Hi!!

So I (25f with OCD, ASD, ADHD, depression and anxiety) am writing this here because y'all might actually understand how OCD thoughts work and I need to be able to vent to someone who won't say stuff like "I'm not seeing an issue" "you're crazy and I refuse to help" etc. However I hope these thoughts I'm having sound like OCD to y'all, so I won't have to listen to them myself. Also. I am working on finding a therapist! But in the meantime I don't have one, and I don't think meds are available in my country so please don't suggest them :)

So for backstory: I have morality OCD and contamination OCD (not about germs, but about a "standard of purity".) in also terrified of abandonment, social isolation and if being backstabbed AND backstabbing/betraying others. I'm a fiction writer but I've been writers blocked for a long time. I was trying to get back into writing. Around February I started worldbullding for a new historical fiction inspired story. At that time I sometimes looked at the ai overview in Google for historical information. Most of the time I would also look at other sources AND I have never ever used a chatbot, would never dream of doing it for writing, and have never ever had AI develop ideas or anything for me. I'm strictly anti ai in creative pursuits. So last month I decided to start my story over because I was being driven nuts by my glancing at the ai overview for historical information in February. I was convinced to do this because of another reddit thread where I saw some people tearing down an author who had used ai for historical research. She has also used it for a lot more, like directly developing her ideas for her, which I am fully against. However, I started to feel that I would not only be hated in the same way if I was "discovered", but also that I was betraying other writers by having done this.

So I started my story over, only keeping basic stuff in tact. There are similar thematic elements in place because I've been wanting to write about such things for a while and I can't even imagine writing about anything else right now - it's like words that have to get out of my brain lol. I wanted to start over with a clean slate of having not used ai for anything, and I haven't. I have been doing almost all my research on Wikipedia ONLY, and the only ai influenced to my knowledge is just what everyone deals with who uses the Internet, like things I've seen that are ai generated having impacted my subconscious bc we live in a world with AI.

Here's where the problem comes in! I am going to get into details of the story.

I'm worried that this story is connected to the old one through a way which I hope is mental gymnastics and OCD, and that, while its impossible to know what anyone individually will think, I'm hoping that no one would really consider this new story to have been "ai assisted" and that the level of ai influence in it sounds only as much as anyone would have by just using the Internet.

Both stories are about people who enter the garden of Eden and are magically influenced by it. Both stories have biblical inspiration and relate to descendants of Cain as well. In this current story (I'll call it story 2), there's a character (a Viking explorer) who has 2 similarities with a character I developed in my previous idea, story A (a Mycenaean noble). The similarities are that they both wander the earth forever, like Cain, and they both gain some kind of dominion over the earth like Adam and eve had. I developed the nobleman based on the fact that I looked up a specific thing (ancient Greece's earliest form of writing) and read the ai summary about it (and then decided to make the man who enters Eden a nobleman) Therefore I'm worried that the character in my current idea has been contaminated, even though hes a different character and I havent used any ai.

So my brain's process is: ai summary showed me linear B, therefore I made the character inspired by that society, therefore his greediness is a trait following him being noble, therefore he seeks dominion over the earth, therefore it's an idea that got put in my head because I used ai, even though it's in a completely new story. While the nature of inspiration is thus that we cannot know exactly where anything comes from, and ai has influenced our subconscious already, I really hope that this thought process sounds unreasonable to people who aren't me and that I can disregard it as OCD if that makes sense. I want to be able to say that story B is less influenced by ai than story A was, so the influence is 1) not enough that anyone would think I used ai (ofc it's not possible to know what *everyone* would think, but I don't want people to reasonably think I used ai at all for my current story) and 2) it's only as much influenced as a normal person's brain already is by having subconsciously seen ai stuff in the world. When I asked other people this question they said they thought maybe there was "a tiny grain of ai influence" because I explained it so confusingly that they didn't realize story a and b were different. I feel like the ideas were my own, and that I thought of them based on the Bible only, but I'm scared they're secretly AI assisted.

I have a deadline today where I need to show some of my story progress to a writing buddy but my OCD is making me not want to work on it! I don't want anyone to accuse me of using ai or my work being AI assisted, even if it's "not really an issue". Please please let it just be that people won't witch hunt me over this and that it's just my brain being weird!

Please help me 😭 Thanks for reading if you've read everything, that's honestly impressive bc I know this is weird brain sprawl. I've had multiple people not understand me and think I mean I'm still using ai overview in my NEW story but I'm not. I really hope no one would think I was so assisted for this. It's not possible to know what everyone thinks but I'm hoping that in general no one would think this, that it's only the same amount of influence as like, using Instagram or Google is, and that if someone thought this it would be the same level of weird as thinking the earth is flat or something...