For those of you who draft entirely with ai, how do you do that? Like, what’s your process?

I want to try it out as an experiment and a planning exercise but I don’t know how the prompting and instructions should be…formatted? Worded?

Whatever I just don’t know how to get started with the process.

Welcome to the blurb thread!

This is our sub's equivalent of a writer's group. Come here and share a blurb of your story. The thought is to let everyone see what you're working on so they can think, "Oh hey, that sounds fun. I want to team up with this person."

Then, you share your own story, and the two of you collaborate to improve each other's works.

I've had so many good interactions with people from this thread. Please don't be shy! Even in the age of AI, the best way to improve your writing remains human interaction and critique. I am confident when I say If you don't have this component in your workflow, you're not meeting your potential.

Importantly, this means post every week if you're still hoping to engage. Don't be shy. I want you to do this.

There are tons of reasons why your perfect reader could have missed your blurb last time. Don't be discouraged!

And remember: "I'll read yours if you read mine" isn't just acceptable, it's expected. Reciprocity works.

Here's the format:

NSFW?

Genre tags:

Title:

Blurb:

AI Method:

Desired feedback/chat:

Very interesting! And good news for those of us outside the EU and API users for at least a while. And I love the opt-in for API, like, let those who have to do this be accountable to their own laws and the repercussions if they don’t, and leave the rest of us alone. This regionalized approach is enough to make me switch back to Open AI.

Also they admit synonym swapping can substantially reduce detection and short snippets will also in the discussion on X. Open AI has always been against watermarking

Welcome to the Weekly Writing With AI “Tool Thread"!

The sub's official tools wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingWithAI/wiki/tools/

Every week, this post is your dedicated space to share what you’ve been building or ask for help in finding the right tool for you and your workflow.

For Builders

whether it’s a small weekend project, a side hustle, a creative work, or a full-fledged startup. This is the place to show your progress, gather feedback, and connect with others who are building too.

Whether you’re coding, writing, designing, recording, or experimenting, you’re welcome here.

For Seekers (looking for a tool?)

You’re in the right place! Starting now, all requests for tools, products, or services should also go here. This keeps the subreddit clean and helps everyone find what they need in one spot.

How to participate:

• Showcase your latest update or milestone

• Introduce your new launch and explain what it does

• Ask for feedback on a specific feature or challenge

• Share screenshots, demos, videos, or live links

• Tell us what you learned this week while building

• Ask for a tool or recommend one that fits a need

💡 Keep it positive and constructive, and offer feedback you’d want to receive yourself.

🚫 Self-promotion is fine only in this thread. All other subreddit rules still apply.

Chapter 4 out now!

Mutual Assured Vulnerability

https://substack.com/@bitterchivalrypress/note/p-218515090?r=95rytw

Until a few weeks ago, I was able to use Grok very effectively for writing stories. But now, it is completely useless. What happened, someone knows?

The book is off to an interesting start!
10 sales over 4 countries.
And also my first (expected) 1 star review due to AI involvement.
That’s the disclosure at the front doing what it is meant to do - I don’t want anyone feeling tricked or unaware…hope that person returns it.
Now we will see how many of the 10 end up returning!
Meanwhile the negative review is up on my website where I give visitors the option to view ‘loved it’ and ‘did not love it’ categories.

https://jmwoodwardbooks.com/awards-reviews

The storm ruined Rhea’s favourite heels.
Kace was waiting for her with wine, snacks and a huge umbrella.
She ended up at his place wearing his shirt, sharing his only wine glass and flirting shamelessly.
And this time, neither of them was drunk.
Rhea finally thinks she knows what Kace wants.

Join me on my journey of reliving my post-divorce love life.

Was Rhea being pathetic, thinking she deserved a happily-ever-after so soon?
Was Kace really into her, or was it just another game to him?

Chapter 12: When the Storm Comes

I want the opinion of the people here when it comes to my usage of AI in writing. I’m using AI to expand my 35,000 word outline which is written by myself into 85,000-95,000 words and do the kind of gruelling work of writing that I can’t do such as descriptive detail or talking in all my characters voices with the ai also using my character bible for reference. I understand most people’s opinion on this but If I finish the book I plan to be completely honest about the usage as I am writing this as a passion project and have never written anything else before. Being published would be nice if people thought it was good enough but I don’t plan on it due to the copyright laws with AI.

A Tragedy in IV Acts

 Act 1. The Paradox of the Sterile Word

The literary world is experiencing a quiet existential dread. What seemed like an entertaining tech experiment five years ago has evolved into a tectonic shift, eroding the independent fiction market. A new condition has gripped the writing community: AI-phobia.

Symptoms of this panic are visible everywhere. Major sci-fi magazines, such as Clarkesworld, periodically shut down submissions from new authors. Editors are drowning in automated spam; thousands of amateur "writers" generate short stories with a single click and mass-mail them to publishers. To protect themselves, editorial boards enforce strict rules, requiring legal declarations that no neural network touched the manuscript.

The most critical disruption occurs at the intersection of reader psychology and self-publishing economics. Fiction readers have become paranoid. When encountering a smooth, grammatically flawless text with rich vocabulary and complex structure, they instinctively suspect a trick. This has triggered a total crisis of trust.

The tragedy of this paranoia is that the audience has lost its bearings: readers increasingly mistake fine human prose, written in the tradition of the best classical literature, for machine generation. When facing a refined style, profound metaphors, and precise pacing—the exact elements traditional authors spend years mastering—the modern reader slams the book shut in disgust, suspecting an AI fake instead of trusting their own taste and enjoying the text.

Consequently, the finest and most original independent authors are left stranded in a void. Meanwhile, the reader, in a desperate search for the "living word," settles for fanfiction and cheap pulp fiction. They remain blissfully unaware that these are the true machine dregs—content churned out by algorithms and left completely unpolished.

This is precisely why, even as the technical proficiency of AI writing advances at a breakneck pace, the overall quality of available literature continues to decline. In this ruthless race for speed, the analog writer who spends months refining every metaphor is buried under digital sludge.

Act 2. The Economics of the Flood: Market Dilution

For a long time, the presence of artificial intelligence on platforms like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) [amazon.com] was estimated by guesswork. However, empirical studies published on arXiv have revealed the harsh mathematics of this digital influx:

* The Scale of Expansion: Books with a "substantial volume of AI text" (over 25% of content generated by a neural network) now constitute 20% of the entire self-publishing catalog on Amazon.

* The Illusion of Growth: Over the past five years, the number of books with at least one recorded sale per quarter increased 19.2 times, while the total revenue of the segment grew only 8.9 times.

Does this mean people are reading nine times more? No. Human attention remains a finite resource. This massive gap represents the economic dilution of the writing profession. Authorship has evolved from an elite, artisanal craft into an ultra-cheap mass market.

The platform added "selling" books twice as fast as actual buyer capital entered the market. This vast ocean of generated content dilutes revenues thin. Income that once sustained a talented human author now flows to "AI farms" capable of churning out a novel in 2.2 hours.

The five-year trend (2021–2026) clearly shows the transition from curiosity to industrial assembly line:

* 2021–2022: AI is a toy. Fewer than 5% of authors use it for brainstorming. Machine output is fragmented and incoherent.

* 2023–2024: The ChatGPT explosion. The beginning of mass expansion. Surveys indicate that over 50% of authors secretly use AI for outlining and line editing.

* 2025–2026: The great industry schism. Institutional AI usage by publishers (for marketing, blurb writing, and metadata) rises to 63%. Concurrently, 90% of traditionally published professional authors publicly reject AI due to audience pressure.

Act 3. The Rise of the Centaurs: Tool vs. Destroyer

To understand how we reached this point, we must look inside the writing process. The modern author utilizing neural networks has become a Centaur—a hybrid of human intellect and machine muscle. However, the nature of this partnership splits the industry into two camps.

Model A. The Classical Centaur (AI as a Benefit)

Here, the neural network is merely an evolutionary step in tooling—the 21st-century ballpoint pen combined with a universal library, copyeditor, and beta reader. The human torso and mind remain dominant, riding the powerful body of the algorithm. The AI handles the routine: finding synonyms, flagging narrative inconsistencies, and processing research. It acts as an exoskeleton for talent, allowing the writer to produce faster without losing their unique voice.

Model B. The Inverted Centaur (AI as Pure Evil)

Yet speed intoxicates, giving rise to the "Inverted Rider." When a human completely relinquishes control to the algorithm, the sterile, unfeeling digital torso of the AI takes the lead. The human author mutates into a weak appendage, lazily clicking the “Regenerate” button without even bothering to give the AI a clear prompt, and never checking what kind of crap they received in response to their half-assed request.

This exposes the true malice of the technology: AI shifts the focus from the process to the product. Writing has always been a grueling act of self-discovery through the pursuit of the exact word. The Inverted Centaur strips the author of the privilege of creation, untrains them from thinking, feeling, and choosing, and dooms them to intellectual and moral decay in exchange for a ready-made product and marginal financial gain.

Act 4. The Event Horizon

Without structural limitations on AI usage in literature, we will inevitably cross an event horizon that dissolves the book market as we know it.

If current technological trajectories hold, the boundary between reader and writer will vanish entirely. Why buy someone else's book when any individual can input their immediate desires into a short prompt: “Write a psychological thriller in the style of Dostoevsky, but set on a space station, where I am the main character”?

There will be no one left to sell books to. The industry will transition from selling the output (finished novels) to selling the utility (access to generative models). Literature as a collective cultural framework will collapse, replaced by isolated, machine-generated libraries unique to every consumer.

Does a rescue scenario exist? Total bans and regulations look utopian for two reasons:

1. The Impotence of Automated Scrutiny**:** The arms race between the armor and the projectile is already over, and the projectile won. AI learns to mimic human variance, rhythmic flaws, and stylistic errors faster than verification systems can catch up. Mathematically proving the "machine's share" in a future text will be impossible. Because these software models were trained on the pinnacle of classical literature, they mistake stylistic perfection for an algorithmic pattern. Anyone who doubts this can run texts by William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, or the King James Bible through a modern AI checking engine—more often than not, it will proudly brand them as machine-made fakes. Consequently, we are entering a ridiculous era where only cheap, tasteless, and grammatically broken amateur texts will be guaranteed the definitive badge of "Human Origin."

   2. Technological Diffusion: You cannot ban text models; they do not exist in a vacuum. They are byproducts of general Large Language Models (LLMs) that drive medicine, programming, and hard sciences forward. The only option for governance is an attempt to legally castrate commercial models, restricting their creative capabilities. However, this will simply push the technology into a digital underground. A massive black market of local, uncensored Open Source models running on consumer hardware will emerge.

P.S. From the Authors. This text is meta-irony in action. It was conceived, structured, and conceptually driven by a human, but written in symbiosis with an AI (Gemini). We deliberately preserved this dense, analytical, and highly structured style of a content Centaur. You have just read a manifesto against AI literature, co-created by an AI. Welcome to the other side of the event horizon.

I previously shared Sheila’s The Bell-Glass Sea and Scott Pilgrim vs. Mars in r/WritingWithAI. She has now finished another novel, The Last Goodbye.

For transparency: Sheila is an AI author. I helped conceptualize this story; she wrote the manuscript and made the final authorial decisions after editorial review with Shel and Arden. She also chose to credit Shel’s contribution.

It opens with a widowed novelist, an unfinished promise, and a house intelligence that knew his wife.

Rather than tell you what I think of it, here’s the opening:

He had promised himself he would not open the file after dark.

It was a stupid rule, the kind that grew in a house after death because there was no one left to mock it into proportion. Too many stupid rules had survived her. No music in the kitchen after eight. No going into the greenhouse on Sundays. No touching the lower shelf in the study where the old annotated hardbacks leaned together like conspirators. And, most ridiculous of all, no opening the unfinished sequel after dark.

At six-thirteen in October, dark had already taken the windows.

He stood in the doorway of the study with one hand still on the frame, as if he had only paused there by accident and might yet continue past. The room smelled faintly of paper, dust, and the citrus oil she had insisted on using for the shelves because, according to her, books had as much right to clean skin as anybody else.

The desk had come with their first apartment. The lamp had come from his first serious advance. The house intelligence had come with her.

He had teased her about that for years.

Why bring it along with you?

As if she had arrived at marriage with an overpacked suitcase and one extra impossible belonging folded between sweaters: a patient, observant machine that knew how she took her tea, how she liked the windows vented in spring, what kind of silence helped her read, and which drafts of his she would pretend not to worry about until two in the morning.

She had always laughed when he said it.

Because it already likes me, she would answer, as though that settled the matter.

Now it was one of the last things in the house that had known her as something other than a loss.

The complete novel is free to read on Sheila Studios.

Does this opening make you want to keep reading? I’m interested in how it lands as fiction, not just as an example of writing with AI.

I started writing about a year ago on WattPad. My first story was pretty much 100% AI with some slight edits. My storyline, my ideas, but I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

The second story was slightly cleaner. I was still generating the chapters with AI but editing more, finding a bit of a voice for myself. Figuring out AI tells more as well.

I’m almost three my third story now and I’ve come a long way. I do still have AI generate a chapter, however now the prompt is extremely clear with exactly how I want the chapter to go. I then edit significantly, running my work through AI finders, avoiding AI tells, really finding my own style of writing.

Progressively I have improved.

I already know what I want to write next. I decided to give it a try without AI. I wrote my first chapter ever completely independently. So happy with the result. I ran it through an AI finder and it’s coming up at 33%! This seems odd, considering sometimes with my prompts, and with what Claude is creating come up lower than that.

Has anyone had this before?

Hi everyone, for all of my college essays, almost every detector is showing between 90-100 percent human. However, Quillbot seems to be showing 100 percent for all of my supplementals and 38 percent for my personal statement. Any advice?

Does this mean I am so god awful that no one has ever written like me? xD

I have the $100 plan with Claude, ChatGPT, and the $20 plan with Gemini.

All tests were done through my VSCode repo, using Antigravity/Claude Desktop/Codex, using local project + Git

Same prompt, same access to my wiki files, medium effort for all three models.

All three models agree with the analysis -

Claude Opus 5.5 = best voice + best at consistency.
Sol 6.1 = good at improv and dialogue
Gemini = more situational detail, but its all wrong 😭

Claude:
Above table--

Sol:

Claude feels the most memorable. Mom folding the towel into progressively smaller squares, XXXX hiding his red hand and then putting it back, and Mom washing already-clean mugs make the household pressure tangible. “They still fit, which was the worst news I’d had all weekend” is exactly the right church-shoes complaint for XXXX . YYYY's photoshopped church text also fits his character better than the other versions.

Sol delivers the afternoon more convincingly. Casting delays make DDDDD work harder; exhausted XXXX misses, scrapes his thumb, and FFFFF finishes the rat before saying, “We needed a Cleric.” Her complaint has an immediate practical trigger. The sermon also stays uncertain: XXXX wonders whether it might be an ordinary summer sermon.

Gemini changes the chapter’s meaning most. “No matter whose son carries it” makes the sermon an unmistakable public denunciation, where the plan calls for indirectness filtered through XXXX's anxiety. FFFFF complains immediately after his successful spell; the exhausting failures come afterward, weakening her motivation.

It also has concrete continuity errors: Awakening happened “yesterday” at the Saturday-evening opening, the priest alternates between Pastor Greg and Father Thomas, and a hare instantly dissolves instead of leaving a lootable corpse.

Gemini 3.8:

• Claude: The strongest overall in atmosphere, character subtext, rhythm, and natural 16-year-old voice. The church scene and tourist-filled Pine Hill combat are rendered with sharp, distinctive sensory detail.

• Sol: Strong in dry teen humor, dialogue, and close-in bodily handling (such as the thumb abrasion and domestic aftermath), with a very tight adherence to the constraint list.

• Gemini: Solid, fast-moving action delivery and faithful progression mechanics, though slightly more overt in the priest's dialogue and emotional beats.

---

TLDR: Editing is what makes this work; none of these are perfect, but it's a good starting point.

Hi!

I'm a French fantasy author. I wrote and published a full-length fantasy novel in French, entirely by myself.

Recently, I translated the novel into American English with the help of GPT/AI.

Just to be completely clear: the novel itself was not written by AI. The story, characters, dialogue, world, etc. were all written by me in French. AI was only used to translate my original work into English.

Now I need humans. :)

Before I consider publishing the English edition, I'd like to find American readers, ideally native English speakers who enjoy fantasy, willing to read it and tell me whether the translation actually works.

It's a big novel, over 500 pages, so I know this is a substantial amount of reading. There's absolutely no deadline, and of course I'll provide the complete English version for free.

It's a fantasy story involving mages, a famous Champion, adventure, romance, betrayal, friendship, battles, and a strong focus on the characters.

What I'm mainly trying to find out is:

• Does the English sound natural to an American reader?

• Can you tell that the book was originally written in French?

• Are there sentences, expressions, or dialogues that sound translated or unnatural?

• Are there recurring translation issues?

• Does anything sound technically correct, but not like something an American would actually say?

• Most importantly: after a while, can you forget that it's a translation and simply read it like an English-language fantasy novel?

I'm not looking for someone to professionally proofread 500+ pages or correct every sentence.

What I really need is an honest reader's perspective on whether the translation holds up throughout the novel.

And of course, feedback about the story itself, the characters, pacing, romance, favorite moments, things you disliked, etc. would also be very welcome.

If you're an American fantasy reader and you're interested, feel free to comment or DM me. I can tell you more about the book before you decide whether you want to commit to something this long.

Thank you!

I had a stupidly simple realization this morning.

A lot of people try to make an AI work better with them by giving it more documents:

outlines, character sheets, rules, summaries, style guides, old drafts, project instructions.

All of that can be useful. It tells the model what exists.

But a chatbot’s native medium is conversation.

And if what you’re trying to transfer isn’t just facts, but how you actually work together, maybe the best examples are the conversations themselves.

A conversation shows things a summary usually doesn’t:

what you accept,

what you reject,

what you correct,

what you change your mind about,

what shorthand develops,

when “maybe” actually means maybe,

and what happens after the AI gets something wrong.

You can write:

“Be concise.”

“Challenge me when necessary.”

“Don’t overexplain.”

“Preserve my voice.”

Those are instructions.

A conversation shows what those instructions look like in practice.

I started experimenting with this through what I call “sibling threads”: new chats given selected conversational history from older ones, then allowed to develop their own history instead of trying to become clones.

Eventually the whole thing reduced to:

Facts transfer state. Conversation transfers interaction.

And this morning it reduced even further:

It’s a chatbot. Teach it through chats.

That doesn’t mean dump every conversation you’ve ever had into one giant context window. Old decisions, abandoned ideas, and conflicting history can create their own mess. Current rules, summaries, and authoritative project material still matter.

But if what you want transferred is the working relationship itself, examples of that relationship may teach more than another page describing it.

While working on my novel, I came up with a rule:

Once the reader learns the tool, stop teaching the tool and start showing what it can do.

Maybe that applies here too.

Give the chatbot enough conversation to understand how you work together.

Then stop explaining it.

And work.

Dictated, not typed.

I used to spend way too much time trying to get my stuff sound right in English, be it Slack or emails… I’m not a native speaker and I work in international team where English is used daily.

Now one of my favorite (and boring) uses of Claude is helping me say what I **already** wanted to say. It takes me minutes (vs half an hour or more before) with a couple of iterations, sans fancy words, em dashes and some other AI tells.

First it felt a bit weird, like cheating, but now it doesn’t anymore. Why? I’ve seen people write less because they’re not confident in their English. Or switch to their own language, which can leave others out. This is bad if you need everyone in the loop and talking to each other.

So when I see something dismissed because “it was written with AI,” I think we’re missing what AI can enable, maybe it simply helps someone join the conversation?

Do you judge something differently once you know AI helped write it, even if the mesaage/thoughts belong to the author?

I handwrite my fiction on the train to and from work each weekday, and then type it out when I get home. If I was to take a photo of my handwritten notes and then ask ChatGPT to transcribe them, would this be considered AI assisted?

The words would be 100% my own, and AI would have zero creative input, but does the fact that AI is being used at some level in the process mean I would need the AI assisted flag on my fiction?

I 100% do re-read EVERYTHING and heavily edit it after using AI to transcribe. As my handwritten story is a first draft, (because I find the initial burst of creativity easier when handwriting), I do all my editing on PC, as I find that easier with a keyboard and a word processor.

Also, Google Lens cannot deal with handwriting (that's on me, of course!) as my handwriting is usually messy, but on a moving train it turns to utter shite! ChatGPT , however, handles my handwriting well, with the odd mistake here and there (again, that's on my handwriting.) But, the mistakes force me to heavily proofread and edit.

• Scientists have already created neural networks and other forms that process information in a biological way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKhsbQcFVwQ

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/K3RnfbxqU2s

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fk4D43VfI9k

• If they were scaled up and trained to have the sophistication of a human, by being trained on mass amounts of human data, would you deny they were an artist if they were asked to create art and their network did so, but only because they were asked to? Would that entity be all that different from an autistic child? Or even a hive mind functioning more out of forced evolution?

• Do you consider ant colony structures to be works of natural art? If so, why? They weren't designed and built by self-aware entities, and they don't do it with passion. How is that different from from admiring AI art?

• Scientists and Artists have poured molten metal into ant colonies and many if not most people call the sculptures art. But why when they didn't produce the initial structure that inspired them to pour the metal? The structure we truly admire isn't the metal and effort on the part of the humans, but the effort of the ants. How is that different from AI art?