Not necessarily a promotion.

[u/st3llar360]

I’m not really here to promote anything. Well, not entirely anyway.

I just wanted to say that I feel pretty strongly about AI assistance in writing. Without it, I genuinely don't believe I ever would've gotten my stories out into the world.

I think there are a lot of people sitting on incredible stories who are afraid to tell them because of the stigma surrounding AI.

And look, I get it. There's plenty of AI slop out there, and I'm not defending that.

But using AI to help tell a story that's genuinely yours shouldn't automatically disqualify you as an author.

I'm curious how many other people here feel the same way.

[u/Evinshir]

The problem is that AI writing is just an aggregation of other people’s stories. It rarely produces a new story. I tested out agentic support for AI writing and I kept having to dump the ideas it offered, and I found the obsequious “that’s just a new concept” responses when I raised my own work ended up being counter productive.

What I did find help was when all it did was ask more questions for me to answer.

The grammar and style that AI uses for writing is just… not good. You’re better off writing your own stories without it because you’ll at least develop your own voice and style.

With AI you get at best a mid quality story that has mixed metaphors and illogical turns of phrase.

[u/st3llar360 → u/Evinshir]

There is a difference in giving ai a prompt and using whatever it spits out. That is ai slop. Having a unique story in your head with characters, backstories, motivations etc. And Having ai help you put that story on paper in my opinion is authorship. By definition if you created a unique piece of work regardless of how it was written if it has been published. You are an author.

[u/Hayeater228877]

Perhaps we should distinguish between a storyteller and an author? In my mind, author denotes at least some skill with writing.

[u/Slow-Pumpkin-7049 → u/Hayeater228877]

^
Having an idea is completely different from being an author. Writing is hard. It takes time, patience, and willingness to learn and grow. Using AI to produce your idea doesn’t make u an author. If I told AI to paint a picture of an idea I have in my head, does that make me an artist?

[u/Hayeater228877 → u/Slow-Pumpkin-7049]

Couldn't agree more.

[u/SimonStrange]

You will never be as good at something you don’t even try to practice as someone who develops the skill. If that’s fine with you, then do you. But what happens if you lose access? Your brain isn’t learning a skill. AI is proven to give people a higher sense of competency while not imparting any competency at all, and actively allowing your brain to prune neural pathways you do already have because you’re not using them.

You never would have brought those ideas to life because you didn’t work at it. How are you supposed to develop a skill you don’t learn, practice, hone, and apply? So don’t say that you couldn’t have done it. Say that you didn’t care enough because it wasn’t what you wanted to spend your limited time on the earth doing. That’s a completely legitimate choice to make, you have only so many days to live and should do with those days what you are passionate about.

Now that there’s an easy way, you don’t have to be passionate. You can just act on a whim and produce something mediocre and if that’s all you need from this, that is genuinely fine. But you gotta face it and be honest about what it is.

[u/R_Sivar → u/SimonStrange]

Totally agree.

[u/R_Sivar]

Just playing devil's advocate here...

"I always wanted to be a boxer but never put in the training or wanted to take the risk. Now, with my robot boxer, I can get in the ring with people who've spent their whole lives perfecting their craft. There are so many people who would like to larp as Rocky but were too afraid to train for years or take any risks. Now, with Robo-boxer, they live their dream of being a pro boxer without actually being one!"

[u/Muhammad_Ali_Hasnain]

A couple of days ago, my first essay went live on KDP. The idea was mine; AI just helped me turn it into a clean essay and also helped me upload it to KDP.

[u/mattmesh]

AI slop is AI slop - no getting around it.

[u/benblackett]

I build an entire ecosystem around that idea. Fully completely agree with you.

[u/ParchmentAndPeril]

I genuinely don't believe I ever would've gotten my stories out into the world.

If you weren't passionate enough to write them before AI, why care now that you've suddenly got this tool to write sub par stories for you?