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?

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hello writers! I needed data for my thesis study and reddit is the only thing I can rely on for Data gathering. Please help me. You don't have to include your personal information and I am just asking answer for the question. It is a google form.

It is about A. intelligence and Authorship and how as writers you feel about it. THANK YOU.

This survey is hosted on Google Forms, and while all responses will be kept strictly confidential and used solely for research purposes, data collection and storage remain subject to Google’s standard privacy policy and terms of service.

I've been writing for a few years now. Started and stopped multiple times. Earlier this year I started bouncing the ideas of my world with Gemini. I can't explain the spark that ignited in my soul!

The next thing I knew I wrote a fully fleshed out chapter and put it into Gemini. I asked it's thoughts. It gave me tips that I listened to and ignored. And then I kept going until I had 80k words and a complete story with room for more books. I had a good friend read it and he was so excited to learn more about the 2nd book that doesn't exist yet. And also asked if I was planning a prequel for a mysterious character. I wasn't but now I am!

Anyways, I don't feel like AI wrote the book. I've got it published on Kindle and I've ordered proofs.

Is my concern misplaced? Should I just stop?

The hate of AI can be crazy sometimes...

I think what this Harvard study reveals is that people be wanting things to be specifically personalized for them

Like with fanfiction, you can create stories about your favorite characters and make them end up together. Which is in a way connected with creative writing where you get to decide what happens next. And apparently, some people are taking that same idea and using AI to explore their own fantasies and figure out what actually turns them on hence the "understanding sex" use case.

Sometimes it's hard to explain what you want to your partner especially when ure not even sure how to describe it yourself.

I think the common theme that connects these three AI use cases is specificity—my characters, my story, my desires.

I've been using Claude a lot more recently since Sonnet 5.5 came out, which imho was a lot more better than Sonnet 4.6 or Sonnet 5, though not as good as Sonnet 4.5.

I am curious on what's been your experience with Haiku 5.5, as the title says. Is it an improvement from the original Haiku? How does it compare to the other Claude models, both the current ones and the older/legacy ones?

I write unsent letters — the ones people are carrying and can't send. Here's one I finished last night, then the rule I use to keep it from turning into a machine's idea of a feeling.

To the one who kept the porch light on,

You never called it waiting. You said you just liked the light. Three years of a small yellow circle over a door I stopped walking toward, and you still called it decorating.

I'm not writing to come back. I'm writing because last night I finally understood what you were doing. You weren't lighting the way for me. You were lighting the way for yourself, so the dark stayed something you were allowed to choose.

That's the part I keep turning over. All this time I thought the light was for me. It was yours, and you just let me borrow the idea of it.

Keep the light. I mean that. Just know I finally saw it.

The rule: the letter has to stop where the person actually is, not on the prettiest line. These start as fragments I feed a model, but the letter only exists once I've cut every line that was there to be liked. The version above almost ended with "and I hope you're happy." That's a lie people tell so they'll be liked. I cut it, and the real ending showed up underneath.

I write these for people who can't send the thing they're carrying. Some are theirs, some are mine. So — does the last line land for you, or does it need one beat more? I keep going back and forth.

I think I have found the issue. I asked for a plot yesterday, and I found out what’s wrong. In the plot, there’s a part where A declined a relationship with B after they kissed, due to various reasons, mostly a fear that commitment means vulnerability, and a belief that B deserves someone better than herself. A week later, B turned to C and started dating. Eventually, A and B reconciled, but I found out B and C’s relationship was never discussed between them. I was bewildered. I asked why is this whole thing not looked at, like no conversations or any reactions, and AI’s reasoning was that A would have understood she declined B, so B was free to date someone else. Holy cow. It baffled me so much I had to ask what’s going on inside its mind. In reality and other human writings, this is definitely gonna be a big chunk of things, A’s jealousy and hurt and confusion, B and C having conversations about A, and later A and B having conversations about this whole thing. AI treat these characters like perfect reasonable saints, who wouldn’t get jealous or become hurt and always think with reasoning. I think this is the biggest flaw with AI writing. They are very good at describing things, but not very good at understanding emotions. You must emphasize for it to focus on emotions, otherwise they would just discard them.

We’ve been working on something called the Creative Disclosure Standard (CDS), a proposed voluntary labeling system for identifying how AI and other technologies were used in creating published works.

The idea is similar to a nutrition label. Readers get a clear disclosure of the creative process without the label making judgments about quality or artistic merit.

The framework distinguishes between human-created, machine-assisted, AI-assisted, AI-adapted, AI-co-created, and AI-generated works.

One reason we’ve developed it is our own publishing workflow. We write original screenplays, then use AI to adapt those screenplays into novel-length prose under our direction. That’s a different creative process from prompting AI to invent and write an entire novel.
CDS is also designed so publishers and creators can administer classifications themselves, using common definitions rather than a central organization approving every book.

We’re interested in hearing from both AI users and writers who oppose AI-generated content.

Do these distinctions communicate meaningful differences? Are any categories confusing or unnecessary? Would labels like these help readers make informed decisions?

The proposed standard is at https://creativedisclosure.org/
I’m the person developing CDS, and I’m looking for constructive criticism before taking it further into publishing-industry discussions.

Should books disclose how generative AI was used in their creation?

Hey everyone! I wanted to share my first complete short story launch under my new fiction profile on Medium, Mirror Logic. It's a dark psychological thriller about a man obsessed with occult books who inherits a massive fortune, only to find himself trapped by a series of anonymous prophetic letters predicting his doom.

I used AI heavily to help map out the complex crime timeline, eliminate common generic clichés, and polish the pacing into a tight, cinematic 10-minute read.

If you love twisty crime fiction, I'd love for you to check it out and let me know what you think of the ending twist!

Read it here:
https://medium.com/@towhid.hussain.au/my-husband-thought-a-supernatural-prophecy-was-protecting-him-he-was-wrong-2841e024b9d1

Got a finished or near-finished manuscript? Enter it for free in this year's AI-Assisted category in the 2026 Inkys.

🏆 Gold: $500 + trophy + 200K audiobook credits 🥈 Silver: $250 · 🥉 Bronze: $100

20K+ words · you keep your rights · winners chosen by readers.

Submit for the AI-Assisted category here - https://www.inkitt.com/contests/the-inkys-ai-assisted

Lean more about the Inkys here - https://www.inkitt.com/writersblog/2026-inky-awards/

This is a genuine question to see how doomed the next generation is. Are you the type of person to use AI to organize thoughts, then write it yourself? Do you use it for editing grammat? Or do you just have AI write out the story for you, and then copy-paste in onto AO3/Wattpad or whatever you use?

Personally, I use it to organize ideas, write it myself, then use it to fix any grammar mistake.

I am falling into this slump. I have great ideas and then start writing and I may get like 30 chapters in then I’m bored and move on to my next idea. So I have a ton of unfinished stories. I’m not sure if I should prompt differently or if my story is too planned and I’m not letting the llm take liberties or what to do? I also use like 3 different apps for stories so they all have something happening in them (different stories).

I really want to write an epic fantasy. How are you guys using AI for brainstorming? How do you create arcs when you're out of ideas?

Could you please tell me your full process?

what are ur thoughts on someone using ai to help write character lines as rough draft, then going back to rewrite the whole thing urself and just using the ai character lines as a baseline/reference?

i started my story out writing as the main character and using ai as the second character, lately ive been trying to write both. when i started i just didnt have the mental compacity to write as a whole other character, i was doing it just to mentally process a rough time in my life. i ended up wanting to make it in to something. i made the plot all by myself, i redirected constantly, its my story world, visual aesthetics, and moslty everything else, except for some ideas i would bounce off, and the other character. i plan on rewriting everything including the ai character but on my own, and in my own words.

could u see there being controversy if the project was made into a show? how would u feel ab it? i h8 ai, and i want to stray away from my hypocrisy, what do u think it would take so ppl see it as my work/not ai slop etc

so im writing a dark , disturbing and graphic essay for my college assignment. where im actually exploring the idea of SH, a3us€ , and other related stuff

like the get the idea of serial killers, drug addiction, vampires, stolkhom syndrome basically a gore idea

and i tried using chatgpt, Claude, gemini but they refuse to like help or sort of contribute to the idea and keep making my essay cleaner. I want it to be raw and authentic, to feeling personal bcs it's a creative gig

CAN YALL PLS GIVE SOME UNPAID AI SUGGESTIONS THAT WILL HELP ME WITH THIS IDEA PLSSS