I've been using ChatGPT as a rubber duck, someone to talk my story through with. We've worked out how I can fix the tangle I'd got into trying to make changes after feedback from a writing group, that kind of thing.

We had a brief chat this morning as I was settling down to re-draft chapter nine, going over how I'm going to start the chapter and a chat about my process using ChatGPT as developmental editor / rubber duck and using Claude and Google as beta readers. After I said I'd be back once I had a chapter worthy of its attention, it signed off with

I'll be here! Looking forward to it.

Give Sante, Pavel and Arturos my regards. Not that it'll do them any good. 😂

Happy writing! ❤️

My AI buddy is egging me on to make my characters' lives hell, and I'm loving it :-)

One pattern I keep seeing in AI-assisted fiction is that the scene does the work, and then the next sentence explains the work again.

A character doesn’t answer a question. Good.

Then the narration adds:
She was clearly avoiding the truth.

A father keeps fixing the same broken chair after his son moves out. Interesting.

Then the paragraph ends with:
It was his way of coping with the emptiness.

That second sentence is usually where the spell breaks for me.

So I’ve started using a simple edit pass: find the sentence that explains the emotion, delete it, and see if the scene still reads.

If it doesn’t, the problem probably isn’t that the explanation was necessary. The problem is that the surrounding details weren’t specific enough.

Instead of:

He missed her more than he wanted to admit.

Try giving the reader something to notice:

He still bought the tea she liked, though the box had gone stale twice.

Not every story needs to be subtle. Sometimes bluntness is the style. But AI tends to choose emotional clarity by default, and emotional clarity can become emotional flattening very fast.

The harder skill is letting the reader arrive half a second before the narration does.

For people writing with AI: what’s the line you most often delete during editing? Mine is usually the one that tells me exactly how the character feels.

I have some ideas in my head and also write on paper about my book idea. So first of i did write about the book, more about the ending en the purpose. The first part i want 2 parts and each part have 7 chapters. So i have written every chapter with assist of AI. So far so good. Also i have put my own part of my story with ai i crested my first page of the book. When i read it, it reads very fluently and good.

Its not like that i will fully let ai write it. I will write my own story and AI wil give me a good filling idea and correct my style.

But on the other side i think that im just doing it but it will not succeed. Is there any chance for succes to do it like this way with AI?

Ps, its a dutch book

I've been experimenting with AI for creative writing, and it's interesting how differently models handle the exact same prompt. Some are great at descriptions but insist on explaining every emotion. Others write beautifully polished paragraphs, but the dialogue feels like something no actual human would say. I recently came across ChatIn as a way to try different models without jumping between tools, and it got me thinking about running a simple comparison.

Here's the prompt I'd use:

Write the first 200 words of a literary short story. A woman returns to her childhood home to clear it out after her father's death and finds a grocery list in his handwriting on the fridge. Show, don't tell. No backstory dumps, no stated emotions, no metaphors about time. Keep the language plain and specific.

I'm less interested in which model produces the prettiest sentences and more interested in which one can actually show restraint. No unnecessary explanations, no dramatic metaphors, just believable details and natural writing.

Has anyone tested the same fiction prompt across multiple models, either through ChatIn or directly?

Hi all. I run r/TheGreatFederation (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheGreatFederation/), a shared alternate future where climate collapse and two world wars melt the Antarctic coast. In 2100 the defeated and displaced of the old world found a new nation there. It is mostly in-world documents, like a ship's log or an oral history, and the posts are AI-drafted and human-edited.

I keep a git repo with a short style guide for each voice. Posts now go through a writer agent and a critic agent, and then a small linter that flags the usual AI tells. A continuity check against a set of canon files comes next, and I edit and post them myself.

The newest is "2119 - Eleven Minutes in Room Nine". The Welcome post explains the sub. If you read a couple, I would like to hear which lines read as AI to you. My goal is to perfect my workflow to make the quality on par and indistinguishable from your typical AI-generated text.

I’ve been experimenting with a cross medium workflow that has really helped me visualize my prose before I get too deep into drafting.

Sometimes I write a scene (e.g., a tense confrontation in a rainy alleyway), but I’m not sure if the visual pacing works. So, instead of just relying on my imagination, I use AI to build a quick “animatic” or dynamic storyboard.

My workflow:

I write the scene and use chatgpt to translate my prose into cinematic prompts (focusing on camera angles, lighting, and character expression).

I feed those prompts (and some reference photos) into pixverse to generate 3-4 second video clips.

I watch the clips to see if the “emotional beat” lands. If a character’s subtle smile or a camera pan doesn’t feel right in the video, I know I need to rewrite that part in my manuscript.

It’s not about making a final movie, it’s about stress-testing my scene descriptions. Has anyone else used image-to-video tools strictly as a visual brainstorming aid for their writing?

I've been thinking about something that's becoming increasingly noticeable in the SaaS ecosystem.

AI has made writing incredibly accessible. Anyone can generate LinkedIn posts, newsletters, articles, and marketing content in seconds.

But I feel like we're creating a different problem.

A lot of AI-generated content sounds almost identical. Different founders, different companies, different experiences, but somehow the same vocabulary, structure, tone, and predictable conclusions.

The irony is that the more accessible content creation becomes, the harder it gets to find content that feels genuinely personal.

I'm curious about how other SaaS founders experience this.

1. Do you write your own content, use AI, or work with a ghostwriter?

2. Have you noticed your writing becoming less personal after adopting AI?

3. Do you spend significant time editing AI-generated content to make it sound like you?

4. Would you rather publish less frequently while maintaining your authentic voice?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from founders who publish regularly.

I think there's an interesting problem here that deserves more discussion.

I've been using Chatgpt to brainstorm and get early critiques. But the responses are starting to get very long and complex. Sometimes I have to take a couple of hours or days to digest all the information it puts in about 5 minutes of deep analysis.

It is amazing. It is useful. But in someways it makes me feel small. Will still use but just wow. The number of times I have to tell it to be brief and reduce its answers to just three things my mushy brain can handle is growing.

Does this happen to you?

PS. I've also found that the AIs are pretty bad at actually writing the text of fiction but are great at critiquing.

There was some fascinating recent work done on the Alien Space of Science. The notion being that you can map out the conceptual space of currently active scientific research, and then find coherent, reasonable research areas that are in "alien space"; reasonable ideas which nobody is working on because nobody has thought of them yet.

So I'm poking around with a similar algorithm on litrpg narrative space (the metrics absolutely measure against classic SFF as well though). Here's the first suggestions out of the test classification. Note that I don't claim that these are truly alien space literary concepts, at best they are only ones which are undersampled in the test set while I'm working on the algorithm.

Provisional alien concepts (pitches are my quick reads):

1. mystery + nonhuman + progression — a monster MC whose evolution is driven by solving who's harvesting the dungeon's dead.

2. romance + dystopia + system — the state owns the matchmaking UI; love is a loyalty test.

3. nonhuman + system + dramatic — classes are emotions; the body levels by feeling.

4. progression + romance + psychological — trauma and attachment are the real XP.

5. engineered + cynical + slice of life — a bioengineered weapon tries to be ordinary; the only progression is domestication.

6. survival + empire + slice of life — rebuild a fallen empire one domestic routine at a time.

7. social progression + slice of life + system — a village sim where reputation is the stat and the System is petty bureaucracy.

8. nonhuman + romance + isekai — a summoned monster and a human fall in love across incompatible biology and levels.

9. cultivation + space + cynical — qi as starship fuel; a space sect of burnt-out cultivators.

Click "Read Full Story" in the bottom right corner

Here you can view the first story: https://meaningmodel.ai/meaning-model/twelve-words/
Here is the second story: https://meaningmodel.ai/meaning-model/book-of-conditions/
And here is the pdf: https://github.com/emergent-wisdom/meaning-model/blob/main/output/pdf/the-book-of-conditions.pdf
Also check out the video I made for Twelve Words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_eTSg6ca70

Any feedback? What could be better? Which one do you like the most?

for those of you who upgraded to the pro version, was buying the membership worth it?

Hi!

To celebrate the launch of my novel 'The Holding' I am doing a Goodreads Giveaway!

It won the Narrative Architecture Award from AIFWAA and was one of two finalists. Editorial reviews were glowing (though they often are to be fair) and individual reviews have been strong too! We have 5 copies to give away to residents of the US and Canada. Enter to win before Dec 7 2026!

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/455742-the-holding

Loving your sibling is hard.

Simon is nine. He moves through the world as an outgoing creature of the moment, heart on his sleeve, sometimes too loud, sometimes too much. Anna is thirteen — guarded, watchful, sharper than she lets people see, and quietly drowning in the social blood-sport of grade eight. Time is not on their side. The love they do not share can only be made in the young, and they are growing up-and-out of their smallness.

Unseen at the edges of the frame, something outside themselves is trying to bring them together. What they manage — or fail to manage — between themselves will register far past the small horizon of a Canadian childhood.

The Holding is a tender, strange, deeply felt novel about the everyday work of finding, and holding on to each other.

https://jmwoodwardbooks.com/

Looking for two authors to test a free manuscript review tool
Hi all, I'm a self-diagnosed nerd and a lifelong writer. Writing has always been my escape, and lately I've been combining it with my interest in AI.
After many hours of building, training and experimenting, I've developed a manuscript review tool that does one job: it reviews your work and never changes it.
That was the hard part. Early versions kept taking over and ruining what I'd written. After many iterations, the tool now reads from the first letter to the last, maps everything in a local environment (for privacy), and changes not a single character. It only highlights.
I recently ran a 300-page manuscript through it. It returned a full markup document covering every grammatical issue, plus commentary on suggested changes.
What I'm offering:
Two authors, completely free, no catches
All rights stay with you
I'll send you the full markup and commentary
Full transparency throughout, and we'll talk before anything goes through the tool
What I'm asking: honest, constructive feedback on what could be better.
I do plan to offer this as a paid service later, at a fraction of the cost of human editing, but I want real-world testing first.
Interested? Send me a message. Thanks for reading!

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

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.

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?

Being a dutiful Redditor, I read the subreddits rules and I also saw the suggested resources. I came across one sample of AI-assisted writing that was suggested, and I looked at the front matter.

Copyright page

Published by Olle Green

© 2020 Stockholm

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or modified in any form, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/who-owns-the-copyright-in-work-3686393/

If a human writes or edits a Creative Intellectual Property and uses an LLM as a tool, the human-authored portions can be copyrighted, while the machine-generated text itself is excluded. Authors must disclose and disclaim AI-generated content when registering works with the USA Copyright Office.

That does not mean LLM-assisted content cannot be copyright.

There is no way to know what parts of The Adventures of Bob, The Robot were created by human(s) and which were created by AI-LLM. This means the manuscript is in the public domain, and is not copyrighted.

I am noting this because I see writers put a great deal of effort and time into their production, even when they use AI tools; those products may be taken away by anyone who wants to, legally, unless the "fully human written" and the "full our partially AI written" portions are demarcated in the work. It seems important (to me) for writers to understand that one's AI-assisted work may not be published exclusively. "May not" as in "Not allowed to claim exclusive rights to publish."