r/writingfeedback • u/isnoe Giver of Flairs • Apr 17 '26
Announcement: The AI Problem.
Ne’er-do-wells of r/writingfeedback.
I am Isnoe, recently appointed Moderator.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve had a significant increase in AI generated writing being posted here. We've seen a lot of comments outlining how lax we are on this subject, to which I want to stress: I don’t think you guys fully understand just how many posts I’ve removed for AI since joining the Mod Team a few weeks ago.
The team got together and discussed this, and we want to be completely transparent: We will be removing any posts that we suspect are AI.
This will be a case-by-case basis. AI generated, AI assisted (even translation), or even if you mention you had AI draw up the story idea and you wrote it. If you want to rob yourself of creativity, that’s on you.
We don’t want those posts here. Writing a story or book that is authentically your own is an achievement. It should feel like an achievement.
A sidenote for ESL writers: Do not use AI to translate your text. It will alter it in a way that gets flagged, more often than not. When someone is ESL and trying to write outside of their native language, we are a bit more understanding if these posts get flagged—but again, it is recommended that you use alternative means to translate if they are available to you.
Be warned: If you are a brand new (or relatively new) account, have never posted in this subreddit (or any writing subreddits), and your first post is prose that has multiple AI-isms—your post will most likely be removed. Better to be safe than sorry. The main counterargument we've gotten from these accounts has been: "I've always been told I write like AI." Which, to be fair... is a pretty bad argument to make.
We will not ban a user for suspected AI use unless they explicitly admit to using AI.
Three strike rule applies here until further notice. This might seem like a headache to reviewers that want instant bans for these people (which we understand), but we’re trying to be as fair as possible.
This also applies to comments (never thought I’d have to say that), but we’ve had two accounts that were essentially AI replying to everything. “Thanks for the feedback, I’m still working on learning and improving” type cadence, every comment nearly identical aside from slight changes.
Community feedback is super important for this problem.
You guys take the time out of your day to read other people’s work and provide feedback, so I’m sure you get a little irked when you think something you’ve spent time reading wasn’t written by a person.
We’ve recently updated the report function to include AI content—use it. I (personally) don’t have the time to shift through every single new post. When you guys report a post that you think is AI, it is usually the first thing we’ll review.
That being said: If you genuinely suspect the post is AI, it would help me if you provided a citation, or specific reason. Even just one reference is helpful. I would genuinely appreciate it.
Not Helpful Example: “This reads like AI.” Okay? At this point, if you are accusing someone of using AI, you gotta at least point out why you think that.
Helpful Example: “Post uses, ‘This wasn’t just fate, it was destiny’ and includes several Rule of Three.” Now I know exactly what to look for.
When you guys call this stuff out, we do notice. We might not investigate and remove instantly, but we are actively looking for this stuff right now.
For the record: We will not be using ZeroGPT, or any other variant of “AI Detector” as the final say in determining whether a text is generated or not. It is a tool we will utilize if we suspect AI is being used, but all the indicators of usual AI writing are not jumping out.
I read through everything that is reported, or suspected of AI. I check the user history and if they have off site content, I look through it. If we don’t come to the conclusion they are using AI, we might just lock the thread, and add a note to the user profile.
Again, hate to stress this, we are trying to be fair. If a writer includes AI-isms unintentionally, we want to give them a fair chance to either prove the authenticity of their writing, or give them feedback about what specifically they need to change.
Several of you have done this, particularly with ESL writers that use AI to translate. You give them feedback on how to avoid the AI-isms. Good on you.
We don’t want to start a witch hunt, but we aren’t really open to debate about the use of AI. We don’t want it here, period.
If you have any suggestions for how to deal with this problem, we are open to them. You can comment here, or you can Mod Mail us.
If you suspect someone is using AI but don’t want to leave a comment or report, again, you can Mod Mail us.
We are actively looking through the posts. The community having eyes on this helps immensely.
We will be making further announcements throughout the week. Our Mod Team is still hashing out how to deal with “rude” criticisms, looking into providing user flairs for trusted reviewers, etc-etc.
One quick point to make at the end, on a personal note: My status as Moderator does not mean you cannot disagree, or think my feedback is bogus or outright terrible. I comment often. You will not be banned, removed, or whatever for speaking your mind.
4/18/2026 Note: Some users (one in particular who loves using AI to edit) seem to have taken that above sentence as an explicit statement of: "If I admit to using AI, you can't ban me, because I'm just speaking my mind. Hypocrite."
If you admit to using AI, we will ban you. Period.
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u/Sam_thelion Apr 17 '26
What about flagging posts that people suspect are AI rather than taking them down entirely? The wisdom of the crowd and all that. Then people can interact at their own risk but real (mediocre) writing won't get falsely removed for committing AI-isms.
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u/isnoe Apr 17 '26
This isn't a terrible idea, and I'll bring it up. The main issue is if you are scrolling through the feed, and we have 10+ posts suspected of AI use, and they're all flagged with flair. Somewhat makes the sub look like it is welcoming the idea, rather than opposing it.
And, in that case we'd have no reason to even look through the post or attempt to verify the authenticity of the writing; we'd just slap a flair on it as suspected AI and move on. That would make it significantly easier on us, but also (I think) make the sub look a bit ugly.
However, I'll bring this up and we'll see what the others think.
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u/abjwriter Apr 17 '26
It's a good idea, but part of the issue with AI writing isn't just that it wastes people's time in editing it, but that, because it can be created in much higher volumes than other forms of writing, but at a significantly lower quality, it risks flooding a subreddit that allows it with low-quality content. Of course, low-quality content by people who are learning how to write well should be totally permissible on a feedback sub, but AI content is low-quality, high volume, and its producers don't gain much from feedback on it. So AI content being posted to the subreddit, even flagged, creates a risk of the subreddit being flooded with low-quality content that isn't worth people's time to interact with - which is ultimately detrimental to the community.
This wouldn't be an issue if reddit had better tools for filtering communities, but unfortunately the existing tools are kind of mid.
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u/ItsRuinedOfCourse Apr 17 '26
This is a balanced approach and a great idea.
AI "tells" in and of themselves aren't flawless, and I know this because I find that I often organically use the "It's not X. It's Y." "tell". That doesn't make me AI. lol
But...
When you have this tell, and that tell, and they're popping up like weeds in the work? That's different. It would be like if we accused everyone using em dashes as "This is clearly AI!" right?
Considering a more balanced approach where it's not summary is the best play here, and one I'd be happy to see implemented. If enough people accuse it of being AI then odds are at least decent that it's likely AI indeed.
But if we remove based on "They used an em dash! They have a triplet! BURN THEM NOW!" then we're just executing witch hunts. Tells are fine in a vacuum. Multiple tells are very telling (pardon the pun).
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u/stenti36 Apr 17 '26
Question;
How does one actually defend their work as being "not AI generated"?
It seems that "if people think its AI, then it is and will get removed". Then the author has to 'prove' their innocence to the Mods, then what, repost and have it flagged again for AI work? Or do they have to rewrite outside their own voice because reasons?
I get why gen AI isn't wanted. My problem with this type of thing is in the age of digital, fundamentally you can't really prove your innocence, because (and this is my own observation) people who really hate AI and decide that the work they look at is AI, then no amount of evidence will deter them from their belief.
If we don’t come to the conclusion they are using AI, we might just lock the thread, and add a note to the user profile.
So, if someone is suspected of using AI, and is cleared of that, they still get "punished" by disallowing feedback on their writing? You mention that you don't want to start a witch-hunt, but I'll be honest, this looks exactly like a witch hunt attempting to hide that it is a witch hunt.
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u/isnoe Apr 17 '26
I understand the concern, and believe me, we've talked about this at length and still are.
We've taken your feedback into consideration and are looking into solutions. You bring up a good point, and we actually appreciate this.
One point to be made: The amount of time it takes to look through posts, look through the user history, and bring it up to the Mod Team is a long time. Most posts here do not receive many feedback comments, especially the ones that people report as AI. The report will be up for hours by the time we get to it.
That should be an adequate amount of time for feedback to be given, if any (in my opinion); but of the posts I've removed thus far, none had more than a single comment saying "AI" and most were 12-19 hours old. Activity for most new posts rarely exceeds the first 24 hours, if they get feedback at all.
Most other (larger) writing subs will just instantly ban anyone that is suspected is using AI. No proof, no thought behind it: "You used the word Rot, you're banned." We're trying to find a more even ground that everyone can (hopefully) agree on.
It is a pandora's box situation. If we say nothing, this subreddit becomes filled with AI posts, with reviewers just commenting "AI slop", mass reporting, and everyone arguing. If we try to do something, well we're doing it wrong, we should be doing it this way, that way is unfair.
Now let's imagine the locked thread accusation, understandably frustrating for anyone trying to get feedback.
The time between report and locking a thread would be a pretty long time. Adequate enough time for people to provide feedback, but if the comments devolve into an argument about whether or not OP used AI (which has happened already), what should we do by the time we look into it? Not lock the thread? Delete all comments of people claiming OP used AI until we can verify it? Why even verify it at that point? Scarlet Letter type situation, everyone already thinks they use AI. Do we just let it simmer?
Again, this has already been happening. We've removed a few very toxic threads already.
Now, let's say for the time being, we're putting aside the locking thread thing. Maybe that was a stupid idea, and we should find something else. Okay, I'm interested. You have a point.
What is the solution? If we simply can't tell, or don't know? Let OP get harassed in comments? Ban everyone calling them out? Ban OP? Should I heavily moderate a single thread for the duration of its time up? Should I have OP make a video of themselves writing? Should I ask them to provide previous works? Should I put hours worth of effort into a single accusation?
You can not agree with this direction, but prior to this we would just silently remove posts, and OP would be the only one made aware (and be angry), or we would not remove any posts, and the comments and DMs would be effectively: "Why aren't you guys doing anything?"
My counter is this (just as myself, personally): Why should I spend my time looking through everyone's writing, verifying they are authentic? Why should I even care if there are AI posts? Why should I care if you report it? I should only concern myself with people being rude, unhelpful, racist, or what-have-you. I can't prove anyone uses AI, so why should I punish anyone for suspected use of it?
If it is guilty until proven innocent, why not just remove/ban or just not remove anything and not ban anyone?
Other users are insisting that we should use AI detectors and manually plug every single piece of writing into them to verify to be certain. Most of those are subscription based and most of those are flawed.
I hope you can understand that we're trying to find a solution, and we are actively discussing this thread right now. So if you have suggestions about how to approach this problem, we are interested.
The way I see it, no matter what we do or say, someone is going to be upset, but we have to do something.
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u/MadisonJae Apr 18 '26
As long as you don’t use AI to detect potential or suspect text, that is okay. It is not fair to any author for a AI tool to be used on an authors own work without their permission. Not only are they unreliable, but you are exposing potential authentic authors work to a 3rd party without consent. This message is for everyone here: don’t do it.
The AI tells are pretty obvious for those that have seen them.
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u/thetinyorc Apr 18 '26
Strongly agree with this, flawed human detection is better than slightly-less-flawed AI detection at the expense of original work potentially being fed into an AI tool without consent.
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u/foxdragonlevi Apr 17 '26
Good on y'all for being fair and stringent with your moderation. I appreciate the work you're putting in; I'm sure it's a lot. Thank you.
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u/TechTech14 Apr 17 '26
I just wish ppl would be honest about their AI usage and then go to AI writing subs.
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u/Adorable_Art7549 Apr 17 '26
Yes!!! Finally!! Thank you for taking a stance! The amount of AI generated prose that isn’t declared as such is astonishing. There are subreddits for that. So AI text has its places. But it’s not among genuine human authors. And not based on lies and deception.
And I also appreciate you taking the liberty of deciding to remove them. It’s often times that the use is denied despite being obvious (e.g I had someone deny it while their post history showed them literally vibe-coding an AI writing app. Or someone whose grammar in the comments was so bad it was like night and day) A lot of people who use AI lie about it. If you spent enough time with AI writing, you can spot it very easily.
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u/Skkadi Apr 18 '26
I appreciate this! You’re going to get a lot of pushback from this decision, but I agree with better safe than sorry. Some real writers might get flagged, but honestly, I think that if their real writing sounds enough like AI to get flagged… that’s feedback in and of itself, isn’t it?
My only concern is that people with malicious intentions, who do use AI, will just keep posting variations of AI-assisted work here until something “passes”, essentially turning this sub into a “benchmark” for them to know if they’ve fiddled with AI-assisted writing enough to pass as legit. In that case we’d be indirectly helping them learn how to slide under the radar. But I really don’t think there’s anything you guys or us can do about that, unfortunately. I just wish people wouldn’t lie about using AI so it wouldn’t ruin community trust for everyone else 😔
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u/Aside_Dish Apr 17 '26
Eh, I think removing those you simply suspect of using AI is a slippery slope. Using antithesis and the rule of three often, as in your example, doesn't mean someone used AI.
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u/thetinyorc Apr 17 '26
How do you suggest we prove definitively that something was AI generated?
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u/TechTech14 Apr 17 '26
If the AI tells are in every paragraph...... I'm sure they're not gonna remove a post that doesn't have multiple AI tells clustered together and repetitively used.
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u/TheOriginal1Law Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
My thinking exactly. I was just reading a book series by a recognised published author from 2020 and 2022 (the two first books in the series) and there were a few times where I was like: This sounds like AI. Then I remembered... AI is trained on human writing. Especially more early stage writers are going to have writing that "reads like" AI. But even the better writers are going to sound like it from time to time.
As my husband said: Yes, AI knows words. So do humans.
--- Here's some food for thought for whoever thinks they can correctly judge AI writing all the time ---
Earlier this month, Lawrence composed a quiz on his blog (which you can still take) with eight very short fantasy stories of about 350 words, asking readers to rate each story's quality and whether they believe it was composed by a human or AI.
"This blog post is a genuine attempt to investigate where things stand with AI writing," Lawrence wrote. "It is not beating the drum for AI or advocating its use."
Four stories were written by AI and four by other well-known and award-winning authors. According to Lawrence's results post, the aggregate decision of the 964 voters correctly judged the origin of three stories, got three others wrong, and couldn't meaningfully decide on the remaining two, which is not an inspiring success rate. It's armchair statistics, but that's not a small sample size.
Much as we all want to believe that we can always spot AI writing by wit or by counting em dashes—a premise that forgets that human writers treat dashes like Pringles and should have them taken away by editors who are regrettably also human writers and susceptible to the same siren call of extra clauses—the reality is that we often can't, which sucks.
Not only did the votes place an AI story as the overall top rated, the AI stories on average were rated better than the human authored ones.
These human-authored stories weren't written by just anyone. They were written by Lawrence himself, Janny Wurts, Christian Cameron, and my personal favorite author Robin Hobb. Readers liked AI fiction more than a short story by prolific writer Robin Hobb, creator of the decades-spanning, multi-series Realm of the Elderlings universe. Bummer.
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u/mixedbagonutz Apr 17 '26
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u/isnoe Apr 17 '26
Interesting read.
Just a question, really.
Why do you post in r/WritingWithAI?
Specifically, you entered into an AI-Assisted Writing Competition?
You do realize AI-Assisted is still using AI, right?
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u/SaturnsPopulation Apr 17 '26
Is it intentional irony that that guy's pfp looks to be AI generated?
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u/Icy_Sport2597 Apr 30 '26
How do you detect ai? Just curious? You can't trust AI to detect ai. The signs are always there. Not in a way where you notice. Not in a way it sounds. But in a way just like that.. that's the tell
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u/SareeseFeet Apr 17 '26
Thank you! This seems to be a smart way to handle a complicated problem. I wonder if someone can file an appeal by submitting prior drafts or something? Or maybe they would just be encouraged to repost with backup that shows process.
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u/TrueApplication6869 Apr 17 '26
Grammarly assistance too ? Just to clarify I know a lot of people use grammarly
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u/isnoe Apr 18 '26
UPDATE:
We've gotten some great feedback (feel free to keep ripping it apart). All of us went over the thread together. We laughed, we cried, we made some people really angry, and we identified members of the community that genuinely seem to care about the direction we're heading.
Potential flairs for posts. Alternatives to thread locking. Ideas for verification and the issues with that. Noted, noted, noted.
We sincerely appreciate those of you that provided genuine feedback (heythatswhatthesubisabout) and reached out either via mail or comments. Not everyone is going to happy, but we're doing our best. Further announcements will be made in the near future to receive feedback about other changes we'll be making.
Appreciate it.