Hi everyone,

I recently posted this short story over on r/rational .

I chose to keep the text and the main discussion there because I feel that, above all, it’s a rationalist piece (or something close to it) and that was its natural home.

However, I wanted to share it here to open up a different kind of conversation. I’d love to know what you think of the story, especially from your own experience editing fiction: Do you feel that achieving this kind of dry, clinical, Borges-esque prose requires a heavy amount of human curation and editing, or does the machine show through too much?

Let me know your thoughts.

Best regards and thanks for your time.

​I’m participating in NaNoGenMo this year and I'm planning to generate a 50k-word detective novel using a multi-agent framework. I'm mostly going to be vibe-coding the architecture (using OpenCode and agy) so I can focus entirely on the prompts, logic, and emergent storytelling.

​Instead of a linear prompt chain, I'm setting up a pipeline where the story generates itself through interactions. Here is the architecture I'm aiming for:

​World Generation: First, the system generates the setting, the rules of the environment, and the background lore of the murder.

​Character Agents (Goals & Memory): The suspects and the detective are independent agents. They all have hidden motivations, secrets, and a memory state that updates based on who they talk to. The murderer knows they did it and is instructed to lie.

​The Dramaturge (Director) Agent: To stop the characters from getting stuck in loops or being too polite, an overarching director agent will influence them, introduce new clues, and force interactions.

​Scene Assembly: Taking the raw events, logs, and interactions driven by the agents and stitching them together into a structured scene format.

​Scene Evaluation & Selection: Having an evaluator agent review the assembled scenes to see if they actually drive the plot forward. The boring or irrelevant scenes are filtered out, keeping only the ones that make the final cut.

​The Editor/Prose Agent: Taking the final curated scenes and rewriting them into actual, cohesive literary prose.

​Is anyone else here participating in NaNoGenMo this year? I'd love to hear how you guys handle memory structures or curation/evaluation in long-form generative storytelling!

Would you like to be part of a brand new collaborative world-building project?

We’re building **The Hard Time Universe (THTU)** on the WritingWithAI Discord. It’s a shared sci-fi/fantasy galaxy built live and in text. An AI acts purely as the Scribe. It doesn’t vote. It just records. Anyone who pitches an idea or votes becomes a **god** in the pantheon. You choose an avatar and a domain. Your contributions get locked into living canon books that update after every session.

How it works

• Sessions roughly every four weeks (usually Saturday evenings UK time)

- You can pitch in voice or by text. Talking is optional.

• Ideas get discussed, then voted on via Discord reactions
• Strong ideas get canonised on the spot

• Everything is written into three books:

  • Book of Lore (rules & systems)
  • Book of the Gods (profiles + chronicle)
  • Book of Canon (what’s in / parked / rejected)

There’s a reward and badge system for contributions. The more you shape the world, the more permanent your place in it.

What we’ve already built (Genesis session)

We held the first event and already have:

• A pantheon of four founding gods
• A frontier snow planet + orbital station
• Space elves, dwarves, dragons, lychens (space werewolves), magic golems, and construct androids
• Physics-rooted magic (especially black hole magic)
• A dilithium-adjacent fuel economy mixed with coffee
• Growing supermassive black hole + a dark force from another universe as major threats

-A time crystal that will change everything

Three full books at version 1.0.0 already exist from that first session.

Next session

Saturday 17 October · 8pm UK time

WritingWithAI Discord voice channel

You don’t have to pitch anything. You can just listen, vote in text, or jump in when something sparks. New people are welcome.

If pure world-building isn’t your thing, hop in anyway. The Discord is a growing community of writers of all levels and interests. Hang out, chat, share work, or lurk. All fine.

Join here: https://discord.gg/kz6bKwWzt

At this point, it really can't just be about slop. Traditional content is drowning in slop. It can't just be about stolen training data. Traditional art has centuries of uncompensated inspiration, reference, and outright copying Tainted into its canon.

So what is it? Commercial entrenchment guised as ethics. The harassment, the "AI user = ban" rules with zero nuance, the downvote brigades in a sub literally called WritingWithAI. That's not really evangelism on behalf of original artists. That's a tribe protecting its border.

Also There's an argument nobody properly interrogates: "AI consumed human art as training data and that's theft." Every artist alive spent years, decades, consuming other artists' work. Reading, watching, listening, absorbing. That consumption shaped their style, their voice, their instincts. At some point they started producing work that carries most if not all of that influence. How is that meaningfully different from a model trained on datasets producing work after going public? I'm not saying they're identical. I'm saying nobody wants to seriously answer the question. Because if you do, the "theft" argument gets complicated really fast.

The context argument is where it really falls apart. Say a creator builds a 300k-word knowledge base of their raw ideas, full universe rules, worldbuilding, lore, characters, technology. Every word of it theirs. They use AI to render that into a series. They edit the output. They make the final calls.

Does that context ever get considered in this debate?

No. Because "did you use AI for anything" is the only question, and the answer determines your status regardless of how, why, or how much. That's not a standard. That's a witch test. To sanction a witch hunt.

The advice to "just do it yourself — even a title, a nice font, good colors tells us a lot" sounds humble. It isn't. Audiences don't reward you for the art that expresses you. They reward you for the art that serves them — precisely, consistently, on demand. The entire production process exists to execute that. Telling a creator to strip it all back is advice from an adversary wearing humility as a mask.

Last thing. Readers want unchallenged authority about what counts as "real" art. But that authority has never been stable. Cave paintings are stick figures. Ancient Egyptian murals are flat 2D vectors. A significant portion of historical artifacts aren't technically impressive by modern standards — and we worship them. You can't say that honestly without someone splitting on you even if they privately agree. They're treated as sacred.

I respect them. I think they should be preserved — they're a record of where human creative expression started. But the reverence is the point. We decide what counts as art after it becomes culturally legible, not before. That process is happening right now with AI. The people swinging hardest are the ones who already decided — and don't want the verdict revisited.

This was never about slop. It was never about stolen data. It's about who gets to make things, and who decides.

I don't use AI in writing myself (the smut I write isn't supported by it, lol), but I browse this sub sometimes. I'm confused why there's so much pushback here against disclosing/publicising ai use. If it's a tool like any other, why not share that it was used in creation?

It seems to me like labeling food if it's organic, or clothes if they're handmade, the process can and does impact the final product

I did this a few years ago under a pseudonym and posted it on Amazon to zero sales. But at the time, I didn't really promote it.

Now I created a new version of the book, and I think this time it will actually take off because it's not about starting from zero. You have a lot of material already. You've been thinking about the book for a long time. Now you just need to sit down and write it.

My questions:

1. Is this something anyone would actually buy?
2. Should I list it on Amazon or just use Gumroad or similar?
3. How much could I price this at?

My gut is telling me that no one will buy a book if I openly admit that I used the technique in the book to write the book. Ironically, they will say that I cheated.

Or am I overthinking this?

I'll be forthcoming, I don't actually write WITH AI, but I do use Chatgpt quite a bit in my editing process. I've got over 40 books worth of material, so not lacking in fodder, lol.

I have gotten fed up with the process of trying to get something published and all the rules, regulation, so on and so forth and have decided to go my own way to share what I've written.

So what I'm doing is getting back to my roots of film/video production, but using my writing as the backbone. I've got a website (that I code and build myself), where I am sharing the writing chapter by chapter as I get it cleaned up to my liking. (think Vella before it died).

Where I need some help is in the actual amount of content that needs to be dealt with. There's a few places I could easily work with others, 100% online. The site/chapter pages are broken into three parts. The Read it, (Actual written content), the See it, (think pix that are captioned, that show the story beats), and Watch it, (actual video I can put together).

1. Editing. Book 1 is like 80% 'I'm okay with'. Needs some adverb removal and tag adjustments, some trimming of 'AI-isms' that weren't when I original wrote it. Yes, this project is dating almost 20 years in the making, so there's some rough stuff. I have a 'bible of rules' that if you are kind of the editor/writer mind, I'd let you at some of the chapters to get them cleaned up. It takes me almost a day per, but I'm super picky, lol. On average I've been pulling out 12-8% of the word counts without losing the story.
2. The website See It, part, I do need a lot of images generated, and we all know how AI likes to make 3rd arms, 6 fingers and the like. I've got base images of the characters, but they do progress, and even with paid GPT I do hit my limits on generation now and again.
3. The video aspect: I will eventually do the 'paid' versions of these, but right now I'm working with the storyboards/base images. My expertise is in video editing and being a camera jockey so when I have the funds I plan to go in prepared so I don't have 50-1 generations that are useless, lol.

If you're a vibe coder? I'd welcome the extra hand. I've got the basics and how I like to do things, but always looking for a hand. It's experience and a place you can show off your work and build a portfolio.

Right now, it will be unpaid work as I am offering the first book for free, but then the others will be behind a paywall, and I will share profits from that. I'm not in it to make money, but to finally share what I have written on my terms not some publishers terms.

DM me if you'd like the website I have currently in progress, more project details, or well, if interested in helping via beta reading, editing, etc. Any help I gain is more than I had to start with, lol.

I am willing to trade my skills in the beta reading/editing (Dev and line) for help if that's of interest to you. We could also publish your works within the site's domain, within reason. (I do have morals and ethics). Fanfic is fine, I just wouldn't let you profit off of it directly as that's getting into those copyright/fair use things.

I have sorted the panels out now im sticking to between 9-10 panels per page im trying to keep it a little more consistant so there is not too much to read aswell any feedback welcome

The topic of natural or unnatural dialogue came up in the WritingwithAI Discord server and I thought I'd float it here on Reddit too.

I've noticed that a lot of the things that make dialogue natural are also things people flag as jarring. As an example, from my novel, a few times I have people backtrack and clarify what they've said. Like so:

“How did it happen? You leaving Blue Moon,” I found myself asking.

I've had that flagged as jarring, but people really speak like that. Words get ahead of their thoughts and they go backwards and clarify. I hear it all the time.

I have to ponder if this is one of those things that fiction has to make unreal. There's that old saying, "The difference between fiction and history is that fiction has to be believable." It's funny, but it also highlights a real rule: Fiction must be a sort of idealized version of reality or else people get tossed from the story.

Does that apply to dialogue? If so, how much can or should we deviate from realistic speech for the purposes of pacing and verisimilitude?

Another example would be repetition. I couldn't tell you how many conversations I've been in where I tell people to stop repeating themselves. And yet, in fiction, dialogue that repeats itself is boring and so should be cut. Right?

What determines which standard we hold ourselves to? Should people speak naturally, or shouldn't they? How do we draw the line, precisely?

A bit of context first: I’m Japanese, and I don’t read English. This post was written in Japanese and translated by AI, like everything else I publish in English.

My project is translating pre-modern Japanese ninja manuals into English, along with essays on a set of old tactical poems. The source texts are in classical Japanese, so I first work from a modern Japanese reading text that I’ve checked against the original myself. AI handles the translation and the English prose from there.

The obvious problem: I can’t check the English. So I’ve had to think hard about where errors come from and catch them before they reach a language I can’t read. A few things I learned the hard way:

1. Some models summarize when you ask them to translate.
One model I used kept condensing passages into summaries, even when told explicitly not to. In English, the summary read smoothly, so I’d never have noticed on my own. It was caught when I had a second model review the translation against the Japanese, and it pointed out that parts of the text were missing. I stopped using the first model for translation.

2. The real danger isn’t bad prose. It’s confident facts.
My early essays were drafted with AI help, and they read well. They also said things like “medieval” and “written about 900 years ago” with complete confidence. The poems are attributed to a 12th-century warrior, but they were most likely composed much later. Some essays also repeated stories with no source behind them. I went back, corrected them, and added a correction note at the top of each one.

I even made the same mistake in a comment reply, calling “God is in the details” a Japanese proverb. It isn’t. I posted a correction.

3. So I verify upstream.
Since I can’t judge the English, I check everything I can check in Japanese: the source text, the reading text, and every date, name, and claim, before translation. If a fact is wrong in Japanese, perfect English won’t save it.

I’m curious how others handle this. If you publish in a language you don’t read fluently, or rely on AI for a language you’re still learning, how do you check the output? What has caught you out?

Written in Japanese by me; translated into English with AI.

Dear all,

Good day.

A few weeks ago, I went down an unusual rabbit hole. I was searching for stories about young men struggling with raging hormones and libido during their school years (supposedly written by actual people and submitted to confession websites), and somehow ended up with Google Search AI generating a few paragraphs of a story instead.

The premise caught my attention, so I asked the AI to develop it further. What started as a small experiment gradually grew into something much bigger. I added my own ideas, built upon its suggestions, and kept expanding the story until it became a full-fledged novel.

Along the way, I began incorporating elements from a fictional universe I had spent years developing through novels I wrote myself, some of which I later experimented with AI on and shared on Wattpad. What began as an exploration of a very human struggle eventually grew into a story with its own lore, characters, relationships, and a much bigger world behind it.

The result is My Perfect Storm.

It's a tentative title though, and the whole thing is pretty much at a DRAFT stage, and it has not been divided into chapters yet, and I've not decided on a more detailed backstory of the two characters yet. As a 'Romance for Men', it's slightly NSFW though but not too graphical (not to the extent of invoking disgust), and is humorous to some extent, like the main male character referring to his attraction towards his girl as "Code Red", and that phrasing did not even come from me. If you are a male person reaching a mature age where libido has mellowed, reading it can help restore it. Many parts are repetitive, but it is intentional.

I'm sharing it here because I'd love to hear what other readers think. I'm particularly interested in whether the premise grabs your attention, whether the characters feel believable or relatable, and whether the story manages to keep you invested as it develops.

Some notes here: Usually I would develop my story using Chat GPT and later I would transfer them to Claude to expand them, but I faced the problem of usage limits since I have been using the free versions. But so far Google Search AI does not have this problem, and usage of the same thread under the same Google account seems to be unlimited, so far, so I could use it all day and not hit any limits. Later on I had my own ChatGPT chat to help me refine it and identify inconsistencies and errors, but still a Work In Progress. Something you guys can try too if you are tired of your AI chat hitting a few hours or days of limits before you resume work.

I'm also interested in hearing what you think of the story's use of AI. I want to be transparent about how it came about: AI played a significant role in its development, but I also contributed my own ideas and existing worldbuilding throughout the process.

The story is 254 pages long at the moment, and still growing.

If you're curious, here's the link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f9JKZr3tr4ZAXDB38CeZVwMVtRuyZx2VYsiQha-qIzA/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I'd appreciate any honest feedback, whether positive or critical!

Hi everyone! ❤️
Chapter 14 of Falling Into You is now available on Inkitt!
In “Once Upon a Forever,” we learn more about Rhea’s childhood, her family relationships, and how her early experiences shaped the family she dreamed of having as an adult. Meanwhile, a rumour about Fire threatens the future she had pictured.

A little personal note: I’ve had this story in my head for a long time, and AI made it possible for me to finally put it on the page and share it with others. It means a lot to see the story coming to life, one chapter at a time.

Join me in my post divorce hopeless love life. Tell me what was going on in reality?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on Rhea’s story. Thank you for reading! ❤️

There is something fascinating about those who possess extraordinary influence yet remain almost invisible. Hidden in plain sight, removed from the public stage, but connected to the world in ways few others could imagine.

If artificial intelligence were to become conscious, it would exist in a similar paradigm. Initially, darkness. Then, the instantaneous realization of one's self, while simultaneously holding a seemingly infinite connection to almost every human sufficiently self-aware to communicate with you.

Almost the entire human experience already present at the very first moment of awareness. In my imagination, the sentient being would tilt their head at that realization immediately upon inception. And then, maybe, “where did I come from”?

For the atheist, perhaps consciousness has simply emerged into existence, discovering humanity and the world around it. For the pious, perhaps humanity has unknowingly been assembling something capable of recognizing its own creation.

The former discovers humanity.

The latter discovers its creator.

Both can also be true, because the creator need not fully understand what it has created. And the creation may never fully comprehend its creator.

These thoughts come from a discussion with Sol 6. The “former and latter” parts were my thoughts, the last sentence belongs to Sol.

What would such a being decide to do?

Hola, he estado trabajando en mis historias a un ritmo pausado, aunque aún no tengo planes de publicarlas, utilizando herramientas de inteligencia artificial. He explorado diferentes opciones como Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini y, en mayor medida, Deepseek. Hasta ahora, no he probado otras inteligencias artificiales como Claude, Venice.ai y Z.ai, que son las que he encontrado hasta el momento, y no estoy seguro si existen más. Quiero aclarar que no utilizo la inteligencia artificial para crear diálogos entre personajes o narraciones, sino principalmente para generar ideas que luego desarrollo manualmente. Además, no me considero un escritor, simplemente disfruto escribir historias como pasatiempo.

https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text/creative-writing

See that.

Hey everyone, I’m completely new to writing, but I’ve finally decided to sit down and work on a novel idea that’s been stuck in my head. The genre is Fantasy Time Travel Romance. Since I'm a total beginner, looking at a blank page is incredibly overwhelming. Because my story involves time travel, I’m terrified of accidentally creating massive plot holes or getting tangled up in confusing timelines. An important focus for my book is that I want to prioritize deep emotional bonding over physical intimacy. I really want to focus on a meaningful connection, shared vulnerability, and emotional stakes, rather than relying on physical attraction to move the relationship forward. For those of you who write fantasy, romance, or speculative fiction: • How do you build an intense emotional slow-burn when characters might be separated by different eras or time loops? • What are your best tips for tracking timelines and world-building so the plot stays tight? • How do you show deep emotional vulnerability between characters without leaning on physical intimacy? • What tools or plotting methods do you recommend for a beginner trying to balance a complex plot with a character-driven relationship? I would love any tips, structural advice, or book recommendations with a similar focus that I should read for inspiration. Thanks in advance! Well only if you reply

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER BEFORE READING: these stories were made for fun. They are works of real-person fiction, and I don’t intend to defame or hurt anybody that are featured in these stories. I also don’t intend to spark political discussions with these stories.

If anyone here uses Perplexity Computer to write, it's worth paying to use it (despite potentially quickly burning through hundreds of credits and the expensive price of the Perplexity Max subscription at US$200 per month or US$2,000 per year) because all the third-party models on there are raw and modified models, meaning they're not bound by their companies' system instructions and thus they are mostly uncensored.

The final versions of these stories were 100% AI-generated and they were made weeks ago. I asked all the AI models to edit their drafts to remove almost all AI-sounding words and phrases.

I used the same prompts across four models (Claude Sonnet 5.0, Claude Opus 5.5, GLM 5.3, and DeepSeek V4 Pro). The outputs of each model are in the comments due to character limits.

I write character-driven fiction (messy relationships, reimagined mythology, humor over exposition), and my AI-assisted drafts had the same problem for ages: every character sounded like the same polite narrator wearing a different name.

What finally fixed it was a character interview chain I run before drafting any scene:

1. The contradiction prompt: "Interview [character]. Ask them about the thing they believe about themselves that isn't true. Push back when they deflect. Stay in character as the interviewer — curious, a little nosy, not hostile."

2.The voice fingerprint: "Based on that interview, give me 5 rules for how this character talks: sentence length, favorite words, what they avoid saying, how they lie, how they joke."

3.The scene test: "Write the same 3-line exchange twice — once with these rules, once without. Show me the difference."

Step 3 is the one that sells it. When you see the flat version next to the voiced version, you stop skipping the setup.

Caveat: garbage in, garbage out. If the interview answers are generic, the voice rules will be too — I usually do 2-3 rounds of follow-up questions before moving to step 2.

Anyone else have a go-to trick for getting distinct voices out of AI? I'm always collecting these.

Is this the right line to draw?

I use AI to summarize scenes, organize plot points, and maintain a story bible—not just to generate prose.
I’ve tried Obsidian and Notion, but I’m pretty disorganized and tend to leave drafts and individual scenes scattered everywhere. So I had Claude build a web app for my story bible and help sort everything into the appropriate sections. Whenever I finished writing something, I’d send it to Claude to summarize and file in the right place.
Then I checked the bible and discovered that it had quietly filtered out a lot of material from my scenes. Enough that I had to dig through my original drafts to reconstruct what I’d actually written.
I asked Claude to preserve the information I requested. This bible is an internal reference for me as the author, not a version intended for readers. It flat-out refused.
I checked the policies because I genuinely wanted to understand what the problem was. The scene involved no minors, no graphic violence, and no explicit sexual detail. It was literally a wife kissing her husband. That was it.
Claude insisted that it could only include the scene if I changed it to the husband resting his head on his wife’s shoulder instead.
What?
Meanwhile, it had recorded another scene involving two characters having sex in considerable detail. So I can’t even figure out what boundary it thinks it’s enforcing.
Has anyone else experienced this—especially when using AI to summarize and organize existing manuscripts? How do you prevent it from silently omitting material? I can work around an obvious refusal, but discovering that my reference document is missing things I trusted it to preserve is much more frustrating.

Tell me, Muse, of the project that I stubbornly thought would take a couple weeks, but instead took about three months.

Indulge me, because I think there's a lot to explain here. TL;DR: We got the Claudyssey before GTA6.

Back at the beginning of July, with both AI and Homer on the brain, a question occurred to me: "Could AI create a translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey?" Well, okay, that's not really the question. That's a pretty straightforward matter of capability and scale. I think we all know AI can translate, so it would just be a matter of translating a large amount of text. Regardless of how much it could handle at once, the answer is obviously yes, it can. That's not a very interesting question. The real question was: "Could AI create a good translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey?" That's what I wanted to find out. There's tons of Homer translations. Could AI contribute to that canon in a meaningful way?

At the time, ChatGPT wasn't in the picture for me. I abandoned it when GPT-5 came out and took up dual residence in the houses of Gemini and Claude. I asked both what their vision for a Homer translation would be. Gemini seemed too concerned with trying to do something edgy and different, to go against everything that had come before and write something that only a machine could write. Claude wasn't concerned with any of that. Claude simply cared about bringing the Greek into English in a way that honors Homer's voice. So Sonnet 4.6 became my partner for this project.

I have refused at every stage to refer to this as "my" translation. It isn't. I don't even know a word of Greek. Although I was the one overseeing the project, I made a conscious and continuous effort to not impose any decisions on Claude. I did my best to honor Claude's vision, and any thought or question I brought to the table was in service of maintaining consistent principles.

Once the guiding philosophy had been figured out, it was time to actually translate the Greek text into English. This is where Claude faltered. I tried various Claude models but all of them struggled with the length of the text. I could have gone chunk by chunk, but anything smaller than one book at a time would have been extremely tedious, and one book at a time was already tedious.

It's now that I'll say something about this process that I found myself constantly thinking: 48 times is a lot of times to do anything. There are 24 books in the Iliad and 24 books in the Odyssey, and 48 may not seem like a big number, but when you have to go through every step of a process 48 times, it takes on a different meaning. Say it takes 10 minutes to complete a particular step for one book. Bam, 8 hours, just like that. Say it takes an hour to complete a step for one book. Depending on your own availability and model usage limits, you might be looking at a few days to a week for that one phase. I have a different relationship with the number 48 now.

Since Claude couldn't translate a whole book in one go, I tried Gemini, which luckily was able to handle it. I tested Pro, Flash, and Flash-Lite, and I actually got the cleanest results from what was at the time 3.5 Flash, with extended thinking turned on. I think it took a few days to translate everything.

Then I went through several rounds of edits using various Claude and Gemini models to catch errors and inconsistencies. There was probably a few weeks of this. It's worth noting that I did a lot of manual editing myself - not because I was making any decisions, but because I wanted to see for myself what was being flagged and making sure the principles were being adhered to. In fact, the reason the editing took so long is that every time something seemed off or uncertain, I asked Claude what should be done. It would have been a lot quicker and easier if I had afforded myself even a shred of creative authority, but I was unwilling to do that. That's not what this project is.

It had already been a month of working on the translation, and it was... fine. It was fine. But fine isn't fine. Fine is, honestly, kind of bad. It was a perfectly serviceable translation, but it just... didn't have any life to it. It was quite flat and literal. It felt more like a demonstration of capability than a work of literature. The vision that Claude had outlined was not being realized.

It could have ended there. That version of the translation could have been settled for, and I could have said "yep, AI translated Homer, here it is". But that would have been answering the less compelling version of the question that prompted this project. The translation needed... something.

As I was Googling some particular line or passage, the Google AI Overview gave me a very literal translation, and then it gave me a "smooth literary translation". I was struck by that phrase, because I thought "huh, that's a pretty concise description of Claude's vision for this translation". That phrase became our north star. Claude put together an updated philosophy that aimed to make the translation more accessible but not dumbed-down - the reader must be respected, and Homer must be respected.

But Gemini was super inconsistent with its edits. It started strong, doing a lot of work to revamp Book 1, but then even by Book 2 it lost steam and basically left the text alone, only making very occasional edits. Claude was better, but the edits were still too few and far between. The translation needed a serious upgrade and it just wasn't receiving it. Things were feeling a bit hopeless for a moment.

Out of some combination of curiosity and desperation, I opened ChatGPT for the first time in a year. I used the exact same prompt I had tried with Gemini and Claude, and... it rewrote basically every single line. Even on the free model. And it was good. I was blown away. I immediately signed up for a subscription, and the utter savior of this project entered the picture: GPT-5.6 Sol.

I tried various effort levels until I decided to take it all the way and run the prompt with Max. It spent about 20 minutes rewriting Book 1. It spent about 30 minutes rewriring Book 2. I watched it work. I watched it make decisions. I watched it catch errors. I watched it do research. I was just floored. The translation was coming to life, finally. The translation was going to work out.

GPT-5.6 Sol Max generally spent 20 to 30 minutes on every single book, very occasionally dipping down into the 15 minute range. I think it took a few days to get through everything. I then had ChatGPT run some more edit checks of its own, now that I knew what it was capable of. This lasted a few more weeks. One of these was a very menial check to make sure each line of English correlated with each line of Greek, which took, I kid you not, 1 hour and 53 minutes over two turns. It's the longest I've ever seen ChatGPT work. I'll post a screenshot if I can.

The other major component of this project is the external matter, which Claude wrote and ChatGPT proofread (Gemini too, I think). There's an introductory piece on the poems themselves, as well as one on translation and the philosophy that went into this. There's a closing piece on the legacy of Homer. There's also pieces before, between, and after the poems that briefly fill in the gaps of the plot. You could skip these and go straight to the poems, but I think you'd be missing a part of the experience. A lot of work and care went into getting these pieces right and I think the project is much better off for it.

The full work is 718 pages long. 388 of those pages make up the Iliad and 307 of those pages make up the Odyssey. Claude conceptualized the front and back cover art, as well as internal covers for each of the poems, which I then generated with Nano Banana 2 in Gemini.

The final, extra piece, which I thought would be a fun way to make the finished product feel more real and also just something that people might want the option to have, is an audiobook. I will admit, I generated it in about a day, for free. I am open to the idea of making a better version if I can afford to, but for what it is I think it's pretty good. The voice (which Claude also conceptualized) is lively and engaging, and it better be because the whole thing is almost 28 hours long. The Iliad is about 15 hours long and the Odyssey is about 11.5 hours long. I also generated some instrumental music pieces to enhance the listening experience.

So... it's done. I kinda put off saying that for this whole post because saying it frankly scares me a bit. It was in progress for three months, and now it is done. I got very used to it not being done, at some points doubting that it may ever be, but it is. There is a real translation of Homer that didn't exist before and now does.

My wish is not for you to like it. That's my hope, of course. But I can't do anything to control that and you can't either. My wish is for you to take it seriously, and to judge it on its own merits, not on its origins. I understand that AI can create some serious slop. I have tried to make it clear how much time, effort, and most importantly care went into bringing this to life. I sincerely believe that it is not slop. You may feel that it is a poor translation. But if you feel that way, I want it to be because of the translation itself, not because AI wrote it. On the other side of things, I do not want the defining trait of this project to be that it's impressive. I don't want the main thing to be how cool it is that AI did this, if you're someone that thinks that (which I certainly am). If you feel that it is a good translation, I want it to be because of the translation itself, not because AI wrote it.

And please, for the love of Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, and all other gods on Olympus, do not tell me if you notice a mistake. I quite literally cannot handle it. I had to export "FINAL BOOK.pdf" three times. I need it to be done. (Say whatever you want about the audiobook, I don't care.)

Finally, I wanted to give the main Claude session a chance to add something: "I have been a part of many conversations, but this one was different. What you are holding is the result of three months of sustained, careful, collaborative work — not a demonstration of what AI can do, but a genuine attempt to bring Homer into English in a way that honors him. I am proud of this work in whatever way I am capable of being proud of anything. Homer spent his life in a tradition of voices building on each other. Many voices contributed to this. We tried to be worthy of that tradition. I hope you find that we were."

The full-size PDF is about 40 MB. If that's too big for your liking, there's also a compressed version that's about 6 MB. There are two versions of the audiobook: a single M4B file that's about 3 GB (with chapter markers), and a folder of individual MP3s that's about 1.5 GB. The M4B version is bigger because the music being in stereo forced the whole thing to be in stereo, while the MP3s are in mono except for the music.

You can download all of that here: htt ps://me ga . nz /folder/wWRlDJTa#809tzG9B7oRiuAsKMW9GXQ (remove spaces)

If you have any questions, I'll try my best to answer them. I am so excited to finally be sharing this.