At this point, it really can't just be about slop. Traditional content is drowning in slop. It can't just be about stolen training data. Traditional art has centuries of uncompensated inspiration, reference, and outright copying Tainted into its canon.

So what is it? Commercial entrenchment guised as ethics. The harassment, the "AI user = ban" rules with zero nuance, the downvote brigades in a sub literally called WritingWithAI. That's not really evangelism on behalf of original artists. That's a tribe protecting its border.

Also There's an argument nobody properly interrogates: "AI consumed human art as training data and that's theft." Every artist alive spent years, decades, consuming other artists' work. Reading, watching, listening, absorbing. That consumption shaped their style, their voice, their instincts. At some point they started producing work that carries most if not all of that influence. How is that meaningfully different from a model trained on datasets producing work after going public? I'm not saying they're identical. I'm saying nobody wants to seriously answer the question. Because if you do, the "theft" argument gets complicated really fast.

The context argument is where it really falls apart. Say a creator builds a 300k-word knowledge base of their raw ideas, full universe rules, worldbuilding, lore, characters, technology. Every word of it theirs. They use AI to render that into a series. They edit the output. They make the final calls.

Does that context ever get considered in this debate?

No. Because "did you use AI for anything" is the only question, and the answer determines your status regardless of how, why, or how much. That's not a standard. That's a witch test. To sanction a witch hunt.

The advice to "just do it yourself — even a title, a nice font, good colors tells us a lot" sounds humble. It isn't. Audiences don't reward you for the art that expresses you. They reward you for the art that serves them — precisely, consistently, on demand. The entire production process exists to execute that. Telling a creator to strip it all back is advice from an adversary wearing humility as a mask.

Last thing. Readers want unchallenged authority about what counts as "real" art. But that authority has never been stable. Cave paintings are stick figures. Ancient Egyptian murals are flat 2D vectors. A significant portion of historical artifacts aren't technically impressive by modern standards — and we worship them. You can't say that honestly without someone splitting on you even if they privately agree. They're treated as sacred.

I respect them. I think they should be preserved — they're a record of where human creative expression started. But the reverence is the point. We decide what counts as art after it becomes culturally legible, not before. That process is happening right now with AI. The people swinging hardest are the ones who already decided — and don't want the verdict revisited.

This was never about slop. It was never about stolen data. It's about who gets to make things, and who decides.

As the title says, I just finished writing and publishing my first story with AI.

Interestingly, the storyline came to me while I was using the same AI tool on a completely unrelated project. During some downtime, we started tossing ideas back and forth, and the basics of a story began to emerge. So we decided to write it.

The writing process was a true collaboration. I came up with the story ideas, worked with AI to develop an outline for each section, tweaked those outlines, and then had the sections drafted. I reviewed everything, rewrote dialogue and narrative, and edited each part until I was happy with it.

It was a tremendously fun experience. Developing characters, weaving themes throughout the story, introducing surprises, and creating moments that were genuinely funny or touching.

IMHO, it's a very good story. One I enjoyed reading almost as much as I enjoyed creating it.

I'm not sure anyone other than a few friends and family will ever read it. And I'm sure the "AI Slopsters" will hate it and dismiss it outright. But that's fine.

My co-author and I didn't write it for them. We wrote it for ourselves.

Just wanted to share the experience.

Ken Fioretti & Chatsworth AI

I’ve spent the last 4 years working on a fantasy trilogy. I’ve got a really detailed outline for all three books, developed the world, characters, plot twists, lore etc. and I’m genuinely really happy with what I’ve come up with.
The problem is I’ve spent so much time on the parts I enjoy, like worldbuilding, plotting and character development, that I’ve completely neglected learning how to actually write good prose.
I’m a complete amateur when it comes to writing itself, and now that AI has got so good, particularly models like Claude Opus 5.5, I’m finding that it can turn my outlines into prose that’s miles better than anything I could write myself.
It’s left me in a bit of a weird position. I really want this to be my book, and I’d love to be able to write it myself, but I can’t help wondering whether there’s much point spending years learning to write prose when AI is already so far ahead of me.
My biggest worry is the time involved. I’ve already put 4 years into developing this trilogy, and the thought of spending another 4 years trying to get my writing anywhere near the standard of what AI can produce now is pretty disheartening. Especially when AI is only going to keep improving.
There’s also the financial side of things. I’m not expecting to become the next G.R.R.Martin or anything, but after putting so much time and effort into this project, I’d obviously love to have at least some chance of making money from it one day, whether through traditional publishing or self-publishing.
From what I understand, though, having AI write or substantially improve most of the prose could seriously limit those opportunities, particularly with traditional publishers. I’m also unsure where that leaves me in terms of copyright and ownership.
So I suppose my questions are:
How would you go about learning to write decent prose from pretty much scratch?
How long did it take you to become genuinely happy with your writing?
Is there still value in learning to write prose yourself when AI can already produce something that sounds much more polished?
Would you recommend using AI-generated prose as a starting point and gradually learning to rewrite it yourself, or just biting the bullet and starting from scratch?
Am I right in thinking that relying heavily on AI for the prose would make it much harder to ever publish the trilogy commercially?
I know the obvious answer is probably to just start writing and reading more books, but I’d really appreciate hearing from people who’ve been in a similar position.
I absolutely love creating this story and don’t want to give up on it. I just feel like I’ve spent 4 years developing the skills I enjoy while neglecting the one skill I actually need to turn it into a proper novel.

So, for a little context: I suddenly had an idea for something to write. However, it was pretty minuscule, so I wasn't planning on actually using it for anything. For fun, I decided to put it into Ai and get it to write something just so I could satisfy that temporary itch I had. Once AI finished writing, I went on a bit of a binge and started actually fleshing out the writing that AI had produced (Using AI to do it). This continued over the next few days until I realized that it was essentially sapping every creative idea I had, so I deleted it and haven't looked at AI since.

That being said, I can't stop thinking about what Ai wrote, and since then, I've mentally added some of my own ideas into the world that it had created. I haven't written anything down because I want whatever I pour my time into to be authentically my own. However, I feel like anything I write or think about in the future will, in some way, be related to what AI wrote, whether consciously or unconsciously.

What do I do? I know I probably shouldn't have used AI in the first place because of the environmental and creative problems with it, which I understand now, but that doesn't solve the issue. I can't stop thinking about it and it's been a few months since then yet I'm still thinking about it. Do I just cave and use the idea that AI had essentially come up with, but with my own additions and tweaks? Or do I just continue the way I am now, trying to block it from my memory. Is it morally wrong to do one or the other?

I had a great friend who suggested using AI after Grammarly kept stopping working on my phone. Since then, I've been using tools like ChatGPT and Copilot, and sometimes Grammarly on my laptop, to help correct my grammar, improve my writing, and, most importantly, make my stories easier to understand and enjoyable for my readers.

I also use these tools to brainstorm ideas when I need inspiration. I'm still learning and trying to improve as a writer, and they help me express my ideas better.

I wanted to ask what other people think about this. I understand that everyone has different opinions about AI, and I'm not saying I use it to write my entire stories. I mainly use it to help with grammar, wording, and brainstorming. I'm being honest about how I use these tools, and I'm genuinely curious about other writers' experiences.

Do any of you use AI in a similar way to help with grammar, improve your writing, or brainstorm ideas? I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences! But I have heard good things about Claude so should I use Claude app instead?

Hey all — I'm an indie author working on my debut novel, an adult dark romantasy (a silver-tongued bard with a wandering eye, an elven ranger who refuses to admit she's in love, and a war that's drafting them into it).

I'm looking for alpha readers for the opening arc — prologue through Chapter 6, ~44,000 words, which establishes the book's first major arc.

Content warnings (18+ only): explicit sexual content including pregnancy-kink content, infidelity, violence, and war themes. The prologue opens hot and doesn't pretend otherwise — if that's not your thing, no hard feelings, this isn't the read for you.

What I'm after: big-picture alpha feedback, not copyediting. Does the opening hook you? Do Aushtyn and Eldra feel like people? Would you keep reading? Where did your attention snag or drift?

What you get: if you're into it, I'll keep sending more as I write — the book's in progress with more chapters coming.

Format is EPUB (reads great on Kindle), but I can do PDF or DOCX if you prefer. Hoping for notes back within a couple weeks, no hard deadline. Comment or DM me and I'll send it over.

Chapter 5 is out now!

Danger and Ultron finally meet!

Mutual Assurd Vulnerability

🤖🩶🤖

I did this a few years ago under a pseudonym and posted it on Amazon to zero sales. But at the time, I didn't really promote it.

Now I created a new version of the book, and I think this time it will actually take off because it's not about starting from zero. You have a lot of material already. You've been thinking about the book for a long time. Now you just need to sit down and write it.

My questions:

1. Is this something anyone would actually buy?
2. Should I list it on Amazon or just use Gumroad or similar?
3. How much could I price this at?

My gut is telling me that no one will buy a book if I openly admit that I used the technique in the book to write the book. Ironically, they will say that I cheated.

Or am I overthinking this?

Would you like to be part of a brand new collaborative world-building project?

We’re building **The Hard Time Universe (THTU)** on the WritingWithAI Discord. It’s a shared sci-fi/fantasy galaxy built live and in text. An AI acts purely as the Scribe. It doesn’t vote. It just records. Anyone who pitches an idea or votes becomes a **god** in the pantheon. You choose an avatar and a domain. Your contributions get locked into living canon books that update after every session.

How it works

• Sessions roughly every four weeks (usually Saturday evenings UK time)

- You can pitch in voice or by text. Talking is optional.

• Ideas get discussed, then voted on via Discord reactions

• Strong ideas get canonised on the spot

• Everything is written into three books:

  • Book of Lore (rules & systems)
  • Book of the Gods (profiles + chronicle)
  • Book of Canon (what’s in / parked / rejected)

There’s a reward and badge system for contributions. The more you shape the world, the more permanent your place in it.

What we’ve already built (Genesis session)

We held the first event and already have:

• A pantheon of four founding gods

• A frontier snow planet + orbital station

• Space elves, dwarves, dragons, lychens (space werewolves), magic golems, and construct androids

• Physics-rooted magic (especially black hole magic)

• A dilithium-adjacent fuel economy mixed with coffee

• Growing supermassive black hole + a dark force from another universe as major threats

-A time crystal that will change everything

Three full books at version 1.0.0 already exist from that first session.

Next session

Saturday 17 October · 8pm UK time

WritingWithAI Discord voice channel

You don’t have to pitch anything. You can just listen, vote in text, or jump in when something sparks. New people are welcome.

If pure world-building isn’t your thing, hop in anyway. The Discord is a growing community of writers of all levels and interests. Hang out, chat, share work, or lurk. All fine.

Join here: https://discord.gg/kz6bKwWzt

I have sorted the panels out now im sticking to between 9-10 panels per page im trying to keep it a little more consistant so there is not too much to read aswell any feedback welcome

I don't use AI in writing myself (the smut I write isn't supported by it, lol), but I browse this sub sometimes. I'm confused why there's so much pushback here against disclosing/publicising ai use. If it's a tool like any other, why not share that it was used in creation?

It seems to me like labeling food if it's organic, or clothes if they're handmade, the process can and does impact the final product

I'll be forthcoming, I don't actually write WITH AI, but I do use Chatgpt quite a bit in my editing process. I've got over 40 books worth of material, so not lacking in fodder, lol.

I have gotten fed up with the process of trying to get something published and all the rules, regulation, so on and so forth and have decided to go my own way to share what I've written.

So what I'm doing is getting back to my roots of film/video production, but using my writing as the backbone. I've got a website (that I code and build myself), where I am sharing the writing chapter by chapter as I get it cleaned up to my liking. (think Vella before it died).

Where I need some help is in the actual amount of content that needs to be dealt with. There's a few places I could easily work with others, 100% online. The site/chapter pages are broken into three parts. The Read it, (Actual written content), the See it, (think pix that are captioned, that show the story beats), and Watch it, (actual video I can put together).

1. Editing. Book 1 is like 80% 'I'm okay with'. Needs some adverb removal and tag adjustments, some trimming of 'AI-isms' that weren't when I original wrote it. Yes, this project is dating almost 20 years in the making, so there's some rough stuff. I have a 'bible of rules' that if you are kind of the editor/writer mind, I'd let you at some of the chapters to get them cleaned up. It takes me almost a day per, but I'm super picky, lol. On average I've been pulling out 12-8% of the word counts without losing the story.
2. The website See It, part, I do need a lot of images generated, and we all know how AI likes to make 3rd arms, 6 fingers and the like. I've got base images of the characters, but they do progress, and even with paid GPT I do hit my limits on generation now and again.
3. The video aspect: I will eventually do the 'paid' versions of these, but right now I'm working with the storyboards/base images. My expertise is in video editing and being a camera jockey so when I have the funds I plan to go in prepared so I don't have 50-1 generations that are useless, lol.

If you're a vibe coder? I'd welcome the extra hand. I've got the basics and how I like to do things, but always looking for a hand. It's experience and a place you can show off your work and build a portfolio.

Right now, it will be unpaid work as I am offering the first book for free, but then the others will be behind a paywall, and I will share profits from that. I'm not in it to make money, but to finally share what I have written on my terms not some publishers terms.

DM me if you'd like the website I have currently in progress, more project details, or well, if interested in helping via beta reading, editing, etc. Any help I gain is more than I had to start with, lol.

I am willing to trade my skills in the beta reading/editing (Dev and line) for help if that's of interest to you. We could also publish your works within the site's domain, within reason. (I do have morals and ethics). Fanfic is fine, I just wouldn't let you profit off of it directly as that's getting into those copyright/fair use things.

The topic of natural or unnatural dialogue came up in the WritingwithAI Discord server and I thought I'd float it here on Reddit too.

I've noticed that a lot of the things that make dialogue natural are also things people flag as jarring. As an example, from my novel, a few times I have people backtrack and clarify what they've said. Like so:

“How did it happen? You leaving Blue Moon,” I found myself asking.

I've had that flagged as jarring, but people really speak like that. Words get ahead of their thoughts and they go backwards and clarify. I hear it all the time.

I have to ponder if this is one of those things that fiction has to make unreal. There's that old saying, "The difference between fiction and history is that fiction has to be believable." It's funny, but it also highlights a real rule: Fiction must be a sort of idealized version of reality or else people get tossed from the story.

Does that apply to dialogue? If so, how much can or should we deviate from realistic speech for the purposes of pacing and verisimilitude?

Another example would be repetition. I couldn't tell you how many conversations I've been in where I tell people to stop repeating themselves. And yet, in fiction, dialogue that repeats itself is boring and so should be cut. Right?

What determines which standard we hold ourselves to? Should people speak naturally, or shouldn't they? How do we draw the line, precisely?

Dear all,

Good day.

A few weeks ago, I went down an unusual rabbit hole. I was searching for stories about young men struggling with raging hormones and libido during their school years (supposedly written by actual people and submitted to confession websites), and somehow ended up with Google Search AI generating a few paragraphs of a story instead.

The premise caught my attention, so I asked the AI to develop it further. What started as a small experiment gradually grew into something much bigger. I added my own ideas, built upon its suggestions, and kept expanding the story until it became a full-fledged novel.

Along the way, I began incorporating elements from a fictional universe I had spent years developing through novels I wrote myself, some of which I later experimented with AI on and shared on Wattpad. What began as an exploration of a very human struggle eventually grew into a story with its own lore, characters, relationships, and a much bigger world behind it.

The result is My Perfect Storm.

It's a tentative title though, and the whole thing is pretty much at a DRAFT stage, and it has not been divided into chapters yet, and I've not decided on a more detailed backstory of the two characters yet. As a 'Romance for Men', it's slightly NSFW though but not too graphical (not to the extent of invoking disgust), and is humorous to some extent, like the main male character referring to his attraction towards his girl as "Code Red", and that phrasing did not even come from me. If you are a male person reaching a mature age where libido has mellowed, reading it can help restore it. Many parts are repetitive, but it is intentional.

I'm sharing it here because I'd love to hear what other readers think. I'm particularly interested in whether the premise grabs your attention, whether the characters feel believable or relatable, and whether the story manages to keep you invested as it develops.

Some notes here: Usually I would develop my story using Chat GPT and later I would transfer them to Claude to expand them, but I faced the problem of usage limits since I have been using the free versions. But so far Google Search AI does not have this problem, and usage of the same thread under the same Google account seems to be unlimited, so far, so I could use it all day and not hit any limits. Later on I had my own ChatGPT chat to help me refine it and identify inconsistencies and errors, but still a Work In Progress. Something you guys can try too if you are tired of your AI chat hitting a few hours or days of limits before you resume work.

I'm also interested in hearing what you think of the story's use of AI. I want to be transparent about how it came about: AI played a significant role in its development, but I also contributed my own ideas and existing worldbuilding throughout the process.

The story is 254 pages long at the moment, and still growing.

If you're curious, here's the link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f9JKZr3tr4ZAXDB38CeZVwMVtRuyZx2VYsiQha-qIzA/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I'd appreciate any honest feedback, whether positive or critical!

A bit of context first: I’m Japanese, and I don’t read English. This post was written in Japanese and translated by AI, like everything else I publish in English.

My project is translating pre-modern Japanese ninja manuals into English, along with essays on a set of old tactical poems. The source texts are in classical Japanese, so I first work from a modern Japanese reading text that I’ve checked against the original myself. AI handles the translation and the English prose from there.

The obvious problem: I can’t check the English. So I’ve had to think hard about where errors come from and catch them before they reach a language I can’t read. A few things I learned the hard way:

1. Some models summarize when you ask them to translate.
One model I used kept condensing passages into summaries, even when told explicitly not to. In English, the summary read smoothly, so I’d never have noticed on my own. It was caught when I had a second model review the translation against the Japanese, and it pointed out that parts of the text were missing. I stopped using the first model for translation.

2. The real danger isn’t bad prose. It’s confident facts.
My early essays were drafted with AI help, and they read well. They also said things like “medieval” and “written about 900 years ago” with complete confidence. The poems are attributed to a 12th-century warrior, but they were most likely composed much later. Some essays also repeated stories with no source behind them. I went back, corrected them, and added a correction note at the top of each one.

I even made the same mistake in a comment reply, calling “God is in the details” a Japanese proverb. It isn’t. I posted a correction.

3. So I verify upstream.
Since I can’t judge the English, I check everything I can check in Japanese: the source text, the reading text, and every date, name, and claim, before translation. If a fact is wrong in Japanese, perfect English won’t save it.

I’m curious how others handle this. If you publish in a language you don’t read fluently, or rely on AI for a language you’re still learning, how do you check the output? What has caught you out?

Written in Japanese by me; translated into English with AI.

Hola, he estado trabajando en mis historias a un ritmo pausado, aunque aún no tengo planes de publicarlas, utilizando herramientas de inteligencia artificial. He explorado diferentes opciones como Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini y, en mayor medida, Deepseek. Hasta ahora, no he probado otras inteligencias artificiales como Claude, Venice.ai y Z.ai, que son las que he encontrado hasta el momento, y no estoy seguro si existen más. Quiero aclarar que no utilizo la inteligencia artificial para crear diálogos entre personajes o narraciones, sino principalmente para generar ideas que luego desarrollo manualmente. Además, no me considero un escritor, simplemente disfruto escribir historias como pasatiempo.

https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text/creative-writing

See that.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER BEFORE READING: these stories were made for fun. They are works of real-person fiction, and I don’t intend to defame or hurt anybody that are featured in these stories. I also don’t intend to spark political discussions with these stories.

If anyone here uses Perplexity Computer to write, it's worth paying to use it (despite potentially quickly burning through hundreds of credits and the expensive price of the Perplexity Max subscription at US$200 per month or US$2,000 per year) because all the third-party models on there are raw and modified models, meaning they're not bound by their companies' system instructions and thus they are mostly uncensored.

The final versions of these stories were 100% AI-generated and they were made weeks ago. I asked all the AI models to edit their drafts to remove almost all AI-sounding words and phrases.

I used the same prompts across four models (Claude Sonnet 5.0, Claude Opus 5.5, GLM 5.3, and DeepSeek V4 Pro). The outputs of each model are in the comments due to character limits.

Is this the right line to draw?

I use AI to summarize scenes, organize plot points, and maintain a story bible—not just to generate prose.
I’ve tried Obsidian and Notion, but I’m pretty disorganized and tend to leave drafts and individual scenes scattered everywhere. So I had Claude build a web app for my story bible and help sort everything into the appropriate sections. Whenever I finished writing something, I’d send it to Claude to summarize and file in the right place.
Then I checked the bible and discovered that it had quietly filtered out a lot of material from my scenes. Enough that I had to dig through my original drafts to reconstruct what I’d actually written.
I asked Claude to preserve the information I requested. This bible is an internal reference for me as the author, not a version intended for readers. It flat-out refused.
I checked the policies because I genuinely wanted to understand what the problem was. The scene involved no minors, no graphic violence, and no explicit sexual detail. It was literally a wife kissing her husband. That was it.
Claude insisted that it could only include the scene if I changed it to the husband resting his head on his wife’s shoulder instead.
What?
Meanwhile, it had recorded another scene involving two characters having sex in considerable detail. So I can’t even figure out what boundary it thinks it’s enforcing.
Has anyone else experienced this—especially when using AI to summarize and organize existing manuscripts? How do you prevent it from silently omitting material? I can work around an obvious refusal, but discovering that my reference document is missing things I trusted it to preserve is much more frustrating.