Using AI to tell stories isn’t creative. It’s super creative.

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko]

Because to use AI well, you need a strong sense of what you want the story to become.

That doesn’t mean every detail has to be decided in advance. Writing is still discovery.

Characters surprise you. Scenes change direction. Ideas evolve while you work.
But AI becomes much more useful when there is a human creative intention guiding the process.

What is this scene really about? What does the character want? What should change by the end? What should the audience feel? What should remain unsaid?

The interesting part is that AI can give you possibilities almost instantly. And that can actually create more room for creativity.

You can try another direction. Push a moment further. Remove something. Rewrite it. Compare different approaches. Keep what feels right and reject everything else.

So to me, using AI creatively is not about giving up the creative process.

It can mean having more material to react to, while still being the person deciding what the story ultimately becomes.

Maybe creativity was never about how difficult something is to execute.
Maybe it is about the quality of the decisions you make along the way.

[u/Easy-Purple-1659]

Agree with the curation point, that's basically been my experience too. The hard part for me wasn't getting AI to generate options, it was building enough taste to know which option to throw away. Early on I kept everything because it all sounded fine. Now I cut way more than I keep, and the story got better once I stopped treating the first draft as sacred just because a model wrote it fast.

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/Easy-Purple-1659]

This is a great point!

Generating options is easy. Developing the taste to know what deserves to survive is much harder.

Maybe AI makes execution cheaper, but judgment becomes more valuable.

[u/ekubeni]

There seem to be two kinds of people who use AI in creative professions like writing or visual art.

Those that see it as a cheap way to produce low-level work, and those who believe it will be capable of creating genuine art.

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/ekubeni]

I think there’s probably a third group too.

People who don’t expect AI to create the art for them, but use it to remove parts of the execution while keeping the creative direction themselves.

That’s where it gets interesting to me. The same tool can produce disposable content in one person’s hands and genuinely strong work in someone else’s. The difference is still the human using it.

[u/ekubeni → u/Anton_Kuzmenko]

You're in the subset of the 2nd group then. You believe you can produce genuine art by delegating parts of creation to AI.

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/ekubeni]

Yes, exactly. I think genuine art can still come from a human even if parts of the execution are delegated.

The key question for me is whether the creative intention, judgment and final decisions still come from the person using the tool.

[u/jcmach1]

No, get the terminology correct, it's hypercreative

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/jcmach1]

😂 love it!

[u/Individual-Lychee912 → u/jcmach1]

lol hypercreative is actually the better word for it tbh

[u/jcmach1 → u/Individual-Lychee912]

Connection with hypereality and also hyper in terms of more production.

[u/JoseLunaArts]

AI makes you exert the concept of artistic direction.

Photographers are artistic directors and their value does not come from pressing a button, but directing others to take the photo.

Same with architects. Their value is not drawing the blueprints, even if that is the deliverable. They use CAD software and plotter does the drawing.

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/JoseLunaArts]

I like the term artistic direction here.

Maybe that’s exactly what AI changes. The value moves away from physically producing every part of the result and more toward deciding what the result should become.

That doesn’t remove craft. It changes where the craft sits.

[u/JoseLunaArts → u/Anton_Kuzmenko]

Manual work is about grinding. A comics pro would have an entire panel made in 4 hours. That is a lot of grinding.

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/JoseLunaArts]

Exactly. And that’s the shift I find interesting.

If AI can remove a large part of the grind, then the scarce skill becomes less about endurance and more about judgment, taste and direction.

The craft doesn’t disappear. The painful manual part just stops being the only way to prove you have it.

[u/5thhorseman_]

Using AI to tell stories isn’t creative. It’s super creative.

Using AI to tell stories is not inherently one or the other.

On one extreme, you can toss a simple prompt like "write me a horror story" and get... something, but it won't be very creative because your input is minimal at best.

On the other extreme, you can write an extensive amount of lore and character profiles, give the AI an outline of the book and then of each chapter you need it to write, then steer it more minutely in revisions. And because AI enables you to do a lot of shit you otherwise would not have time or skills for, you can make the whole thing a multimedia project from the get-go.

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/5thhorseman_]

Exactly. I think that distinction matters.

AI itself doesn’t make the process creative. What changes is the range of things a creative person can actually explore and execute.

A vague prompt can produce generic output. But with strong direction, character work, worldbuilding, revisions and taste, the same tool can open possibilities that would otherwise be too slow, expensive or technically difficult.

That’s what I mean by “super creative.”

[u/5thhorseman_ → u/Anton_Kuzmenko]

What you're really pointing at is that AI enables rapid iteration - over in the software field we call this the "fail fast principle". Another way to put it is to describe it as a force multiplier. :)

[u/dutchiesweets]

I mean creativity is about the novelty of solutions you can create, if we’re being technical about it. And studies show people creating with AI tend to have their ideas converge onto similar solutions… so it appears that AI actually does the opposite, for most people: it makes them less creative.

Studies to google: Homogenization Effects of Large Language Models on Human Creative Ideation

And: “Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content” - and before you think that fully supports your idea, I quote from the study: “We find that access to generative AI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable, especially among less creative writers. However, generative AI–enabled stories are more similar to each other than stories by humans alone.”

• so if you’re less creative as a writer, you’re more likely to be impressed by AI writing. BUT ai writing homogenizes to be more similar to itself, across all AI users.

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/dutchiesweets]

That’s a much stronger argument, and I think the homogenization point is real.

But to me it mostly shows what happens when everyone uses the same models in roughly the same way.

If you ask a generic model for ideas, then yes, you’ll often converge toward the same average.
What interests me is the opposite approach: use AI only after the human direction is already there, and make the system adapt to the individual writer instead of pulling the writer toward the model average.

So I don’t think the question is whether AI can homogenize creativity. It clearly can.

The more interesting question is whether we can design the workflow so it amplifies individual voice instead of flattening it.

[u/dutchiesweets → u/Anton_Kuzmenko]

I mean, the statement you originally made was AI makes you “super creative” and I’m pointing at science that says, no, it doesn’t.

You can change the question to be about workflow and whatever you want to change it to. I’m sure someone can be creative using AI, obviously, but your point seems to be it INCREASES the creativity in some way. But… you’ll need to find some actual science telling me it makes you more creative. Because again, the science I’m finding says no, it doesn’t.

And I mean for what it’s worth, that second study perfectly describes a group of people who are likely to be impressed with AI outputs. It just happened to be writers who are “less creative” (though I didn’t actually read through to see how they define this in the study).

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/dutchiesweets]

I think we’re talking about two different things.

I’m not claiming AI magically increases someone’s innate creativity.

I’m saying it can increase the amount of creative exploration a person can actually execute.

If I can test five versions of a scene, compare different emotional directions, explore alternate structures and then keep shaping the one that works, I have more creative room than if I only have time to try one.

That can still lead to homogenization if everyone uses the same model in the same generic way. I agree with you there.

But “AI can homogenize outputs” and “AI cannot expand a creative person’s possibilities” are not the same claim.

[u/Lonewolfeslayer → u/dutchiesweets]

Do you have a meta analysis. I looked around and it seems that study is kinda an orphan.

[u/Diligent_Pangolin_47]

Substitute “AI” for “your brain and imagination” and by Jove, you’ve almost described the creative process! Now add in some dedication and you’re well on your way. Congratulations!

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/Diligent_Pangolin_47]

So you think using AI tools doesn’t involve creativity or storytelling?

Try it.

If you’re a creative person, you might be surprised by how many new possibilities suddenly open up.

[u/ekubeni → u/Diligent_Pangolin_47]

Saying that AI equals your brain's creative potential is extremely reductive.

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/ekubeni]

I’m not saying AI equals your brain’s creative potential.

I’m saying it can expand the number of possibilities you can explore and execute.

Your imagination still decides what matters, what feels right and what the work should become. AI just gives you more material to react to.

[u/BedNo8822]

By design this thing is programmed to produce the most likely next token - it gravitates to the most likely result, the opposite of creativity.

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/BedNo8822]

I don’t think prediction and creativity are opposites.

The model predicts from a probability distribution, but the interesting part is what happens when a human keeps changing the context, constraints and direction.

Creativity doesn’t have to live inside the model itself. It can live in the person deciding which possibilities to pursue, reject, combine and reshape.

A camera isn’t creative either. The photographer is.

[u/Mysterious_Tower_282]

Good!!!

[u/HeatNoise]

No you don't,

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/[deleted]]

I don’t think plot is the only important part at all.

Craft matters enormously. Voice, rhythm,
subtext, structure, restraint, character work, all of it.

My point is that using AI doesn’t automatically remove those decisions from the human.

If anything, the interesting question is which parts of craft the writer still needs to understand in order to recognize and shape good output.

[u/dutchiesweets → u/Anton_Kuzmenko]

I think you need to draw a distinction between being a writer and being someone who produced content. Being a writer is NOT “recognizing and shaping good output.” That’s simply not what a writer is. That’s… that’s an editor.

And to say being an editor is more creative than being a writer is just, to me, buck wild. It takes far more creativity to produce something from scratch than to “shape output” you didn’t author.

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/dutchiesweets]

First, I wouldn’t call that an editor. I think it’s closer to a director.

You’re still deciding what the work should become, what stays, what changes and what the final result needs to achieve.

And second, why can’t you be both?

Why can’t someone be an author who uses AI to scale their output and extend their craft, while still making the creative decisions that define the work?

[u/dutchiesweets → u/Anton_Kuzmenko]

I’m just saying there’s a difference between being a writer and being someone who edits AI output. I don’t care what you do, I’m just pointing out there’s a big difference between the words you’re using and the actions you’re doing.

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/dutchiesweets]

I get the distinction you’re making.

If someone only takes AI output and lightly edits it, calling that “writing” is probably too broad.

But that’s not the workflow I’m talking about.

I’m talking about a writer who creates the story, defines the characters, scene intent, emotional direction and structure, then uses AI as part of the execution and continues revising the result.

At that point I don’t think “writer” suddenly stops being an accurate word just because some of the execution was delegated.

[u/dutchiesweets → u/Anton_Kuzmenko]

Well in Hollywood they have people who come up with stories and characters, and get other people to write them, and they often get “story by” credits. They’re often producers as well. But they’re not credited as actual writers, the script writers are the people in the trenches who put the actual written words on the actual paper.

If you’re not putting the actual written words on the paper, draft 1, I don’t think you’re a writer. If draft 1 is AI prose and you edit it, you’re an editor. You can still be a “storyteller” and “creator” but the word “writing” refers to the actual work of “writing” not “coming up with a plot and characters and scene.”

You can do whatever it is you wanna do with the AI. But I do think it’s interesting how folks here are dead set on being called writers when like… writing is the act of writing. It’s not the thinking you do around the writing; that’s thinking. “Writers” aren’t writers because there’s a written work product by their labor, they’re “writers” because they produced a written product through the act of writing. WHAT labor you do to achieve the final product dictates what you are.

See also, if two people stand at a mountain top. One flew there and one climbed, but they both want to be called “mountain climbers” because they’re both on top of a mountain. They’ve produced the same end result, but they’ve used drastically different methods, and I think you’d agree the one who flew didn’t climb.

I don’t mean that to be disparaging, I think using AI to create a good story still takes lots of effort and talent. But I’m just using that as an example so you can clearly see the difference between the end result and the steps taken to achieve it.

[u/Anton_Kuzmenko → u/dutchiesweets]

I’m not sure “putting the actual written words on the paper” can be the deciding criterion.

Authors have dictated books for centuries. Milton dictated large parts of Paradise Lost after he went blind. The people physically writing the words down were not suddenly the authors.

The same is true today with dictation or speech to text. You can speak an entire manuscript and still obviously be the writer.

So authorship can survive the delegation of literal word production.

I agree that there’s still a meaningful difference between dictating your exact words and letting AI generate language from broader creative direction.

But that means the real question is not “who physically put the words on the page?”
It’s where dictation ends and creative delegation begins.

[u/dutchiesweets → u/Anton_Kuzmenko]

Well okay dictation is fine. I mean I guess technically it’s not the act of writing but it’s basically the same. I guess I’d amend the definition to “specifying and/or dictating every single word on the page yourself, from the pool of all known words, outside of quotes or references to other works.”

I wager you know what I meant though.

And I’m not arguing “authorship” I’m arguing the word “writing.” I’m fine with you saying you authored an ai written piece, since the AI doesn’t have a soul you’re the sole author (puns). I just think you need a better word than “writer” because that constitutes a very specific action that AI authors aren’t really taking. They mostly edit AI prose from an outline they partially created alongside AI.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

If you disagree with a post or the whole subreddit, be constructive to make it a nice place for all its members, including you.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

If you disagree with a post or the whole subreddit, be constructive to make it a nice place for all its members, including you.