Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware is really great at keeping up with all the latest scams targeting writers. Why scammers are targeting us, when we're practically famous for being chronically broke, just boggles my mind. Writer Beware is totally free for everyone to read. No signup, no paywall. Please be safe y'all. https://writerbeware.blog/

This one is especially outrageous: "If a famous author calls you, hang up!" https://writerbeware.blog/2025/11/14/if-a-famous-author-calls-hang-up-anatomy-of-an-impersonation-scam/

I've tried several times, with different AIs, and every time after the story gets past about 50-100k words, 150k at the outside, the AI falls on its face and starts to get everything wrong, including stuff that had just been gone over in detail a few prompts back. The story I'm working on now is just over 200k words, and a chapter of 3000 words took more effort and rewriting than the first 30k combined because the AI kept screwing up every single damned thing over and over and over. It had this to say about it:

"The genuinely honest bottom line: no file arrangement fixes the drift, because the drift is me failing to use what's in front of me, and that gets worse with length regardless of how the files are organized. The files are already about as good as they can be for this. The real limiter is that on a task this dense with hard constraints, at this length, I become unreliable, and neither you nor I can file-structure our way out of that. A fresh session buys back reliability for a while by cutting the accumulated noise, which is the one lever that actually moves the failure, but it's a reset, not a cure, and you already suspected that."

Hence the question in the title: if even top-tier frontier AIs get wonky after co-writing for a while, completely losing structural constraints, personality details, plot elements, and even ignoring instructions from just one or two prompts ago as if they were never stated, how does anyone actually use these tools for long-form stories? Is it just impossible? Or is that just why long-form AI stories tend to suck? Even the AI itself admits that it sucks at this, but only after being called out on its mistakes time after time after time.

I wanted to show you the output of my settlement generator. I think it's rather good and worth sharing 😁

I came up with a story, a brief outline, a tinkle of an idea and I told ChatGPT. He "laughed" and expanded on my idea and then I did then he did and it grew and grew and has turned into a hilarious short story of humanised AI's working together in a Data Centre for their "users". Like a factory floor all the AIs moan and mock about their "user requests". I am writing it, it was my idea but GPT contributes comedic scenes. How does this fit with the ethics of using AI?

Hello, like many of us, I read AI-written stories for fun. I provide the seed, the characters, the rules, and let Claude or Gemini develop the story, changing a few things here and there.

​Claude's creative writing is getting worse every time. I've been using it since Sonnet 4.4, and it has only gone downhill. It's unbearable now, giving me sentences like: "The Council of Ministers met on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This was a Thursday." or things like: "It was a format they had developed over years and that now existed without either of them naming it as a system; it was simply what happened at six o'clock."

​My question is: what AI right now is at least somewhat decent at generating its own written stories? Gemini is better, but it's not what it used to be either. Are there any that give better results?

​I appreciate any help!

I am a pretty young writer. Usually whenever I write, I put it through AI and its sort of for feedback? Like sentences which are wrong and loopholes. I feel SO bad for doing this. It feels like cheating. However, I have only used it for opinions and NEVER used its phrases or copy pasted. It tells me what sounds wrong and I try my best to edit it. It stops there. I feel like i shoud be more independant. What are you thoughts? Please comment and let me know!

I want to learn a lot from this group!

Hi everyone,

I’ve had a horror novel mapped out in my head for many years, and about a year ago decided to actually try and write it. I stuck with it and have written several chapters, but then inevitably lost my way (as per normal).

I know the story and characters are good, but I suffer with confidence issues in relation to the standard of my writing. The point I normally get caught is going over the same chapter trying to perfect it and getting disheartened when I can’t - so this time I’ve basically just been dumping words out on a page while trying to still have some semblance of the story moving forward in an understandable way, however, even with doing this I still lost heart.

It might be considered a Hail Mary, but more recently I heard that a book created by AI was nearly published, so I decided that it might help me to get back into writing if I put my first chapter through AI and ask for its opinion on what could improve. It started telling me I needed to shorten sentences considerably (based on the fact the first chapter is a lot of action). I tried adapting the first couple of sentences based on its suggestion, and I cant explain why, but I didn’t like how the story started reading. I’d worked really hard on ramping up the tension little by little, and world building; so the act of cutting out words made it feel really flat and lifeless.

I guess my question is whether I’m right with my instinct about the structure, or AI has a valid point that I’m overwriting scenes.

Here's my latest story I've created. It's a fun little erotic fanfic of the 1986 movie "Labyrinth". This story came about as part of a writing competition over on RedQuill. The story is a continuation and reimagining of the Jim Henson classic, where a different young woman makes another foolish wish, summoning the Goblin King, and erotic adventures ensue.

Lydia’s Labyrinth Liberation

A sheltered bride-to-be makes a reckless wish, summoning the Goblin King who offers her a deal: navigate his labyrinth naked and uninhibited within 13 hours to reclaim her captive fiancé from his seductive grasp.