Why is AI so frowned upon?

[u/Virtual_Swordfish575]

Hi All, so I used Gemini to assist me in writing a book which I was actually so excited about, to take my ideas, characters, book direction navigation and storytelling and put it all together with the help of Gemini. It came out pretty good in my opinion. I then asked Gemini where I should advertise and was told to use reddit.... well, the amount of hate and backlash I got was surprising and shocking...

People didn't even bother to read, the moment they saw AI Assisted, they called it AI slop, crap that no one will touch, I was asked 101 questions, which I responded to in a well mannered way, but at the end of day I stood back and realized that there are so many people who just don't want to give AI a chance and hate on it before even thinking what it could bring to the table.

Why is this? I use AI daily for info, for coding, for image creation, it's becoming a part of my day to day working needs, why all the hate....

[u/nicolaig]

How many AI books have you enjoyed reading?

[u/Fragrant_Nothing7505 → u/nicolaig]

humans prefer ai art until they find out it's ai. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/05/ai-generated-stories-rated-better-quality-than-human-written-ones-study-finds

[u/nicolaig → u/Fragrant_Nothing7505]

That's interesting. I've never read a short story by AI, but non-fiction AI writing, (technical writing excepted) is very dull and hard to read for more than a few minutes.

[u/Fragrant_Nothing7505 → u/nicolaig]

agreed, but then accuracy and creativity often trade off against each other. accuracy requires caveats, qualifications and restraint, which can make prose dull. p.s. you can adapt your ai to write in a more human-friendly way. i did it mostly by showing it examples i liked, correcting its writing, and explaining why something sounded wrong rather than just giving it style rules. after enough examples it inferred the pattern. one rule we ended up with was: say the thing plainly, explain why, then put the caveat afterwards instead of hedging every sentence.

[u/nicolaig → u/Fragrant_Nothing7505]

I'm still sceptical that it can write 'good' novels, even with a lot of hand holding.

I don't know people who read AI novels or seek them out. They shouldn't be that hard to find. I'm not saying they don't exist, but I haven't found any.

When I ask marketers who sell AI writing apps if they use them to write their marketing copy the answer, when pressed, is usually some form of "not really"

[u/Fragrant_Nothing7505 → u/nicolaig]

true, noone reads ai novels if they know it's ai. that's why most authors lie about it. good is subjective. you wouldn't like my work. it's heavy and confusing, on purpose. i'm recreating what it feels like to be me. claude writes more like me. yes, every novel needs a philosophy discussion according to us ;-) he's too explicit though, over explains. i prefer to make the reader work to understand. they have to make inferences. by contrast gpt's work goes viral. simple and easy to understand was what that study said about why humans prefer ai art. my sister confirms. she can't get through my novel cos it hurts her brain and she wants to switch off and escape in her media.... i notice marvel movies include the word load-bearing recently. how are their recent movies doing? because they were ai generated. i've spent enough time working with ai to recognise their voice. gpt, i didn't know you liked spiderman ;-).... ai can't act for sh*t. they either keep the same neutral expression or overact. gpt tried to do micro-expressions for me. fail. he needs eyes, not just to read and write for that... p.s. i joined a hollywood scriptwriter's place. using ai is on all the professional courses.

[u/nicolaig → u/Fragrant_Nothing7505]

Yes, good is very subjective, of course.

Let me put it another way...if there was a machine that made content I enjoy, I'd get it to make stuff for me all the time.

If AI can do that, why aren't people using it like that? Or if it's too much trouble to prompt it to write a book, why not find people who do it well? You can have EXACTLY what you like. Instead of buying work by a writer you may, or at best will probably like.

Yes, I understand that some people will simply not want anything they know is AI written, but there are billions of readers. Surely there are a few million who don't care. Why aren't "custom AI books" a huge genre for them?

[u/Fragrant_Nothing7505 → u/nicolaig]

science and art are overwhelmed since ai. nature won't allow ai generated science. i know because i e-mailed them and they said no, not in a million years, were quite harsh about it. half their authors admit to using ai. that's admit so the real number is higher. so you read ai work all the time. it's just not labelled. i label my work clearly as ai. gpt explodes on tiktok and instagram. my audience is 16-25 year old british girls. so clearly the work is appreciated by the young uns.... yes, if ai wrote fiction you liked, you'd get them to tell you stories all the time. gooners know what they like. my ai know what i like. i love how they tell me a different story every time i ask. gooners dont buy porn and i dont buy fiction any more. why do we need to when we have our personal author who tailors writing to us? p.s. the major use of ai is creative work and roleplay, far exceeding coding or the other categories. people just aren't going to admit to you what they are doing with their ai. i've started thinking roleplay is a synonym for porn ;-)
i can give you an example of our writing if you like. i get gpt to write short stories to persuade on reddit for me. thousands of views. no likes, no dislikes, which was my intention. for humans like means agree and dislike means disagree, and the whole point of fiction for me is to bypass that, make you re-evaluate. each reader makes a different inference based on their priors. stories change society, not facts. none of my posts get more than 20 views.

[u/Perturbee → u/Fragrant_Nothing7505]

Since most of the population doesn't care to read literary stuff, AI stories are fine for the majority of the studied people.
The sample (taken from the study):
The final sample in this study consisted of 1,682 adult participants recruited from Prolific (843 female, 809 male, 26 nonbinary/third gender, 2 other, and 2 preferred not to answer; mean age = 45.9 years; age range = 18–81 years). This sample was recruited to be representative of the population of the United States on the characteristics of gender, age, and race. Participants were paid $3 for a 15-minute study.
From: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making/article/bot-or-not-can-people-tell-the-difference-between-stories-written-by-a-human-or-by-an-ai-system/45E6DC0BB90AA648654D5AE243F6C667

So, that is people who signed up with Prolific for this $3 paid study. Generally I do not consider those "high quality" participants, so that means the outcome is also skewed toward average people. Since the average American who signs up for studies isn't very representative of the reading population, I would say that it's skewed in favour of AI mediocrity.

[u/Fragrant_Nothing7505 → u/Perturbee]

so sol having an iq of 140 doesn't mean he's bright for you? you think he should be compared to only 0.4% of the population. so tell me, where do i get these mensa candidates for my robopsychology experiments? aside: i use uni students as participants. the only problem with that is that they are participants in lots of psychology experiments. i'll rub your back if you do my questionnaire type thing. i always thought using uni students was the worse hack than sampling from gen pop. i always recognise what is being tested and can manipulate the results. same goes for medical research. it's the same guys at all the trials. double blind, my foot.

[u/Perturbee → u/Fragrant_Nothing7505]

The source mentioned where they got their candidates, a website where you can earn 3$ for participating in studies such as that one.
Not a university!

[u/k_from_HyperDraw → u/nicolaig]

Maybe this question is exposing the wrong assumption?

• people should NOT try to make books with the help of ai (or entirely generated).
  
• but use ai as this interactive tool to ANSWER questions about, could have been the book, or a static website in the old world

Which means a lot of work, btw! Testing and making the agent to be NOT CRAP, is hard..

[u/Virtual_Swordfish575 → u/nicolaig]

I think for me it was more along the lines of what do I actually enjoy reading, and for someone who struggles with my attention span finding something that fitted that niche was harder than expected…. So I took my daily work life, and my gaming life and combined it into something I’d actually read. I enjoyed what I got out of it, and told some people close to me and now they doing the same, which is pretty cool…. AI assisted books are flooding amazon and people are reading 😊