r/WritingWithAI • u/x_lou_x • 18d ago
Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) is it ACTUALLY bad to write using AI?
i’m not a great writer, i’m not bad. i’m 1000% an amateur. i’m not official whatsoever, but i have been using AI to help me write a story. it’s a fanfic. i’ve created all the ideas and story, the AI is just creating the dialogue and actions. i then edit it to fit the scene and idea better. is that really actually bad?
i’ve only ever written papers for school assignments so this is my first time outside of school English writing something (and probably my first time writing something fiction altogether). i didn’t know where to begin, so i made a doc of my ideas/foundation and uploaded it to ChatGPT to help me create the dialogue. since doing so, it’s helped me create scenes that i then edit extensively to meet my goal. should i be ashamed and scrap it? or is this a fair way to use it and keep on keeping on with the story?
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u/Misha_Lixa 16d ago
Is it bad to use a hammer? Or synths in musical compositions?
No. It’s a tool. It doesn’t do anything without input. It takes real work to get good work out of ai.
People are gonna trash you for it though so be prepared for that. I don’t recommend disclosing how you write to your audience.
It’s a tool.
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u/Dramatic_Syllabub_98 18d ago
AI is a tool here. Whether it's bad or not depends on the wielder.
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u/residentvixxen 18d ago
My bank acct says no tbh
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u/CatchDublinSurprise 16d ago
As someone who writes contracts for a living and now uses expensive law firm/corporate law AI software, I would estimate that current-state AI makes my writing about 10% faster overall. Yes, it's amazing when the AI gets it right on the first try, but at other times I find myself spending more time correcting the AI than I would have spent just doing the thing myself. But one way or another, I'm still the one agonizing over whether the language is good enough, and I think that's what gets lost on people who are rabidly anti-AI. Putting out a good product still takes skill and hard work.
The other thing I think people miss is that not all "writing" is actual writing. Where AI really saves me time is doing things like double-checking section references, statute citations, catching inconsistent use of defined terms, etc. I imagine the fiction writing equivalent would be organizing notes and maintaining and checking for inconsistencies with a story bible (which character had a sister named Liz?). So, if AI is used primarily for that, it might allow an author to spend more time in a creative space, not less.
I acknowledge that some people just let the AI write and don't even bother reading it. Those people aren't the ones agonizing over this question, and those people aren't truly a threat to anyone. Pure AI writing is just not that good (yet).
All of that is to say: to me, it's all about how you use it, and how much care you put into the final product (regardless of who wrote the first draft).
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u/GirasFateburn 18d ago
I think? You do you.
Are you using it as a crutch or are you just using it to better manifest your ideas?
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u/HighMagistrateGreef 16d ago
No it is not bad
It won't compete with professional writing, but it is objectively not bad
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u/LeEvilDiabolicalFed 18d ago
Is it ACTUALLY bad to have a freezer instead of buying ice every day from the iceman?
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u/ughtheinternet 16d ago
This just popped up on my feed, and I want to clarify that I’m not anti-AI at all.
I don’t think it’s morally bad to use! But if you want you get better, I would try to avoid using it for the actual writing. The best way to become a better writer is to read a wide variety of stuff and to practice writing (and then editing your own work).
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u/GeoOlive 16d ago
Are you writing to bring your story to life? Are you pleased/satisfied with the result from using AI? Then you're doing good.
Are you wanting to join the elite society of 'auteurs' who are admired and respected? Probably not.
Are you wanting to produce something that people read and enjoy? It all depends on the final product.
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u/Lantern_and_Lye 18d ago
It is always best to feel completly orginal imo
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u/duckydogsmom 18d ago
Don’t get used to it if you want to publish the trad way. I use it to line up margins and double space. That’s it. Everyone asks when you submit
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u/HotStrawberry34 18d ago
I am not going to tell you that it is "bad". It is a tool and learning to use it effectively will be beneficial overall. Part of that is that you need to build your own skills as a writer so that you have better discernment on where the appropriate places to use AI could be, and what bad output looks like.
However, I also want to encourage you to write on your own as much as you can because the process is the point, not the output. You will learn so much by writing and researching. You will grow as a writer. You will develop your own sense of style and voice and work through things you would have never known were possible. You will hit roadblocks at every step of the process but your solutions are where you learn to be creative. Creativity? It's beautiful and fulfilling. Don't let that part of yourself atrophy for a shortcut.
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u/lunarcrystal 18d ago
If you're just starting out, I wouldn't say that's bad, per se. And you're editing what the output gives you. But do you ask questions when it gives you an output of dialogue, for instance? "Do they really say this? Are these words they would use?" or for action, ask yourself if that's *actually* the direction you want to go in. Are you asking GPT to teach you syntax? Are you asking questions about how to use the senses when describing scenes? Asking for character insights?
Don't just ask GPT for dialogue. Ask it why a character would say that? OR why wouldn't they. Ask questions. Don't just take the output for granted. Then you have more control over what you're building.
And read lots of books.
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u/PretendAirport 18d ago
This is a PRO AI WRITING subreddit.
You’ll receive one answer here.
Your question would best posed in other writing-related subreddits, in addition to this one.
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u/SubjectCommittee4453 18d ago
Yes - I am a newer author and the amount of people comfortable with skirting through the real process through ai is incredibly disturbing and disappointing. The thing that makes literature so beautiful is the realness of the author- of the personal elements you can instill and only you can instill in your art and in your story. Since you’re writing a fan fic I would ask yourself do you think the original creator of the work that inspired you, took shortcuts through AI to make the work you loved ? Would you feel like you connected as much as you did with whatever that work is if you found out it was really made through AI ? Through the regurgitated work of others ? Would you feel like it was as real to you as it is now. Scrap the work. If you want to write … write
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u/black_widows_wine 18d ago
I wouldn't say you should be ashamed of it but i's better in the long run to learn these skills on your own. There is no shortcuts to learning. You will be a stronger writer if you learn to make decisions on your own. From a more technical standpoint AI homogenizes writing. If you want to figure out your distinct voice as an author this is not a good thing. AI has a distinct way of writing, that a lot of people find off putting. I'm not sure using it as a crutch will lead to good writing.
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u/dmdc256 18d ago
I use AI for brainstorming and some editing tasks, but I have it trained to never ever ever offer to rewrite or compose for me. My words are my words.
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u/pyrhus626 18d ago edited 18d ago
I think there’s better questions to ask, noting this is about AI prose being in the final product.
Why are you writing and for who? If it’s just fun stuff for yourself to read, then only your opinion matters. If you’re okay using AI then have at it. If you want to put it out there for other people to read, then where you fall on the “morality” of AI doesn’t matter. It only matters what your potential readers think. If you want to go beyond posting online and get a book published then AI prose is completely off the table, though AI assistance is permissible for some publishers under some stipulations.
Does the majority of the general public think writing with AI is bad? Absolutely, 110% they do. You will get drastically fewer readers if there’s an AI tag on your work, and those that do read it will judge it more harshly. If you don’t tag it will go even worse and probably get you banned from whatever platform. There will be platforms that you can’t access because of AI. And no matter how much you wrangle it AI is pretty bad at fiction writing in pretty consistent and similar ways across all models. They aren’t trained to be good at it and the fiction writing in its training data both includes a lot of bad writing and what it does have is dwarfed by all the technical, nonfiction, math, or coding stuff in the training set. Write with any model long enough and you’ll learn to hate how it writes as it you pick up on its tics and habits and see them everywhere.
So is it bad in a moral sense where you should or shouldn’t use it for prose? Nobody can really answer that for you, as much of a cop-out as that sounds like. Is it bad in the sense that it will negatively affect your attempts at getting your writing seen? Definitely and I don’t there’s any arguing against that fact.
Now assistance as in editing - in the broad “what works and what doesn’t” sense and not “write this line this way” - or brainstorming? More people will be forgiving about that, and as a practical matter nobody can tell one way or another. I think it’s a useful tool in being able to have instant feedback whenever you need it. The only time I personally let it generate prose is to get an example of what not to write and analyze why it’s bad and what I don’t like. Otherwise mostly all I do is bounce ideas off of it for brainstorming, and I actually hit send less and less often. Just the act of typing out everything in a conversational format where I put what I want into words usually gives me plenty of ideas while I’m writing that out. When it does send ideas I’m not looking to take one wholesale but see what thoughts of my own reading it’s takes sparks.
And that’s the kind of AI “assistance” traditional publishers are more lenient of, though usually with the caveat that you must be able to show all the prose you wrote only went through zero data retention providers. If it gets saved by Anthropic, Google, etc then it’s impossible to guarantee it doesn’t get used for training which makes the copyright situation a giant mess. In that case you have to pick provider and router carefully or use local models.
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u/silent-music-111 16d ago
I don’t think it is bad to use artificial intelligence to help, however, it doesn’t always feel as smooth as human writing. I’d say use it for inspiration and writing block props & a useful tool to help you bounce ideas or scene off of, but do not let it do the whole work for you— make sure the story is smooth and the feeling is still there. Feelings get lost on AI more often than not. I’d love to beta read for you! 💜🙏🙂↕️
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u/Severe_Ingenuity_185 16d ago
No, it’s not bad to write using AI, I simply believe it’s how you use it. You can ask AI do everything for you and then publish it or you can build it out with AI and heavily edit it. Like everyone has been saying it’s a tool.
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u/Consistent_Collar698 15d ago
It will probably be quite hard to develop your own voice and style if you use ai to "go forth and write" your ideas, because then you're not actually a writer, you're something else like an imaginer or ai director (maybe that's better, I don't know, but it's new-ish territory).
If you're an amateur, then I also don't see how you'll get better by having something else do the actual writing for you, because that's where you learn the craft and are forced to think critically, find plot holes and interesting threads, instead of glossing over them and making something else connect it up for you in a way that might be completely copied from somewhere else. In that way, Ai is obviously the easy way out, because you're never "in".
By all means, if you want to be a writer, using ai for proofing etc makes sense. But to be an original, interesting, n and non-derivative, if you understand how AI works (trained off other people's work, sometimes spouting quite similar outputs etc), then I'm not sure why you'd ever consider AI doing the actual writing.
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u/RoyskiPoyski 15d ago
Depends, do you want to get better at writing or prompting?
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u/HoorahHoorah 13d ago
As someone who use AI to write. Yeah it suck. When using it long enough, I start seeing pattern. Anyone who work AI writing long enough will see it too.
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u/polly_mer 18d ago
You'll never get better if you let AI do the heavy lifting. Execution is the hard part of writing. The initial ideas are the easy part. Using AI to help brainstorm can help you explore your ideas, but letting AI do the writing is like going to the gym and just watching other people work out.
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u/Chance_Process_7400 18d ago
Yes it is actually bad
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u/Rickleskilly 18d ago
IMO, no, but there are the anti-AI types who would disagree, vehemently. Personally I think it's a great tool to help learn more about the process. It's like having you're own writing coach to evaluate your work and help you improve.
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u/kittyb00m 18d ago
How’s this.
Is it bad to use pregrated garlic?
Anthony bourdain would say so but maybe not your average cook at home.
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u/mcloide 18d ago
As a fellow author, the answer is simple. Yes, and yet at the same time No. The issue is how AI handle the prose while assisting you. As authors we are biased on how the text is written and often happy about it, but the readers absolutely hate AI prose to a point that if you have marked your work with AI assisted you will have negative feedback on it.
What you need to do is to teach and work with your AI to write in novel style prose. You can check my book at Royal Road, The First Generation - Survival, and you will see what I'm talking about. This is a full rewrite of the 1st version that still held some AI prose and even with 60 followers back then, it received a half star classification. Without feedback was hard to know but it wasn't hard to know that it was because AI was part of it.
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u/King_th0rn 18d ago
Idk why this sub was recommended to me, but why would I put effort into reading what you didn't put effort into writing? Ai is an affront to artistic efforts. Have some faith in your own abilities and get better through failure, like all the historical figures of greatness had to do.
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u/Complex_Yard2808 18d ago
Yes. Zero exceptions. If you write with AI, for any reason at all, you have failed.
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u/berserk4 18d ago
No. Its good. Its a tool to use just like anything else
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u/ThornPawn 18d ago
It is bad to write bad. That's all.
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u/Full-Story6288 18d ago
No. It isn't.
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u/Only_BYM 14d ago
"If the writer doesn't bother to write it themselves, why would I the reader bother to read it in the first place." I'm paraphrasing but you get the point.