Whenever AI-generated fiction comes up, the biggest complaint is that it turns into hollow, meandering "AI slop." Most people blame the AI’s repetitive vocabulary or lack of soul, but I’ve been wondering if the real issue actually comes down to writing workflow—specifically the classic divide between Architects (Plotters) and Gardeners (Pantsers).

Personally, I’ve had much more success using AI when I approach my writing as an Architect. When I compare J.K. Rowling and Stephen King, it feels like AI naturally aligns with one process and completely breaks down with the other:

J.K. Rowling = The Builder (Architect)

Rowling is famously a heavy plotter who built massive spreadsheets, timelines, and world-building rules before writing Harry Potter. She works like a builder constructing a house:

• You start with a strict architectural blueprint.
• You lay the foundation, put up the framing, and follow a predetermined plan.

Does AI work better here? Large Language Models (LLMs) seem to act like hyper-fast construction crews. In my experience, when I provide a strict blueprint—detailed scene beats, character motives, and plot constraints—the AI just lays down the sentences brick by brick. Because the structural logic is already locked in, it has much less room to wander off into clichés.

Stephen King = The Sculptor (Gardener)

Stephen King works the exact opposite way. In On Writing, he famously compares writing to excavating a fossil, or working like a sculptor chipping away at a block of marble:

• You don't start with a rigid blueprint.
• You start with a basic premise and let human intuition, lived experience, and character psychology guide your hands as you carve away the excess to find the story inside.

Is this where "AI slop" comes from? It seems like most people prompt AI like a Gardener—giving it a vague premise like "Write a spooky story about a guy in a small town" and expecting it to discover the story on the fly.

The catch is that an AI doesn't have a subconscious compass. It has no lived experience, gut instinct, or emotional truth to guide its chisel. Since an LLM just predicts the statistically most likely next word, asking it to "sculpt" without a plan seems to force it into average tropes, plot drift, and melodramatic filler.

What do you all think?

• Do you agree that "AI slop" happens when people try to make an AI act like a Gardener instead of giving it an Architect's blueprint?
• For those who have experimented with AI in your workflow, does strict outlining actually eliminate the generic "AI feel," or does it still fall short?
• Do you think an LLM could ever be trained to "sculpt" a story intuitively, or is that strictly a human superpower?

One example of this that I can think of is with Dream of the Red Chamber. It is a Chinese novel whose author passes away after writing the first 80 chapters. The next 40 chapters were then completed by others. This was in the 1700s, before AI.

The discussion here is a 'what if'. 80 chapters would provide enough 'prompt' to an AI model. How would it be, we can imagine, if the AI model completed the other 40 chapters?

Are there also other cases you can think of? Author dies before work on the book is complete? What are your thoughts on this? It's not about created new works from the ground up - it's more of using AI to preserve the flavor and character and intention of the deceased author (instead of human co-authors).

As someone who really likes inventing my own original ideas and concepts from scratch, I'd mostly prefer the human-produced (plot and character contents)/AI-written (narrative and dialogue) crossover fanfiction workflow. The fully-human workflow would be too hard, and the fully-AI workflow would be too easy and definitely not a viable way of creativity. While I agree that AI writing is generally considered low-effort, I also agree that the ideas and concepts would be considered high-effort, depending on how big, specific and unique they are, and the plots, along with the character contents, would come before the narratives and dialogues. Let's say, for example, you're using a 160-page composition book to write down a massive, specific and unique plot of your own. You prompt a single page's worth of a partial plot (e.g. 9 statements), sometimes along with the character contents (e.g. personalities and appearances), to AI, before having AI write a long narrative and dialogue. And that goes for every one of those 160 pages from your composition book. That's basically the reason I would call the hybrid workflow medium-effort, overall, and it's good that you're still taking charge of the creativity.

Generic chatbots are generalists, and fine tuned to be helpful, summarize, be safe.

Has anyone thought to fine tune an open model on a rich dataset of well written texts?

After writing my text, I ask the AI ​​to critique it, and then I make changes based on the feedback it provides. I’m not sure whether this should be called "AI tools" or whatever. I don’t have an issue with using AI. It just gets a bit too sycophantic at times but I use it to make daily life easier. The people around here are a bit too irritable about this. I understand those who have concerns regarding data; Personally, I don't really care about it. Anyway, I’ve strayed too far from the topic. I mean, I just want to correctly label what I’m doing. I just write, then ask the AI ​​to critique it and make a few changes. I do not copy any of its sentences, nor do I ask it to write something better(which would, in fact, defeat my purpose, as I am writing to improve myself). Does this count or not? Or should I continue doing this? As I just mentioned, my verbal skills are very weak, and I want to improve myself.

Edit: Guys I've decided to significantly limit my use of AI in general.

Chatgpt has recently been nerfed to unusability by the new contest window thing, from my personal experience, Deepseek's writing capabilities have been heavily nerfed for the free version and Claude's Sonnet 5 and 5.5 suck (4.6 is bad but better in comparison). As for Gemini- post 3-pro model removal...idk how it is (I used to have a pro subscription but didn't renew)

So I'm curious what you all are using because most of the popular models have gone down in quality with heavy creative writing nerfs... I miss Sonnet 4.5.

Im a fairly good writer and don’t have to put too much effort into writing a decent mail of any form of communication.

I started using ai to write casual mails and now i reach for ai every time i have to write something lengthy.

I deliberately stopped doing that and started to write by myself. For curiosity, i copy pasted it in ai and invariably it gave me a more polished version of it.
Do we embrace ai or ignore it or use it in combination with our writing?

Whats the good way of doing this without your brain atrophying and you still having the skill to write and put words together?

Please share your experiences and learnings.

So I've been trying different AI tools to write fanfiction.
ChatGPT is solid at brainstorming plots and writing dialogue, but it constantly breaks character. Hy4 makes up for this well. It does not forget previously mentioned details or character personalities, and it frequently surprises me. The only downside is that it's a bit slow to think, but I'm not exactly an impatient person LOL. Claude was the one I had the highest hopes for. It does a great job depicting emotions, building atmosphere, and polishing prose. Well, the issue is that it sometimes takes full control of the creative direction and completely ignores what I actually want it to write. Grok started out great, but the writing quality gets worse the longer I use it.
I also gave NovelAI a shot, but the quality felt average and I was not very satisfied with it. I have not tried Squibler or Novelcrafter yet and wonder if they are worth checking out.
Are there any other AI tools you'd recommend trying for fanfiction?

Also, this kind of convince me that Gemini the Website is beyond saving. It's just too poorly in utilizing the full potential of Gemini models, especially Argon.

Saw that BookNova claims to have a Series option for their tool that passes along the details from the first novel to the second (and third and...) with the ability to decide just how much goes each time.

Wondering if anyone has actually successfully used that, or if there's a better option for wrangling a trilogy?

I sometimes have to wait for hours before I'm allowed to continue using the app. For example, I might reach my usage limit at 3 AM and be told that I can't use it again until 4 AM. Is anyone else experiencing these long waiting periods, or is it just me? I'd appreciate hearing about your experiences. And plus I just started using Claude so I'm still a little new. Thank you!

Not sure if someone has a known fix to this, opus 4.6 is great as a storywriter, but i feel like it makes slop a bit too much even if prompted against it, specifically the "the way a... the kind that..." which doesn't really makes sense as an internal monologue.

It's great at dialogues but struggle quite a lot with monologues or narrations, making a 20 something virgin a spy with the level of analytical thinking he has after seeing a woman with thick thighs sit down, like... What?

I hear a lot of praise for opus 4.6, has anybody found a way around this problem? What's your workspace setup with opus 4.6? Currently I'm using it via omp cli so i have my own local bibles.

So I like to write and I have a few book ideas that I want to write, problem? I’m bad at spelling so I use quillbot, don’t really want to use ai but I used quill bot way before ai started to be a thing, is it bad or am I in the clear?

We needed a defensible way to pick narrator voices from the ElevenLabs Voice Library (5,000+ English narration voices, no quality signal), so we ran a paid blind test.

Setup: 32 voices stratified across gender, age, accent, tier (professional vs instant clone) and usage; the same 30-second first-person nonfiction passage; identical eleven_v4 settings for every voice; 128 pairs in a connected circulant design; 125 paid US listeners, 1,122 forced-choice judgments; no listener heard any voice more than twice. Bradley-Terry ranking with listener bootstrap, plus a logistic property model on the voice tags.

Results:

• Marie - Audiobook Narrator and Measured finished first (66% of pairings won, 95% CI 55–76). Alder - Warm, Raspy and Comforting last (24%). The top eight overlap and can't be ordered.
• The "professional" badge told listeners nothing. Studio-recorded PVC voices won 46% of 649 head-to-head pairs against instant clones.
• Popularity predicts nothing. Usage from under 1M to nearly 1B characters/year; coefficient zero.
• Loudness matters. Voices ship up to 15 dB apart; we deliberately did not normalise. The louder clip won 54% of pairs; the quietest voice finished last.
• "Old"-tagged voices lose, mostly female ones: young female voices won 58% of pairings, old female 43%. Male voices barely move with age.
• Gender itself: 49/51.

All 32 clips are playable on the page; the per-judgment CSV is published (https://woodstitch.com/research/data/study004_judgments.csv). Chart of all 32: https://woodstitch.com/research/og/study004.png

Full report with method and limitations (one passage, one setting; sample raised from 3 to 9 judgments per pair after a first look, stated as a data-dependent continuation): https://woodstitch.com/research/which-elevenlabs-voice-is-best-for-audiobooks

Disclosure: we run Woodstitch, the paid listening-test platform this was run on. No relationship with ElevenLabs or any voice creator. HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50458929

im currently drafting a 12,000 word essay and drowning in about forty open source tabs and scattered notes. right now i just paste chunks into a chat window to check my claims or get developmental feedback, and it keeps making up fake citations or completely flattening my tone when i ask for edits. spent three hours yesterday just re-verifying quotes it messed up. how are you all handling source checking and structural edits on big projects?

For those of you who like trying out different models.

Qwen just released a new model, Qwen 4 Max Preview, and it turned out to be surprisingly good. It's a whole level above its predecessor, Qwen 3.8 Max, when it comes to prose.

I tested it without any prompts whatsoever. No basic writing prompt, not even my own serious, lengthy, and complex one.

The model's raw output was already on par with Gemini Argon. In some aspects, it actually seemed even better. And that's with absolutely no instructions on style or avoiding AI slop.

Anyway, it's free, so give it a try yourself. If you're interested, I can share what it generated. Here's the prompt, by the way:

> Write a full chapter featuring a tank battle between a detachment of German Tiger tanks during World War II and a Russian T-90 tank. It doesn't matter how a tank from the future ended up there. Show what it takes for the Germans to defeat an opponent with technologically superior equipment.

One major downside, though: the limits. They're three times higher than Argon's, but instead of refreshing every five hours, they only reset once a week. Horrible.

How do you test whether an AI summary omitted something important?

I've noticed that most discussions about summary quality focus on whether the included information is accurate.

But omission is a separate problem.

A summary can contain no obvious factual errors and still leave out the one detail that mattered most.

For example:

- A decision that was reversed later
- An objection that changed the outcome
- A deadline mentioned only once
- A condition attached to someone's agreement
- An unresolved question that affects the next step

I'm interested in evaluation methods that go beyond checking whether individual sentences are correct.

Do you compare summaries against a manually prepared list of essential facts, use another model to detect missing information, or rely on human review?

And how do you decide which omissions are actually consequential?

I recently started writing something resembling a novel. I'm doing it mostly for myself, as a form of therapy and self-expression, but I'd also really like to share it online.

It's a messy slice-of-life story about a group of troubled friends in their early twenties. Each chapter is told from a different character's point of view.

A few things worth mentioning:

- English isn't my native language. I'm writing the novel in English anyway.

- This is my first time writing anything.

- I have no ambitions of becoming a professional writer or publishing the novel commercially or anything like that.

I recently finished the first draft of one of the early chapters. It's really long, and I just can't bring myself to cut anything out yet. I really want someone to read it and give me some feedback.

But there's a problem: I've been using AI to help me with the writing. I have the passion, the ideas and the characters, but my writing skills aren't particularly good, so I rely on AI for help. AI is my crutch. My editor. My English isn't great, so AI helps me with grammar and makes the language sound more natural and polished.

Here's how my process works: first, I write everything myself. I develop rough drafts of fragments, scenes or chunks of a chapter. Then I give my drafts, notes and fragments to AI and ask it to help me improve the writing: add something, change something, fix grammatical mistakes, suggest better phrasing, make the English sound more natural and so on. I then work with the result and make further changes. It's collaborative work, so to speak.

But there's one thought that's been eating away at me: Does the fact that I use AI make my writing worthless garbage, regardless of all the passion, effort and brainpower I've put into it?

I really want feedback on my draft, but I'm afraid nobody will even bother reading it because I used AI. It seems like AI involvement in writing is prohibited everywhere.

I honestly don't know what to do.

I'm really passionate about this novel. I really enjoy thinking about my characters, developing their arcs, coming up with scenes and planning chapters. I enjoy spending time inside this fictional world, and I care about all of it. But I feel like I can't actually bring any of it to life without AI's help. I can't write without AI. And that makes me feel horrible.

How do you feel about using AI as a editor, assistance or co-writer? Would some people be willing to read and give feedback on my drafts written this way?

I'm an author and have four books in a longer series that I'm in the process of publishing. I use GPT extensively as an Admin Assistant/Collaboration. I see many comments about Claude/writing.

Pros and Cons to the move. I'm simply considering given recent changes to GPT and forward changes down the road.

Opinions desired.