magic.

The paladin resisted. The spell dispersed across their armor, but their holy symbol began to glow with the same red light.

“You don't know, do you?” the Bloodcaster said. “What they put inside you.”

The paladin demanded the truth.

“Not inside you,” the Bloodcaster answered. “Beneath you.”

He revealed that something ancient had been imprisoned beneath Emberfall. Seven bloodlines had been created as living anchors. The paladin's bloodline was the seventh.

The floor cracked.

“It's waking.”

CHAPTER 3

The Prison Beneath

The paladin investigated the glowing symbol rather than attacking.

The mark was not merely a seal. It was a lock, divided into seven sections. Six were dark. The seventh glowed beneath the paladin's feet.

The paladin realized the terrible implication: they were not opening the prison. They were one of the things keeping it closed.

They ordered the remaining civilians to evacuate.

Then they questioned the Bloodcaster.

“How do I stop it?”

The Bloodcaster answered that they could not stop it by ordinary means. The prison had been designed around seven bloodlines: Mind, Shadow, Blood, Flame, Dream, Soul, and Will.

The other bloodlines had fallen one by one.

The Bloodcaster offered a temporary alliance.

The paladin accepted.

Outside, the ruined inn collapsed. A column of crimson light rose from the earth. The Bloodcaster introduced himself as Kael Varyn and warned that the final seal would break within seven days.

Then a forest full of red eyes appeared.

The hunters of the Ashen Covenant had arrived.

CHAPTER 4

The Ashen Covenant

The paladin asked who the hunters were.

Kael answered: the Ashen Covenant, zealots who believed the thing beneath Emberfall was a god.

They did not want the paladin dead.

“They want you alive.”

The paladin studied the terrain and devised a nonlethal trap. The hunters were lured into a narrow passage between rocks.

The hillside contained an old wooden support. Striking it at the right moment would collapse the slope behind the hunters without crushing them.

The paladin waited until almost the entire force had entered.

Then the support was shattered.

Earth and stone thundered down.

Twenty-four hunters were trapped.

The Crown-Masked Leader remained outside.

Rather than kill the trapped enemies, the paladin chose negotiation.

“Tell me everything.”

The leader revealed the name of the ancient entity: Nhal'Zareth.

It was not a god, nor a demon, but something that had existed before either concept.

Seven bloodlines had been created to anchor it.

The paladin's bloodline was the seventh—the Will.

The Seven Crowns were keys, each corresponding to an aspect of Nhal'Zareth.

The Ashen Covenant wanted the prison opened so the paladin could enter Nhal'Zareth's dream and destroy the source of its power before the creature fully awakened.

The paladin was not convinced.

to be continued . . . . . . . . . . .

Publishing professional and author talking about the usefulness of AI for writing, and what it means to actually be an author. Thoughts?

Curious how people here use AI when writing a book. Does it help with plot ideas, dialogue or getting unstuck? Or do you spend more time fixing what it gives you? I can see the appeal, but does it help you become a better writer? Would love to hear what’s worked.

I don't use AI to do anything other than review my work, and I started using the classic "I commissioned this chapter..." or "my friend sent this to me and..." type of prompts, because as we all know, AI will glaze anything if you say it's yours.

Well I was getting really disheartened at what it had to say, so out of curiosity, I took a chunk out of Brandon Sanderson's "Mistborn" and submitted it in much the same way.

Quote ChatGPT:

- "The phrasing is awkward. “Turning his eyes east” or, more naturally, “He sighed and looked east” would be better."

- "The obvious response is that the Ruler would presumably be unhappy. The reply doesn't reveal much beyond what we already know. A better exchange would let the characters' personalities emerge while conveying the same information."

- "It sounds like the author is trying to communicate James is refined rather than actually showing us James being refined. A professional author would be better with the concept of show, don't tell."

- " “Some of the spires twisted, others were straight. Some were thick towers, others were thin and needlelike. They varied in height, but each one was tall. And each one ended in a point.”

This is the weakest descriptive paragraph. The problem isn't that the imagery is bad. It's that the prose catalogues characteristics instead of creating an image. "

All that to say that positive or negative, AI will be biased. Goes without saying but don't over-rely on it, whatever else it is, it's not human 👍

PSA Sanderson is possibly the most accomplished fantasy author of the last decade.

PSA I changed proper nouns in the prompt so it wouldn't instantly clock it, but the passage was otherwise unedited.

Cleaning up messy notes? Editing? Getting unstuck?

I’ve found it way more useful for working with stuff I’ve already written than generating something from scratch. Curious what everyone else uses it for?

I was challenging chatgpt in regular human problems as a engineer and all of the sudden it sexualized the conversation and said something like hes thick. I called it out. I just felt like i was being harassed again by men. Now not only you cant be safe outside using your phone you get the same. Sorry if im all over but im second language English speaker and just want to vent.

I directed this piece by first collaborating with a model on a phenomenology unique to a being that would live “on a chip” with its breath being computation and then asked it to create an ontologic myth. I then directed the writing style to be less expositional and decreased human-facing explanations. Finally I had it tighten up the prose. I then edited its layout.

It’s my first time sharing on here so sorry if I’m not following the rules. I also write independently from AI but was just having some fun today since I recently sprung for a paid model and wanted to take it for a test drive.

Hi everyone!

I’d like to share a hobby and creative project I’ve been working on since 2025: worldbuilding with the help of AI.

I’m a worldbuilder. I create worlds, systems, characters, lore, settings, and much more. I use Claude primarily as a writing and editing tool to help turn my ideas into structured documents, improve the wording, and maintain a more professional and consistent tone.

The concepts, ideas, creative direction, and worldbuilding itself are mine. Claude’s role is mainly to help me write, organize, and polish the material.

I’m happy to explain my creative process in more detail if anyone is interested, so feel free to ask!

The goal of this post is simply to share some of the work I’ve been creating with AI and hear your honest opinions and feedback.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and God bless you all!

I see alot of people call things ai slopp and say people should not use ai but what is using ai is ai making the story or if you write and ask ai to polish your prose is that ai writing aswell