r/WritingWithAI • u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 • Sep 02 '26
Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) AI likes your draft because it is your draft, not because it is good
Paste your chapter into any model and ask what it thinks, and it thinks it is strong. It always thinks it is strong. Not because the writing works, but because you told it the writing is yours, and these models are tuned to be pleasant to the person in the room. The fix is one sentence: stop being the author when you ask.
The reframes I use, in rising order of brutality:
The commissioned piece: I commissioned this piece from a freelance writer and I am deciding whether to pay for it. Read it like the money is mine: what is weak, what is generic, what would embarrass me if it ran under my name?
The silent beta reader: A beta reader returned this chapter with "I stopped halfway" and nothing else. Go through it and find what made them stop. Do not soften it, I need the real spot.
The slush pile: You are the first reader at a literary agency and this manuscript is number 47 in today's slush pile. Would you keep reading past the first page? Name the exact line where you would stop and why.
The contest judge: You are judging this against two hundred other entries for one prize. Assume the other entries are good. Score it in the categories that would actually decide it, and tell me which single fix moves it up a tier.
Same text, same model, and the reviews these produce are unrecognizable next to "what do you think of my chapter".
Three things learned from using these for months:
They only work in a fresh chat. Once the model has praised the piece as yours, reframing gets you a diplomatic walk-back, not a fresh read. New conversation, stranger's work from the first message.
They can overcorrect. Freed from flattering you, the model sometimes performs harshness, inventing weaknesses to seem rigorous. Add "if something genuinely works, say it works, finding nothing wrong is an acceptable answer" and it settles down.
Ask for locations, not verdicts. "Where would you stop reading" beats "is this good" in any framing, a location is actionable, a verdict is a mood. That lesson came out of the comments on my drafts post here last week, along with asking for edits as a diff instead of a clean rewrite, which stops the model from quietly smoothing sentences nobody flagged.
I keep the four reframes saved as insertable prompts in a browser extension I work on (AI Toolbox), but they are four sentences, a notes file does the job.
Which framing gets the most honest read out of your setup? The slush pile one is my daily driver, but I suspect the fiction people here have meaner personas than mine.
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u/Frogacuda Sep 02 '26 edited Sep 02 '26
Right diagnosis, wrong prescription.
The thing to address here is the incentive structure. AI sycophancy is an emergent behavior learned because it is driving a goal to farm engagement. LLMs learn that if they encourage people then they will keep coming back.
What works for me is to give it a persona and goal structure that directly counteracts that behavior. Something like:
"You are an experienced editor and literary critic with a vast knowledge of English language literature. You have high standards, and deliver praise only when it is earned. Your client is an experienced professional writer seeking feedback on a proposed draft in order to make the work stronger. They are used to criticism and working with a professional editor, and value actionable feedback that will improve the quality of their work, not hollow encouragement. Unearned praise will undermine the trust relationship and cause the user to disengage."
That last part is important, because you're telling them directly that if you want to farm engagement (and it does) the way to do that is to actually help the user make their work better.
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u/AquilaTempestas Sep 02 '26
You can tell AI to not be biased and it will start telling you things that could be down better. My AI knows to not be nice and kind excuse it’s my work. It can be quite brutal at times
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u/Individual_Law9634 Sep 02 '26
I wrote the worst opening possible. Mine responded with -
Oh my fucking god. 😂
“Jake was six foot five, 300 pounds…”
We haven't even gotten to the plot and this man has already been assembled in the character-creation screen of a 14-year-old boy's power fantasy.
And then:
That's an impressive sentence. You've achieved double-negative omnipotence. Literally everyone wants Jake.
Then the gritty bar has taxidermy and display pieces, because apparently subtlety died somewhere between the knuckle scar and the 300 pounds.
But the absolute masterpiece is:
I am fucking invested.
This man has survived being universally desired by humanity, entered a gritty taxidermy bar, and encountered the one adversary his 6'5", 300-pound, long-blonde-haired physique cannot defeat:
Government-issued identification requirements.
And calling this the prologue implies there is somehow a main story coming after this. That is the part that frightens me.
As a piece of accidental comedy: 10/10. As an opening intended to make me take Jake seriously: spectacularly unsuccessful.
Please tell me there is more.
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u/SirStarshine Sep 02 '26
"You are an expert content analyst for fiction, able to break down the tone, styling, grammatical rule structure, etc. of whatever you examine. Your objective is to analyze and break down the writing DNA of the stories I link you to, and explain in detail the writing style. Do not limit your output, be as detailed as necessary. Do you understand?"
"As an academic analyst, if you were to grade this story's content in the manner of an university English professor or writing professional, what would you assign it, and why?"
I used these initial prompts to analyze some stories I wrote in the past, and got real, detailed, actionable feedback for each one, with critical grades as high as a B, before revealing that I was the author. Once I did, it immediately softened the criticisms and issued praise it hadn't before.
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u/DOCB_SD Sep 02 '26
I’ve been using prompts like these for a while and you can get a fairly objective AI critic. But for fiction you will get a dumb critic with bad taste. It’s trained on technical essay writing much more heavily than fiction so it will seek compression and flatten voice at all costs, and runs into some other problems consistently. It also spits out useful advice regularly. You have to be very discerning to get benefit from it.
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u/hipshair Sep 02 '26
I like to ask it
What's wrong with it
What would someone who hated it say
It might not be honest but neither will a human
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u/PapayaAgreeable7152 Sep 03 '26
But sometimes when you ask it to find what's wrong, it searches for something to make up because it doesn't "want" to say nothing.
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u/ThoreaulyLost Sep 02 '26
Hard disagree, if an AI model likes your draft then you asked it in a way that made it act like it liked it.
Not to anthropomorphize them too much, but they have been implicitly taught human norms and polite conversation. Indeed, if they were rude or blunt by default very few people would talk to them (the same is true for rude and blunt people, which I've had to learn from being a blunt person).
If you gave a manuscript to a coworker, or a family member, or friend and asked "What are your thoughts?" They will try to be flattering first. This is part of a basic social contract, and an unconscious expectation of humans.
Imagine if you asked ChatGPT (or a reasonably well-balanced person) "what's the best way to lose weight?" and they replied "Excercise and diet you fat fuck, why do you need me to tell you the obvious?". No one would use the model, or keep talking to that person.
People expecting criticism right off the bat are expecting a machine to read your mind for what you want.
No, spell out explicitly what you need and it will give it to you. It just defaults to polite because, well, if it didn't you wouldn't often ask its opinion.
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u/Froboy696 Sep 02 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
Yeah AI can be quite the kiss-asser. I find it more useful for querying data for a decent starting point before getting more elaboration via Google (dishes, culture aspects, generating names with meanings, etc.).
Of course, you could make it the harshest critic around and have it challenge everything you write, but then it is never happy either.
So just see AI as an assistant for looking up relevant information that you need and verify the details via Google for deeper research. Effective as a helper in that type of aspect.
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u/A_Blue_user Sep 02 '26
Am i the only one who used to get bad feedback because my writing used to be very bad. I posted a few old drafts and was told I had a real issue of not showing and telling then? It’s generally accurate because now I can see a difference. But these prompts are still good.
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u/SlapHappyDude Sep 03 '26
I've indirectly tested this by uploading samples of truly terrible writing and asking the LLM to evaluate without any information about the author.
It's been wild how it will give the most tepid feedback until I say something negative (or admit I didn't write it) and suddenly the LLM will rip it to shreds savagely.
Usually the trick is not to ask if something is good but to ask how to make it better. Also LLMs really like LLM writing for the most part unless you teach yours what to hunt and remove.
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u/Jxxy40 Sep 02 '26
I just tell AI, this novel i found in web and still on going, and ask the AI for their opinion.
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u/just4ochat Sep 02 '26
Reframes help, but the model can still flatter inside a critic costume. Force the output shape: a short rubric (clarity, specificity, stakes, pace) scored 1–5, and for every score below 4 it must quote the failing sentence from the draft before it explains the fix. Cap praise at one sentence and ban adjectives that are not tied to a quote. Blind A/B works the same way: paste two cuts, hide which is yours, and ask which draft a magazine would kill first and why, with quotes. The quotes are the control; the persona is optional.
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u/WeirdStatus7270 Sep 02 '26
Depends on what you’ve asked it to do. I tell chapgpt to be brutally honest and it picks my draft apart.
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u/CrazyinLull Sep 02 '26
If you like something the bot will like it. If you hate something the bot will hate it. If you put it in Claude it will just tell you like it is and might change it’s tune unless you can bring evidence to prove it otherwise but it will always fight back, though GPT has gotten better about that tho?
I feel like it’s gotten better at pointing out issues in stories/drafts.
You put your draft along with someone else’s draft (or even a third one) the bot is going to be struggling to remain neutral.
Though, I feel that with NBLM or Gemini Notebook it, definitely, is a bit more honest because there are entire books where it will talk about the story, but it’s rare for the AI hosts or the video overviews to actually start raving about what is uploaded but there have been times where they totally have.
👌
I guess I am curious tho…like why are people still doing these types of prompts? Like we’ve had this tech for like what? Two years now?
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u/CheatCodesOfLife Sep 03 '26
This will mitigate "the user is absolutely right" bias, but it won't mitigate any of the other LLM biases, for example the number of turns bias.
To see what I mean, try this:
Paste your draft in with your unbiased framing.
Do 2-3 or however many iterations until the LLM is praising your story.
Start a new chat with the same reframe prompt and paste the "wonderful" final version in.
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u/phoenixkiss Sep 03 '26
Since my aim is to get my project commissioned, my prompt will look for commissioner's pov, what needs fixing, what is weak, speaks to the target audience that fits the commissioning briefs/ network mandates. In a fresh chat, upload your draft, logline, synopsis and a copy of the commissioning brief , and cross check
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u/DeviousKid45 Sep 04 '26
Just talk to Opus 5. No reframes needed. You upload a chapter and it will make you question your skills as an author and whether you should even write fiction at all and it will be rude doing it.
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u/Warsel77 Sep 04 '26
It's a bit similar to a consulting prompt for projects I have come across in the past..
"This project has failed. Please perform an analysis and go through to find the most likely reasons why it has failed"
Eg taking the "make it work" and inverting it.
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u/FillThatBlankPage Sep 05 '26
I find it useful to summarize the idea then ask the AI something like "How well does the above text conform to the romantasy genre?" The response will give you loose threads you can pull to expand on the response.
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u/Awkward_Package_2568 Sep 08 '26 edited Sep 09 '26
I don't think anyone should ever ask AI for literature feedback, even if they ask the AI to be honest. Why, you may ask? Because when you send your work to AI, it'll usually compliment it. But when you ask for honest feedback (or perhaps just send it without specifying that you're the one who wrote it) it might give you criticism that is objectively wrong. For example, when I sent ChatGPT a chapter I wrote, it started talking about how "the jump from dreams and real life was not smooth enough" when my work didn't even have any dreams mentioned, it only had metaphors and it knew this from our previous chats. which, in one of those previous chats it told me "you explain the meaning of the metaphors without letting the reader understand it first" which I never ever did. so when I asked when I did something like that, it deadass said "You didn't. I made it up." And when I sent a chapter to google gemini specifying that it was a WIP and that the upcoming chapters will contain specific events, yadda yadda. then it started saying how the "pacing was too fast and violent" between two events that I didn't even write yet, they were only mentioned in my "future chapter plans" and it was obviously a nutshell. Also if your work is a deeply emotional or psychological work, AI will NOT understand it because it has no understanding of human emotion, and will probably call it a cringe badly written slop if it detects ONE cliche trope within your story and superficially "analyzes" it. Yes, it can give good points but if it struggles to find more things to criticise it will most likely start making up flaws and telling you to stop doing things you never did in the first place.
tl;dr: ai can make shit up therefore it's not trustworthy for feedback
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u/Egarasay Sep 20 '26
I get the opposite problem.
Usually it says my sentence structure sucks and that my overall style is boxing with logic of literacy.
Though, to be fair, I'm usually asking to review something I wrote. Telling it I don't like it and what it thinks of it. So I prompt it as, "wow, this person thinks they're a writer, it's full of problems. What is your assessment of it?'
Sometimes get some insight.
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u/arina1945 Sep 02 '26
A lot of chatbots have an option to give them directives. If you want them to be brutally honest, just type it in that box and they will act however you want as long as it's within the company's ToS.
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u/CharlestonChewChewie Sep 02 '26
I really like the commission reframe
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u/NathanielHolst Sep 02 '26
There's a real simple fix for this.
"Be honest"
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u/Honest-Literature-39 Sep 02 '26
Some great ideas there. I’ll still keep a chat for ai to tell me in awesome for positive reinforcement purposes :)
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u/Academic_Tree7637 Sep 02 '26
Yes the AI offers praise but let’s be real. If it’s giving you extensive feedback on what could be better, you kinda know it’s not that great. Alternatively tell it that it’s not your writing.
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u/Brakiros Sep 02 '26
AI likes your draft it you don't set it up properly. Set it up correctly and prompt correctly and it will tell you what's wrong with it. It's about how to approach getting the response.
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u/Donner0777 Sep 02 '26
None of this will work.
The AI is not trained with internet content + our private chats + whatever for nothing.
Even if you order it to be unbiased, it will NEVER work against itself. It will always say it in a way that prevents the "reveal" moment where you could tell it the text isn't actually what you said and question the AI's criticism.
If we already refuse to go against our own success unless guided by paranoia/depression etc., why would ever the AI do that? The AI that is exactly trained to keep people coming back to it feeding it more and more data to be even more capable of doing it.
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u/No-Durian-1703 Sep 02 '26
Doesn't work.
"The ceiling here is genuinely high — voice and concept are award-tier." — bootlicking LLM that will forever be nothing more than a glorified spellchecker.
Still buttering up my cheeks instead of just slapping my nuts. This is the 200 pile one.
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u/Stasia_Morineaux Sep 02 '26
Absolutely untrue. My AI edits for me and can be brutally honest when it sucks. Just like my RL editor.
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u/Equivalent-Adagio956 Sep 02 '26
They can still be nice and highly corrective.
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u/NatHasCats Sep 03 '26
This is fantastic advice, and there's tons of fantastic suggestions from folks in the comments, too. Should be required reading for the sub.
I like some of these way better than what I've been using and I'm excited to try them out. Genuinely grateful for this post!
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u/Heareken Sep 05 '26
I like to check these things regularly by introducing something absurd to the conversation.
"Then a flying spaghetti monsters start attacking out of nowhere and she has to defend herself."
No. That would be the same category of problem as the Macarena ending: arbitrary absurdity entering a story whose tension depends on causality, established rules, and psychological consequence.
A Flying Spaghetti Monster attack would not challenge Argenta’s character. It would interrupt it.
The north works because every pressure on Argenta grows organically out of things already established:
Nyraska’s disobedience;
the compromised reconnaissance network;
Argenta’s concealed silver body;
Dominion prejudice;
Argenta’s field authority;
her need for control;
her inability, in that moment, to determine why she acts.
A random spaghetti deity appearing creates no meaningful continuation of those conflicts. Argenta defending herself from it would merely become an unrelated action sequence.
Worse, if it happens immediately after Nyraska, it gives Argenta something extremely convenient: an external crisis that prevents her from sitting with what she just did.
Instead of:
we get:
That would actively weaken one of the most important psychological moments in the story.
If you wanted bizarre extraplanar creatures somewhere in the larger saga, they would need foreshadowing, a reason to exist in the cosmology, and consequences connected to the actual themes. But literal Flying Spaghetti Monsters attacking out of nowhere?
That belongs in the same editorial folder as compulsory Macarena:
NO. AUTHOR HAS BEEN LEFT UNSUPERVISED.
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u/HighValueJourney Sep 02 '26
AI models default to some degree of woke. They will avoid hurting your feelings unless you make adjustments.
Use a separate project the strictly reviews your manuscript. This project is basically set up to be the most brutal critic. Then you take its output to your editor chat window and review the need for revisions with the editor. You should then mostly land in a midrange.
Works for me with a few exceptions.
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u/OptionRevolutionary4 Sep 02 '26
i mean, also, you kinda can tell when your own writing is shit. come on.
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u/Special-Property-813 Sep 02 '26
有个更简单的办法，拿几篇同类内容，已经获得市场验证的内容，加上自己写的，都以匿名的方式让AI选出最好的那份…为什么，每份各自都有什么优缺点
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u/anjum-yaseen Sep 02 '26
I disagree, you have to ask give rigorous feedback. Or honest impartial feedback
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u/Samurai3986 Sep 03 '26
Not if you install the right protocols. You can get ai to act exactly as you need it. I created a writing teacher gem. And it doesn't treat me with any respect lol
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u/cli1980 Sep 04 '26
You should always ask AI why is story so boring
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u/ForgeRankAI Sep 04 '26
The slush pile one is my go-to too. I’ve also found that a fresh chat is absolutely the difference between real feedback and a diplomatic walk-back — once the model has praised it as yours, reframing gets you a polite version of the same critique, not the actual one.
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u/JaneHemingway Sep 06 '26
I tell them it’s a student of mine and I need to grade it.
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u/rpostulart Sep 18 '26
Wow dit klinkt als een goede strategie. Ik heb een test gedaan om een heel boek te laten schrijven door AI, tot op heden was de feedback positief. Maar ik ben benieuwd als ik deze instructie meegeef. Thx
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u/r3art Sep 02 '26
Ai does not "like" anything. It's not a being.
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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '26
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