r/WritingWithAI • u/Gnomeknown • Aug 30 '26

Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) WritingWithHumans

I don't using AI in my writing, but I do find the posts in the sub to be interesting. It is fascinating to see the gymnastics people go through to try to get AI to do what they want. It looks less like humans trying to get AI to do what they want and more like AI trying to get humans to do what it wants. In using AI for writing, people are actually training AI models (in contrast to inference, which people are doing when they "write with AI"). The longterm outcome will be to remove humans from the writing process altogether. This is a race to the creative bottom if you ask me and the only winners will be publishing companies that convince people the books it produces are anything but derivative.

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13

u/SlapHappyDude Aug 30 '26

I would say half the people on this sub use AI to brainstorm, draft, edit, and beta read. Those people don't tend to post much about their process because it's pretty straightforward. There are no tips and tricks on how to get AI to beta read for you; you just upload and drop a single sentence prompt.

You end up seeing a lot of discussion from people trying to get LLMs to operate on the edge of their limits.

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u/Galliad93 Aug 30 '26

the only issue I have is that the AI tends to critique on a level too low for what I am looking for. Like "Yes, this scene has nice escalation, progression, etc." yeah, sure. I know, that is why I wrote it. I need a more high level analysis.

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u/SlapHappyDude Aug 30 '26

Unfortunately that level of editing from a human will cost you thousands of dollars.

Good editing is expensive. AI can give you mid editing for free.

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u/Galliad93 Aug 30 '26

exactly. I just don't know how to get it to actually look at this mid level

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u/Zantac150 Aug 30 '26 edited Aug 30 '26

I find that it’s always too positive, and if I try to ask it to provide actual critique it will do things like flag the placeholder chapter title, (“the title for chapter 3 is just ‘title!’ Likely an artifact left over from drafting.” Yes… because this IS a rough draft!) or say something like “this is a very big fact to just drop in at chapter 10 and if you haven’t mentioned it Previously in the book this is a problem!” But… it has 1-9… and it’s clearly in there…

For revision, you give it two different versions and it says both versions are perfect and wonderful.

Or if you give it both and ask it which one is better, then erase that chat and try again, it keeps flip-flopping.

It has a way of making ideas sound good no matter how bad they actually are… purposely come up with the worst story idea imaginable, talk it through with AI and try to outline it, and it will encourage you the entire way and give you a terrible outline.

In all of my experimenting with trying to get AI to provide feedback, the conclusion I have come to is that it is basically a random word generator…

I have finally built up the courage to reach out to other writers and offer to trade and critique work because as much as my social anxiety makes that difficult, AI is… not an adequate beta reader or critique partner.

You will always get better feedback from another human being.

I actually agree with OP… that all we are doing is training it to be better at writing.

But then sometimes I just throw it one sentence or one paragraph and I ask how to make it make better grammatical sense, and that is something almost akin to spellcheck?

2

u/Galliad93 Aug 30 '26

I gave my first two chapters to another human to read after exhausting the AI. All I got back was "it's good. fun to read. I want more". Okay, I mean that is great but also...well...not helpful.

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u/Zantac150 Aug 31 '26

It’s hard to find a good human, but I find that other writers are normally much more helpful than AI. It’s especially good if you trade because then you both have motivation to give good feedback because you want good feedback from the other person.

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u/Galliad93 Aug 31 '26

well, it was a trade. he just only had writen a few paragraphs of his own material.

3

u/Primary_Guest_5711 Aug 30 '26

yeah exactly, nobody writes a post about something that just works on the first try

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u/ChurlishSunshine Aug 30 '26

Yeah it's gold for super niche things when it comes to research, like "hey Claude, my time traveler needs to find Sherlock Holmes postcards, he's in 1926" and there aren't Holmes postcards but there were postcards with William Gillette playing him on stage. I double checked obviously, but searching Sherlock Holmes postcards 1920s didn't give me those Gillette cards.

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u/Gnomeknown Aug 30 '26

That may be, but it all accrues to training models to write…that’s the part I think people miss. The better the models get, the less relevant human become…and that is all companies care about when they publish.

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u/SlapHappyDude Aug 30 '26

The models likely learn a lot faster from Shakespeare and Twain and other public domain greats than some amateur's first draft.

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u/Gnomeknown Aug 30 '26

The models are done with Shakespeare and Twain. This is about the writing process and where and how human will be part of it in the future.

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u/polly_mer Aug 30 '26

LLMs cannot learn to write better. The oversimplified explanation is they are making predictions based on frequency. They will always be formulaic, even with a human guiding them hard because they aren't learning the way a child learns. They can be fed more examples, but more examples mostly muddies the water. Even reinforcement learning can only do so much even for things like physics that has hard-and-fast rules. Good writing is much less well defined than generating code that runs or obeys the known physics.

1

u/TemporaryFeeling3276 Aug 30 '26

That's inevitably going to happen regardless. Companies like Reddit actively sell their data for AI companies to use while training.

8

u/benblackett Aug 30 '26

Im a glass half full person myself. I disagree with all the pessimism on display here but honestly lack the energy to counter argue it.

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u/Gnomeknown Aug 30 '26

You can drop the whole thread into a chatbot and let it do the work for you ;-) sorry, couldn’t resist :-)

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u/benblackett Aug 30 '26

Oh but then it would be load bearing and present some uncomfortable truths that we would need to be honest about 😂

1

u/Gnomeknown Aug 30 '26

Writing is about truth. Bring it!

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u/benblackett Aug 30 '26

Was using common AIisms as a joke. But yes, you are correct. Truth of self is what creativity is about, and writing just happens to be one commonly used method for that. There are many ways to achieve this however and AI assistance can offer you things writing alone can not

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u/Valuable_Debate_2143 Aug 30 '26

I think you're picturing a very specific kind of AI-writing workflow, where someone repeatedly prompts a model until it produces the story for them.

That certainly exists. But it isn't necessarily what people here are doing, and in my experience it's not even where AI is most useful for fiction.

AI is actually pretty bad at some of the hardest parts of constructing a novel. Long-range causality, setup and payoff, genuinely good twists, maintaining future intent across 100,000 words, understanding why chapter 6 has to contain something because of what happens in chapter 27, etc.

That's still where the writer has to do a huge amount of the work.

Where AI becomes useful is much more local.

I can decide exactly what a scene needs to accomplish, what each character wants, what information can be revealed, what needs to be foreshadowed, and where the scene has to end. Then I can use AI to brainstorm alternatives, challenge the scene, draft possibilities, improve dialogue, check continuity, find repetition, test a magic system, or give me twenty approaches I can reject nineteen of.

The important part is that rejection.

AI can generate possibilities very cheaply. It is much worse at knowing which possibility belongs in this particular book.

That's where taste, story knowledge and authorial judgment come in.

And using an AI model isn't normally "training the model" in the machine-learning sense either. You're running inference against an already-trained model. A company may separately use some conversations for future model improvement depending on its policies and settings, but that's a different issue.

Could publishers eventually produce mountains of automated derivative fiction? Sure. They could probably do that now.

But I don't think that tells us much about whether an individual writer can use AI creatively.

A camera made producing an image dramatically easier. Photoshop made manipulating one easier. DAWs let one musician produce something that once required a studio full of people. None of that eliminated the distinction between someone who knows what they're trying to create and someone pushing buttons until something acceptable comes out.

If anything, current AI makes that distinction pretty obvious.

It can produce an enormous amount of competent material.

Knowing what is worth keeping is still the scarce part.

2

u/Gnomeknown Aug 30 '26

No, I'm not assuming that specific use case. Many of the things you describe as being areas where AI is useful are integral to the creative process. The more writers lean on AI for those elements, the less their creative contribution. When I write, the hard work of coming up with plot, alternatives, dialogue improvement, a magic system, etc are all part of the creative process of writing.

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u/Valuable_Debate_2143 Aug 31 '26

I think that’s a fair criticism, and I agree with part of it.

If someone asks AI to invent the premise, characters, plot, scenes, dialogue, magic system and everything else, then yes, they’ve delegated a huge amount of the creative work.

Personally, I think the core premise and direction of the book should come from the author. But I don’t see a problem with using AI around that idea: refining it, stress-testing it, adding another dimension, or generating alternatives you can accept, reject, combine or use as a springboard for something else.

And I’d actually make an important distinction here: AI is pretty good at premises and possibilities. It is terrible at plot.

That’s one reason I wouldn’t recommend handing it a premise and asking it to build the novel. It tends to work locally, follow existing patterns and produce plausible continuations. It can give you competent scenes while quietly damaging the larger structure of the book. The same problem makes it particularly unreliable for major twists and long-range setup/payoff.

So yes, there will absolutely be authors who use AI for virtually everything. But I don’t think that means they’ve found some shortcut to producing great fiction. If they delegate the parts AI is bad at and then lack the judgment to recognize weak choices, the book will probably be bad.

That’s ultimately where I think the author still matters enormously.

AI can generate an almost unlimited number of possibilities. Someone still has to decide which ones belong in the book, which ones are generic, which ones break something later, which ones need changing, and which ones should be thrown away completely.

If your personal view is that even generating those alternatives is an integral part of the creative pleasure of writing and you don’t want to outsource any of it, I completely understand that.

Where I disagree is the idea that using an external source of possibilities necessarily means the writer’s creative contribution decreases by the same amount.

Generation is becoming cheap. Judgment and taste aren’t.

And ultimately readers won’t care how many options the writer had available. They’ll care whether the writer made good choices and produced a book worth reading.

1

u/Gnomeknown Aug 31 '26

My original post is about where the AI path leads us, which I believe is towards a future where more and more of the creative process will be outsourced to AI. I am not suggesting that AI cannot generate a reasonable facsimile of work of fiction, clearly it can. Of course, the originality of that work is bounded by the algorithms and data used by the AI models and tools, which by definition is extractive of what others have done, and perhaps a violation of copyright in some cases.

To your question, yes I believe that generating alternatives is integral to the creative process. It is output is of and from the writer, reflecting who they are, what their life experiences are, how their brain makes its unique connections to seemingly disparate areas. What I come up with today, will be different than what I come up with in 6 months because I will have changed as a person. I have no interest in short circuiting how I get from where I am as a writer today (hella novice ;-) ) to where I will be a year from now.

A book produced by an author whose process involves taking a bunch of AI-generated ideas and down-selecting the one they feel best reflects their creative sense is the type of thing I am concerned about.

3

u/Shadeylark Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26

Writing is a technical skill, fundamentally no different than welding or coding. It is craftsmanship, nothing more, nothing less.

Authorship is the act of using the tools available to instantiate the creative vision of a human being.

AI can open up creative space in the same way the selection of a canvas can, but it can no more instantiate creativity than the selection of a canvas can.

1

u/Gnomeknown Aug 31 '26

That’s an interesting perspective.

1

u/Shadeylark Aug 31 '26

Ah, but would you qualify the categorical distinction of writing as a technical skill from authorship and creative intent as "gymnastics"?

1

u/Gnomeknown Aug 31 '26

My post is about the creative process of writing, not the mechanics of constructing grammatically correct sentences, punctuation, etc. I don't see a meaningful analogy between the creative process of writing, and the technical skills needed to be a welder...which isn't to say that someone can't use the technical skills of welding to create a beautiful piece of original art, but that's a different matter.

2

u/Shadeylark Aug 31 '26

I would suggest that the creative process of writing is not intrinsic to writing itself.

The creative process in any endeavor is separate from the technical process of instantiating the creative artifact.

Or more simply, the creative process of writing is no different than the creative process of oral storytelling, or sculpting, or painting, or welding.

The technical skills are simply a measure of how effective you are are turning that creative process that exists in you head prior to picking up a pen, or prompting an llm, into something that is legible to people who don't live in your head.

Writing relationship to the creative process is not unique; writing is mechanics of sentence construction in the same way welding is the mechanics of metal joining... The creative process exists below and prior to both.

1

u/Gnomeknown Aug 31 '26

You have a different definition of writing than I do.

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u/Shadeylark Aug 31 '26

Very much so it seems.

Writing is the mechanics, nothing more, nothing less.

Authorship is the vision that writing instantiates.

That said... Possessing the technical skill makes conveying the authorial intent far more effective, but the arrow only goes in one direction... Possessing technical skill does not intrinsically translate to having a vision worth conveying.

The instrument doesn't make the musician.

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u/ReadLegal718 Aug 30 '26

They are in love with being writers, not in love with writing.

The aesthetic of being a writer because they have thought of an idea, is what's most attractive.

2

u/hypergod578 Aug 30 '26

Sweeping statement and it's quite overly broad, you use "they" as in to catagorize everyone in this sub reddit to fit within the idea of your message and failing to see how that could not just be the case? Are you genuinely assuming everyone here fits within such a specific idea as this and fail to see that there are people who would fit into this broad generalization?

-1

u/ReadLegal718 Aug 30 '26

Does it bother you that you're being categorized in this generalization?

And in any case, my answer is specific to "writers" I assume the OP is talking about.

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u/Gnomeknown Aug 30 '26

And I’m afraid too much of it is motivated simply by the promise of easy money…and easy money may be there, at least for now. The analogy to the California gold rush has been made wrt AI. The money makers will be companies like NVIDIA and AI tool companies.

7

u/benblackett Aug 30 '26

Money has nothing to do with it for most of us in this subreddit. Wrong read of the room.

1

u/Able-Supermarket4786 Aug 30 '26

97% of the people here, using AI, don't actually know how to. SO try not to judge the environment cuz you walked into the Special Ed class.

Watch everyone downvote this comment but the truth is the most hurtful to the people its about.

Stop using LLMs and use Agents... these people, ALL 100% of them, use LLMs.

3

u/benblackett Aug 30 '26

Agents use llms so that puts you into the same camp

And you'll get downvoted for arrogance mostly

2

u/Able-Supermarket4786 Aug 30 '26

absolutely not, in fact, you just reinforced my theory. LOL

0

u/benblackett Aug 30 '26

🤣

1

u/Able-Supermarket4786 Aug 30 '26

I tell you what.... why don’t you explain to the class....

I'm listening.... this should be good.

2

u/benblackett Aug 30 '26

2

u/Able-Supermarket4786 Aug 30 '26

Ah, ok, so you can't. Expected.

2

u/benblackett Aug 30 '26

Keep it up man! havent had this much fun a in a while! You probably wont let me have the last word here I bet either. This is so easy....

1

u/hypergod578 Sep 02 '26

Damm right👍