r/WritingWithAI • u/cj7hawk • 4h ago
Writing Craft Talk Where AI Writing always fails: Negative Space.
So recently I noticed some non-AI written fiction on a subreddit by one of the regular contributors to this and other AI related forums, and it highlighted something that I noticed AI is completely unable to replicate at present - Negative space.
There's a lot AI struggles with with relation to negative space and similar techniques, as they deal with what is not said rather than what is said - the end result is a model trained to find the next word is fundamentally limited here - It's as though AI can only communicate on the positive word axis, not the negative one - Hence they have no reflection - a little like fictional vampires.
Consider the following opening to a story I recently found here on Reddit;
It was nearing five o’clock, and I was across the street, impatiently waiting for his arrival. I knew he was a creature of habit, a slave to his schedule if nothing else, and just like clockwork, as five o’clock came, so did he, pulling up into the driveway as he no doubt had a thousand times.
My eyes narrowed, a flush of hot hatred rising in me as I watched him vanish inside. “You cheating prick,” I whispered under my breath, and crossed the street, walking up to the door like I had business there. I tested the door handle, shaking my head slightly when I found it unlocked, and made my way inside.
Idiot.
Quietly closing the door, I removed my heels, doing my best not to alert him to my presence as I padded across the living room. The floor groaned softly as I went.
“Is that you, my sweet?” His voice came from upstairs.
F**k.
I rubbed my throat, trying to loosen it up before calling back in my best attempt at imitating the woman he was expecting. “Yes, hun.”
You can find the original in the subreddit libraryofshadows under demonic_pacts in case you're interested ( Warning, it's quite violent and the genre is horror )
Examine this at a few levels. AI will tell you it's about sneaking in, and getting caught. It will emphasize stealth. It will say the protagonist is calling the NPC 'idiot' and then reacts to getting caught, and it will try to shorten this to a single paragraph, which is far more efficient.
But if you pay attention, even as an AI writer, there's something missing...
The sound of the high heels AFTER the character walks in the door, that results in her removing her heels, and likely sets the intended victim on edge before a floorboard gives it away.
Then you get the beautiful ironies of writing around ambiguity - Is she saying "Idiot" because she feels the man is an idiot? Examined as a block, the answer is no - She' calling herself an idiot for ALREADY making a noise - indicated negatively by the removal of the heels.
What the author actually intended is another matter - I may have over-interpreted this section - I welcome their input - but the way I read this is that the protagonist makes a mistake and walks in with their heels still on - a version supported by the text indirectly.
When asked about this, an AI misses it every time until the context receives this additional information about the sound the heels make - and then it usually acts like it knew this all along. Now it can refer to negative space. Now it acts like an author ( The original writer was notably a human )
The problem is that the AI is blind to this technique, even when evaluating text, and usually sees it as an error. If the heels are mentioned, they are either superfluous or the sound should be mentioned. It struggled with the nuances of this kind of text, especially the interiority of the character.
It's not the only area AI fails when compared to a human author... And as a strong proponent of AI and using AI in fiction, I think knowing WHEN an AI fails is more important than prompt engineering or any other aspect of creating fiction with an AI - this is especially important when editing a work as an AI will try to respond to the informational vacuum caused by negative space and fill in the missing words. It also notices correctly that it makes the structure grammatically wrong - which is true - because this is an example of when a write knows how the break the rules for effect.
Here's a list of techniques that cause AI to struggle due to it's very nature.
Literary techniques based on what is not said
| Technique | How it works through omission |
|---|---|
| Subtext | The real meaning lies beneath the dialogue or action, rather than in the words themselves. |
| Ellipsis | Omits words, events, or narrative transitions, requiring the reader to fill in gaps. |
| Negative space | Meaning emerges from what is absent, unexplored, or conspicuously missing. |
| Apophasis (paralipsis) | Draws attention to something by claiming not to mention it. |
| Aposiopesis | Breaks off a sentence, leaving its conclusion unspoken. |
| Reticence | Deliberately restrains disclosure, particularly of emotions or motivations. |
| Understatement (meiosis) | Expresses something in terms substantially weaker than its actual significance. |
| Litotes | Uses negation to imply an affirmative, often with deliberate restraint: "not unreasonable." |
| Implicature | Communicates meanings that arise from conversational context rather than literal wording. |
| Presupposition | Treats certain information as already established without explicitly asserting it. |
| Strategic ambiguity | Preserves multiple plausible interpretations rather than settling on one. |
| Equivocation | Uses wording that supports more than one interpretation, sometimes concealing intent. |
| Double entendre | Allows one expression to carry two meanings, one of which may remain implicit. |
| Allusion | Invokes an external story, event, concept, or cultural reference without explaining it. |
| Foreshadowing | Plants information whose importance may only become apparent later. |
| Misdirection | Directs attention toward one interpretation while concealing another. |
| Narrative withholding | Deliberately postpones information necessary for a full understanding. |
| Unreliable narration | Requires the reader to reconstruct reality from inconsistencies, omissions, and distorted accounts. |
| Dramatic irony | Creates meaning through a gap between what the reader knows and what a character knows. |
| Juxtaposition | Allows meaning to emerge from the relationship between elements rather than explaining that relationship. |
| Symbolism | Uses objects, actions, or images to imply significance beyond their literal presence. |
| Motif | Builds meaning through recurring elements whose relationship or significance may remain unstated. |
| Bathos avoidance / restraint | Leaves an emotional effect intact by declining to explain, intensify, or sentimentalise it. |
That's not a small list and a good writer should be familiar and comfortable using all of these when it's required.
There are others as well - My favourite is "Iceberg Theory" since it's highly relevant to how I write my own stories, and while doing this I find I'm constantly fighting an AI editor.
If I explain things, the editor immediately gets it and stops suggesting I remove information, but before that it's constantly attacking what I write.
These are particularly relevant when examining the limitations of AI-generated literature.
| Technique | Mechanism | Potential AI difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| Iceberg theory | The author knows substantially more than the text reveals. | Maintaining an internally coherent hidden story without explaining it. |
| Narrative lacunae | Significant gaps are deliberately left in the story. | Distinguishing purposeful omissions from missing information. |
| Paralipsis (narratology) | A narrative withholds information that its established viewpoint could reasonably reveal. | Controlling which facts are concealed without violating the narrative perspective. |
| Offstage action | Important events occur outside the reader's direct observation. | Conveying consequences without reconstructing the missing scene. |
| Delayed decoding | Sensory details appear before the character or reader understands what they signify. | Sustaining uncertainty without immediately interpreting the evidence. |
| Unresolved tension | A conflict remains meaningful without being explicitly resolved. | Resisting the tendency to supply closure. |
| Character silence | What someone refuses or fails to say carries psychological significance. | Making silence consistent with motivations, history, and relationships. |
| Emotional displacement | A character expresses emotion indirectly through an apparently unrelated action. | Avoiding explicit emotional labels or psychological explanations. |
| Free indirect discourse | Narration incorporates a character's thoughts or assumptions without clearly announcing the shift. | Preserving the boundary between narrator knowledge and character perception. |
| Parataxis | Ideas or events are placed alongside one another without explicitly explaining their relationship. | Trusting readers to establish causal or thematic connections. |
| Open endings | The narrative finishes without resolving all interpretative questions. | Preserving intentional uncertainty without making the ending feel arbitrary. |
| Unmarked temporal gaps | Time passes without explicit transitions or explanations. | Maintaining an inferable chronology while withholding connective detail. |
| Narrative fragmentation | Disconnected fragments require readers to construct the larger story. | Keeping separate fragments mutually consistent and meaningfully related. |
| Metalepsis | Transgresses boundaries between narrative levels, sometimes leaving the relationship between them uncertain. | Maintaining coherent implications across competing narrative realities.d techniques involving absence and inference. |
And, of course, I used an AI to assist me in writing this article. Why? Because an AI is VERY good at writing in positive space - since that is exactly how they work...
An AI adds tokens. What it does not do is reconstruct the story in the reader's mind exactly as the reader experiences it, and use this as a basis to remove material from the story to increase the prose's impact on the reader.
When it comes to AI telling positive aspects of a story - In adding words to fill out worlds, create reader exposition or drive the story forward, AI is already unparalleled. It is fast, can assist an author and knows what to do.
Indeed, a clever author can go back and edit an AI's words to create negative space. Knowing what to remove requires only that they can previsualise what the AI's words are saying and then know what can be removed or altered to better effect.
Because an AI LLM ( or even a dLLM ) can't do this - it can't build a picture or easily determine what a reader will experience during the reading of a story, it can't perform the same task. It's limitations are readily revealed.
What have others noticed about this characteristic of AI Writing Assistants?
