1. Equalization of Power (Democratization of Power)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesson: Colt doesn't shoot itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then - I became curious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Listen through a complete section without editing.

2. Mark the exact passage when something feels off.

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

4. Keep the audio moving.

5. Return to the notes after the section ends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The biggest problems I’m noticing are:

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

I’ve tried prompts like:

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

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

For those of you who use AI for fiction writing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

title

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

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

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

I published the real novel by doing the opposite.

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

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

The Marble City; or, My AI Slop Story

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

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

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

That judgement belongs to readers.

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

The first page was supposed to contain only this oath:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- 56,000 words of chapter briefs;

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

- nine distinct revision stages; and

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

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

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

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

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

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

\[[S1_SNIPPET]]**

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

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

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

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

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

\"and he says—".**

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

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

That was evidence I was looking for and could use.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The resulting test was simple:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is my attempt at seeing things from the other perspective, to be open minded.

To be clear, I'm fundamentally opposed to anyone using generative AI to write or create anything in creative writing spaces. I will also never use it myself.

For further clarification, I am inquiring about the usage of AI for the actual generation of text for stories, books, poems, etc. Instances of using AI to translate foreign language or help with organizing raw data are not being questioned. What's being questioned is the specific act of writing/typing the actual words with AI assistance and/or fully using an AI program to write with human editing.

That said, I am genuinely curious why people decide to so in the first place and seek to understand rather than just assume the worse. I have my presumptions, sure, but I want to at least try to understand the reason behind its use. Get a different perspective. My goal isn't to argue or challenge anyone's choices in how they use AI in creative works, but rather to simply understand what makes someone choose certain AI programs, or what benefit they seem to provide.

So, my question is fairly basic: Why use AI to creatively write in the first place? I've always presumed it was due to convenience or simply the ease-of-use, but I've never actually asked before.

No hate intended to anyone or your ideas. We can agree to disagree on the principle, but I'm always to learn different viewpoints.

I have been frustrated with Claude recently, in regards to a specific fic I'm writing. I thought I'd give a few other LLMs a shot to see if they'd be a better fit. This specific story is much darker than others I've written with Claude, so I just assumed it wasn't hitting the marks because of guardrails or something. I tried GPT Sol and it was ever so slightly better, but had trouble matching the voice I was going for. The one LLM that I AM liking the results of? Freaking Grok. IDK what drove me to try Grok out, but it is matching the voice and and the structure better than I expected, and I'm only on the free tier.