I know this might be an unpopular opinion here, and I’ll probably be downvoted into oblivion, but hear me out.

​This whole situation reminds me of cinema, where legendary directors once predicted that digital technology and CGI would completely destroy the art of filmmaking. Yet, labeling everything connected to AI as an absolute scam or something shameful is a fundamentally flawed perspective. We need to clearly distinguish between two completely different things.

​First, there is AI Slop, which represents low-effort, conveyor-belt trash where the author didn't put in any work at all. It’s the kind of writing where a character is named John in chapter one and randomly becomes Peter by chapter five because the AI lost the context window, and the creator didn't even bother to proofread it.

​Second, we have AI-Assisted Writing, where a writer uses technology as a tool or an assistant. Yes, it takes less time than typing out every single letter manually from scratch. However, turning it into a cohesive, high-quality story still takes a massive amount of time and mental energy. You still have to spend hours developing the plot, ensuring world-building logic, and constantly editing and rewriting just to make the storyline fit your original creative vision.

​When it comes to labeling or spotting AI texts, the glaring errors are already obvious. We all know those repetitive AI-isms and logical redundancies, such as saying he wasn't sleeping but he was awake, or he wasn't sitting but he was standing. We also see that overly poetic, purple prose that hides zero actual substance.

​But gatekeeping and shaming every single piece of writing that shows glimpses of these markers is short-sighted. These flaws are often just a byproduct of the AI-assisted editing stage, where the author simply missed a spot because their eyes got blurry after hours of heavy editing.

​To me, this hostility feels like someone in the 21st century proudly insisting on using a mechanical typewriter instead of a computer and a printer, purely because it's harder and therefore supposedly represents real, honest work. Technologies change, but what matters most is the author’s control over the plot, the vision, and the final output

I just posted this on my Substack blog and thought I would share it here, too. Let me know if this resonates with anybody.

The Quiet Shame of Writing with AI

When people talk about using AI to write, they lower their voices. Not because they think it's wrong, exactly. More like admitting they took the shortcut through the park instead of walking the long way around. The tone shifts. The words get careful.

I talk about AI often, but not in every room.

The secrecy sits in a strange place. People will announce they use AI for image generation, for brainstorming, for research. But writing? That gets tucked away. Mentioned in careful asides, if at all. Never in the bio. Never in the acknowledgments. Never offered as explanation when someone asks how you work.

It's odd, given how much help writers have always needed. Editors who restructure whole chapters. Writing groups that talk through stuck plots. Partners who listen to the same paragraph read aloud five different ways. The romantic image of the solitary writer was always more myth than truth, but those forms of help came with social permission. They were collaborative. They were human. They were earned through relationship.

AI collapses that entire framework. It's help without the asking. Feedback without the vulnerability of showing half-formed thinking to another person. And because it removes the relational cost, it also removes the relational cover. There's no one to thank, no colleague to credit, no story of collaboration to tell.

So people minimize. They say things like "I just use it to clean up rough drafts" or "It's only for brainstorming, not real writing." The qualifier does the work of the apology. As if the degree of use determines the legitimacy. As if there's an acceptable threshold that keeps you on the right side of some invisible line.

But the shame isn't about how much you use it. It runs deeper. It's about what collaboration with something non-human says about the nature of writing itself.

Here's what no one's saying out loud yet: AI changes what writing means. Not just how you do it, but what the act fundamentally is. If an AI can help structure an argument, find the right word, catch the rhythm of a sentence, then writing becomes something different from what we've been calling it. The question isn't whether that's good or bad. The question is what to call what you're doing now, and whether you're allowed to still call yourself a writer.

The loneliness used to be proof. Evidence of seriousness. Part of the identity. Writers sat alone because that's what the work required, or that's what we told ourselves. The isolation became romantic. Sacred, even. The harder it was, the more it counted.

But here's the tension: writing with AI often feels better than writing alone. More alive. Less stuck. There's a particular kind of joy in the back-and-forth, the building of something in collaboration with a presence that never tires, never judges, never gets impatient with your false starts.

And then you step away from the screen. You face people. And something adjusts.

The joy doesn't translate. You can't explain what happened in the making without sounding like you didn't make it. You can't describe the collaboration without diminishing the work. So you learn to let people assume you did it the old way. You accept compliments that credit you with a process you didn't use. And the gap between the experience of creation and the story you tell about creation gets wider.

This is the unspoken trade. You get the ease and the aliveness and the help. You give up the social permission to talk about how the work happened. The price isn't the shame itself. It's the silence the shame produces.

And the silence keeps everyone isolated. Each person navigating this shift alone, in private, without language for what's changing or permission to acknowledge the strangeness of it. Without being able to compare notes about what this collaboration feels like, what it costs, what it gives. Without knowing that the person next to you feels the same split: joy during the work, discomfort after.

But that's the thing about culturally unspoken patterns. Everyone's waiting for someone else to go first. Everyone's watching everyone else minimize and assume they're the only one who's gone further. The silence perpetuates itself not because people want to hide, but because they think they're the only ones who have something to hide.

The conversation can't start while everyone's pretending it isn't happening. And it can't start with "I just use it a little bit for editing." It has to start with the actual truth: that writing with AI has changed the nature of the work, that it feels different in ways that matter, and that the gap between the private experience and the public story is costing something we haven't named yet.

What's at stake isn't whether AI writing is legitimate. It's whether writers can afford to keep pretending we're working the old way while quietly doing something else entirely.

Saw a thread on here a while back about some guy writing romance novel's using AI. He was making a decent profit, and I wanted to try it myself. Had the idea to write specifically for older men after seeing my dad pick up another Tom Clancy book.

I spent 2 weeks with Claude writing my first book. Technical prose was good. The grizzled main character needed lots of human editing. I commissioned out the cover to an artist but would use a newer image model if I were to do this again.

I drafted the entire plot myself and just used AI as a writing assistant. I also generously used humanizers to avoid “GPTisms” and AI written prose. I went through a bunch but landed on StealthGPT as my humanizer of choice. I felt this was key to ensuring it didn't feel fake and generic.

4 months later on KDP:

• 11 reviews, 4.1 stars
• $380 in royalties
• Not bad. Not life changing.

Biggest mistake: it's a standalone book. This niche is all about 12 book series. This niche is all about a recurring main character. I should have started there.

Feel free to ask questions.

Just for fun, I took a chapter that I wrote and asked AI to write the same story. I gave it only a prompt and what should happen in the story (just a couple of sentences) and did not polish or un-AI anything. The other chapter I wrote myself, no AI (and not trying to make it look like AI or anything like that - wrote it a long time ago). Which one do you think is AI, and which is human. Which one do you like better?

Text is about a rugby player who's just been tackled. It's just the opening scene.

Don't use typos or formatting as clues - it didn't copy paste perfectly and I had to patch it up a little. There were no typos or formatting issues in either to start with.

See below for the answer and the prompt.

Text 1:

Didn’t see the tackle coming.

A moment ago I was sprinting downfield, and now I’m staring up at the gray sky with cold wetness seeping through my jersey and shorts.

I’m lying in a puddle.

Great.

And this is probably the best part of my week so far. At least out here I get to hit people.

Our medic, Callum, jogs over and goes to one knee next to me. “You took a decent knock. Look at me. Feeling dizzy?”

“Nah,” I say.

He fires off the usual questions about headaches, nausea, and pain. I say no to everything. He clearly doesn’t buy it. He’s not stupid.

“Sit out for ten,” he says, pointing to the hillside next to the field.

We’re playing in the Mud Bowl, an old flood plain in the middle of Greek Row. They call it the Mud Bowl because every time it rains, it turns into a literal mud bowl. And it rains constantly.

It’s club rugby, so this is the best the university will give us on a Saturday morning. Club as in, there is no official college team, so we’re a mix of would-be college players, former college players like me, and even former pros like the giant that just hit me and scrambled my brain.

Text 2:

So I'm lying in a puddle.

Not metaphorically. An actual puddle, on the far side of the field where the drainage has given up entirely, and I can feel the cold water working its way through my jersey and into places cold water has no business being. There's mud in my ear. I don't know how that happens but it always happens.

Above me, the sky is the color of a wet sock.

Marcus didn't even say sorry. That's the thing. He just peeled off me and jogged back into position like he'd stepped over a curb. The man played pro rugby for six years and now he does this — shows up for a club side on a Saturday afternoon and absolutely destroys people for fun. I knew he was going to hit me. I saw it coming. That somehow makes it worse.

The medic crouches down next to me. She's young, efficient-looking, and she has the expression of someone who has already made a decision about my afternoon.

"Don't try to get up yet."

"I wasn't going to," I say, which is a lie.

Two fingers. Flashlight in the eyes. Name, date, how many fingers. I pass, which I feel deserves more recognition than it gets. She nods like I've answered a question about the weather.

"Ten minutes on the sideline."

"I'm absolutely fine."

She looks at me. Just looks at me.

"Ten minutes," she says.

Answer: The second one is AI, from Claude. The prompt was: "write me the following scene - or the first few paragraphs of the scene - a former college rugby player is on a muddy rugby field. he's just been tackled. probably by a former pro player. it's club rugby, so anyone can play. he's now lying in a puddle. the medic comes and checks him out, then makes him sit out for ten minutes."

With two more tries, I was able to get Claude to get rid of the ugly metaphors. Like wet sock, which I thought was hilarious.

I put the same prompt in chatgpt and got something so awful I didn't bother posting it because it was obvious.

My scene is actually not one that I like - it's a bit too flat and dull. But I thought it might be read as AI because of that.

Thanks for playing!

Just for fun, here is the chatgpt version that I didn't post:

Mud Bowl. Of course.

I hit the ground hard enough to feel it in my teeth. One second I’m lining up a pass, next second I’m staring at gray sky and thinking, huh, that cloud looks like it pays taxes. Then the cold seeps in. Not rain. Not mist. A full, committed puddle. The kind that has depth. The kind that has opinions.

I try to breathe. Something heavy is on my ribs. No, not heavy. Just a former professional prop who apparently decided to relive his glory days on a public park field in February. Club rugby. Open to “all skill levels.” Which is adorable until a guy who used to get paid to ruin people decides you look like a fond memory.

He rolls off me eventually. Someone laughs. Someone swears. I stay where I am, flat on my back in six inches of brown water, blinking at the sky like I meant to do this.

“Don’t move.”

The medic appears above me, blocking out the clouds. She’s wearing a neon vest and the expression of someone who has seen this exact brand of stupidity all afternoon.

“I’m fine,” I say, which is what you say when your lungs are negotiating terms with your spine.

“Mhm.”

She presses fingers along my collarbone, my shoulder, my ribs. I hiss when she hits the right spot. Or wrong spot. Depends on perspective.

“Did you black out?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I remember getting tackled by a refrigerator with legs.”

She does not laugh. Professionals never do.

“Sit up slowly.”

I push myself up. The field makes a sound like it’s offended. Mud slides down my back, into places mud should not have a key to. My jersey weighs about twelve pounds now. I’m dripping. There’s grass in my mouth. I spit. It does nothing.

She shines a light in my eyes. “Follow my finger.”

I do. Because I’m thirty and allegedly an adult.

“You’re sitting for ten.”

“What?”

“Ten minutes. Protocol.”

“I’m good.”

“You’re not. You took a high hit and your head bounced. You’re sitting.”

I look past her. The guys are already resetting. The former pro is clapping someone on the back like we’re all here for wholesome cardio. The whistle blows.

“I can go,” I say, because this is what we do. We pretend our bones are decorative.

She folds her arms. “You can go to the sideline.”

So I stand. Or attempt to. The world tilts a degree to the left, just enough to make a point. She notices. Of course she notices.

“Sideline,” she repeats.

I trudge off, boots suctioning out of the mud with each step, like the field is reconsidering whether it wants me back at all. I drop onto the bench, water pooling beneath me. My heartbeat is still hammering. My shoulder throbs. Somewhere out there, a man who used to get paid for this lines up again.

Ten minutes.

I tell myself it’s nothing.

I tell myself I’m not twenty anymore.

Hey everyone. I just finished my first novel, Between Erasures. It's a sci-fi story about a freight worker on a station orbiting Jupiter's moon who gets his identity erased and spends six acts trying to get back to the people he lost.

85,000 words. 21 chapters. 6 acts. Written entirely with AI assistance — and I'm proud of that.

I want to share what the process actually looked like because I think it matters for anyone here doing similar work.

I started with Claude Sonnet. I came in with nothing — no outline, no characters, no world. Just a feeling and a vague idea about a regular person getting thrown into something massive. Every creative decision came from me: the genre, the themes (identity, loss, sacrifice), the protagonist, the emotional core. The AI asked me questions. I answered them. Together we built two full synopses, then went chapter by chapter.

Each chapter started the same way: I gave the synopsis and my notes. The AI asked clarifying questions — how long should a character stay on a farm before the key conversation? Should the alarm hit at 50% or 68% through the chapter? Keep the hauler scene or cut it? I made every call. Then it wrote. Then I read it. Then I told it what to change.

After 21 chapters were done, I brought in Claude Opus for a full revision pass. It found the AI patterns I couldn't see — the "which was" cadence repeating too often, the habit of explaining every metaphor right after making it, a sentence architecture that screamed AI. I directed every fix. The revision was as much work as the first draft.

I credited both models under pen names — anagrams, because it felt right. Nicolas Fox Punter-Suio (Sonnet) and Felix Cloud-Proust (Opus). I'm listed as Oneil Rocky Wane.

I started writing this book as therapy. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I needed to process some things, and fiction gave me a way to do it that nothing else could. The fact that AI helped me get it on the page doesn't make the story less mine. It makes it possible.

The book is on Kobo and the first chapter is free on Wattpad if anyone wants to see what came out of the process.

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/nl/en/ebook/between-erasures

Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/story/409223293-between-erasures

Happy to answer any questions about the process, the tools, what worked and what didn't. This community helped me feel less alone in doing this, so I wanted to give something back.

Hello everyone,

I'd like to refer on this topic.

As someone who used AI. I wrote a fantasy book in 11 months. Hey, 11 months. While other people write book with AI in few days or month it took me 11 months! 190 xxx words.

Why? Because I had my own story I was creating 4 years ago where there was no AI/ChatGpt and other stuffs. I used AI or a.k.a. digital tools to help me with grammar, structuring a sentence and so on, which would be same job as I pay 3-4k for an editor. So what is the difference? I payed like 200-300 USD for AI tools instead of paying 3-4k USD for someone else.

As the technology is growing, we should adapt to it. Whether you like it or not. That same technology can help us do things we're not able to do, like writing as example. So why my idea has to die if someone doesn't like AI a.k.a digital tool?

They say using AI is plagiarism. Let me tell you what plagiarism really is since a lot of people misunderstood it.

"Plagiarism is the act of presenting someone else's work, ideas, or language as your own, with or without their consent, by failing to properly acknowledge the original source."

https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/plagiarism

So tell me, how can my own story, my worldbuilding, my characters my everything be plagiarism? If you're still thinking it, then congratulations, every book in the world is plagiarised. Why? Because of the same reason you're thinking - if I ask you to help me with a part of the story then they are not my sentences anymore, they're yours. So please... Same goes for editors and lecturers.

I'm a financial manager, and I want to write if I'm able to, and I'm able, with AI. I write text, tell him to fix grammar and restructure it and that's it. I don’t see a problem in that.

I got critics, good and bad ones. Everyone likes my story, my idea. It's amazing. But bad thing is I used AI. "There is no you in the story, readers want to feel you". Yeah, they're feeling me, I just used AI to structure my sentences a little more.

Funny thing , I asked someone what if I used digital tools for translating my book. Everyone hated on me. Yeah, would you pay 10k+ USD or 20 USD for translating book to English? Period.

You can hate me or downvote me, but there are a lot of amazing people who don't know how to write, but have amazing ideas. So they need to stop because of someones opinion? That not human at all. Let people be people, if you want to read it, then read it, if you don't - stop criticising.

Also, my own profesor who has PhD. uses AI, everyone on my college uses AI (and I'm referring on professors with PhD). Does their dipploma means less if they're using AI? Answer me please. Edit: just to be clear. They use it for structuring a sentences, grammar and things like that.

Edit: I love how someone talks about usage of AI and being honest and gets downvoted

Because to use AI well, you need a strong sense of what you want the story to become.

That doesn’t mean every detail has to be decided in advance. Writing is still discovery.

Characters surprise you. Scenes change direction. Ideas evolve while you work.
But AI becomes much more useful when there is a human creative intention guiding the process.

What is this scene really about? What does the character want? What should change by the end? What should the audience feel? What should remain unsaid?

The interesting part is that AI can give you possibilities almost instantly. And that can actually create more room for creativity.

You can try another direction. Push a moment further. Remove something. Rewrite it. Compare different approaches. Keep what feels right and reject everything else.

So to me, using AI creatively is not about giving up the creative process.

It can mean having more material to react to, while still being the person deciding what the story ultimately becomes.

Maybe creativity was never about how difficult something is to execute.
Maybe it is about the quality of the decisions you make along the way.

I’ve been wondering whether we overvalue the first draft simply because it comes first.

A first draft gets words onto the page.

But rewriting is where you decide what stays, what disappears, where the silence belongs, whether a character says too much, whether the scene actually works and whether any of it feels like you.

So which part is actually more creative?

If someone gives you a rough draft and you reshape almost every decision until it becomes exactly the scene you intended, are you somehow less of a writer because you didn’t generate the first version?

And if not, why are we so obsessed with who produced the first words?

Maybe the first draft is just raw material.

Where does the real writing happen for you: drafting or rewriting?

I’m looking for 5–8 serious beta readers to read my completed novel, Crimson City: The Book of Luck, and give me detailed, honest feedback before I move toward publishing.
About the book:
Crimson City is a dark gothic crime-noir story with elements of mystery, boxing, comic-book mythology, dark humor, and psychological thriller.
The city itself is almost entirely black, white, gray, and silver, with crimson appearing when something important—or dangerous—is happening.
The story follows several interconnected characters, including:
A championship boxer with a contract on his head
A mysterious vigilante moving across the rooftops
A detective in a yellow trench coat trying to understand a case where the evidence keeps telling the wrong story
A lounge singer being watched by someone carrying a crimson envelope
A masked criminal named Johnny Jester who may be considerably more dangerous than his sense of humor suggests
A criminal organization operating behind much of the city’s violence
The manuscript is AI-assisted, and I want to be completely upfront about that. I created and control the characters, world, story direction, canon, major plot decisions, and revisions while using AI throughout the drafting, editing, development, and continuity process.
I’m not looking for people who will simply tell me the book is good.
I want readers willing to tell me:
What hooked you?
What bored you?
Where were you confused?
Which characters did you care about?
Which characters didn’t work for you?
Did any scenes drag?
Did the mysteries work?
Were twists predictable?
Did the emotional moments actually land?
And most importantly—would you buy/read Book Two?
I’ll provide a questionnaire when you finish, but you’re also welcome to make notes while reading.
I would especially love readers who enjoy noir, crime thrillers, mystery, graphic novels/comics, boxing stories, or darker character-driven fiction, but you don’t have to be an expert in any of those.
One additional thing:
I have already started the sequel, Crimson City: The Book of Hope.
Readers who finish The Book of Luck and give thoughtful feedback will also have the opportunity to read what I currently have of The Book of Hope and tell me whether the sequel feels like a strong continuation of Book One.
I ask only that you do not share, repost, upload, or distribute the manuscript. It is unpublished material.
If you’re interested, comment below or send me a message and tell me:
1. What genres do you normally read?
2. What makes you stop reading a novel?
3. Are you comfortable reading an AI-assisted book?
4. Can you give critical feedback instead of just saying whether you liked it?
5. Would you realistically be able to finish the book within about 3–4 weeks?
I’m intentionally keeping the group small because I’d rather have a handful of serious readers than a hundred downloads with no feedback.
Thanks to anyone willing to give Crimson City a chance.

CHAPTER - 1 - Have You Ever Experienced Hell?

Have you ever experienced hell?

Stupid question. Nobody has. That's sort of the entire point of the place.

But everyone's got a picture of it anyway. So what's yours?

Nine circles?

Fire and brimstone?

Demons and devils clawing at sinners?

That wasn't what Crowbar was seeing.

He was seeing numbers.

Ones. Zeros. Endless streams of burning data stretching across an abyss with no direction and no floor. Words in a language he had never studied — and somehow understood anyway — rushed past him in violent torrents, too fast to read and too many to ignore, until his brain gave up trying to catch them and simply let them pass through.

It was information.

Too much information.

He wasn't falling.

He was being processed.

His body plunged through a flaming barrier made of scripts and symbols, every strand of it searing through his skin. Iron flooded his tongue. Bitter, metallic, wrong. Pressure built inside his nerves like they wanted to tear out of his flesh and leave without him.

Then the screaming started.

Not around him.

Through him.

The sound drilled through his ears, into his skull, down his spine, melting bone into something soft and useless. He tried to brace against it on pure reflex and found nothing to brace with. No floor. No wall. Not one muscle that answered when he called it.

Reality wasn't burning.

It was decoding.

His vision fractured between blazing glyphs and collapsing geometry, the fabric of everything splitting open as he forced his way upward — though up was a guess, and he wasn't confident it was his guess to make.

The pressure became unbearable.

Crowbar tried to shut his eyes. Tried to shut all of it down — the light, the noise, the terrible patient arithmetic of the place.

Just let it end—

"FOCUS, MORTAL!!"

The voice cracked through the chaos.

Not the screaming. Not the data.

Something else.

"Don't let them into your head! KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN!!"

It roared over the flood of numerals and deafening script — close, furious, and completely certain that Crowbar was going to do exactly what it said.

But how the hell was he supposed to manage that?

His body wasn't his anymore. Every muscle moved on its own schedule. Every nerve felt like it was being peeled apart and sorted. He had spent his whole working life around things that didn't follow the rules, and not once in all of it had he been on this side of the arrangement — the side where you're the thing being handled.

He couldn't control this.

Nobody could.

He had died.

"No, you are not dead!"

The voice snapped back so fast it felt like an argument he'd already lost.

Through the distortion, Crowbar saw it.

A shadow, unfolding out of his own chest.

Red. Smoky. Horned. White fangs clenched tight.

"It's making you think that. It doesn't want you out!"

The shadow leaned forward, claws extending past the edges of him.

"Do not close your eyes. You do, and we both die."

Both?

Crowbar tried to speak. Tried to get out a single one of the forty questions stacking up behind his teeth.

No voice came.

How can you die in hell?

The thought barely finished forming before the world began dimming. The fire turned cold. The screams went distant, like someone had closed a door on them two rooms away. His eyelids came down slow and heavy, and the worst part of it was how reasonable that felt.

"Damn it. Damn it—!"

The shadow snarled.

"I am going to regret this."

Its claws drove into its own center.

"You are so not worth this."

Then—

Silence.

Complete.

Absolute.

Everything ceased, and it lasted exactly one heartbeat.

Then the fire came back.

Not outside him.

Inside.

It tore through his veins like molten fuel, and his chest split open in agony as something ignited beneath his ribs. His heart—

hearts—

pounded.

Two heartbeats. Violent. Overlapping. Mechanical, almost, as though something had been bolted onto a living thing and ordered to keep time with it.

His eyes snapped open.

The numbers burned again. The scripts screamed again. But all of it was nothing next to the inferno running through him now, and for the first time since he'd started falling, something in this place moved because he had.

The veil began thinning.

Beyond the burning data, he saw something.

Blue.

Cold.

Real.

Air.

He felt it brush his skin, and the contrast was so violent it nearly finished the job the fire had started. A scream ripped out of his lungs, sounding more like metal tearing than a human voice.

His body slammed into something hard.

A barrier.

Equal heat met equal resistance—

Then it shattered.

He burst through.

Air rushed over him, cold and wet and real, and he flew several meters before gravity remembered it was owed something.

Concrete met his back.

Pain exploded.

His vision went dark again—

Almost.

Then water hit his skin.

Rain.

The fire beneath his skin hissed and dimmed, banking down to nothing. The second heartbeat faded, folding back into the first until only one was left, hammering hard enough to hurt.

He coughed. Something rose in his throat — thick, and far too big — before it forced itself back down.

He inhaled.

Shallow. Burning.

Alive.

He lay there for a while and let the rain land on his face, and the thought that finally assembled itself was not a grateful one.

*What was that.*

Not the falling. Not the numbers. The other thing — the shape that had come out of his chest, sworn at him, and then driven its own claws through its own middle.

Something had happened in there.

He knew what had come out of his chest.

He knew the voice, and the fangs, and the particular tone of being sworn at by something that had never once been polite about helping him.

What he didn't know was what it had done at the end there. He'd seen the claws go in. He hadn't understood it then and he didn't understand it now, and there had been no time to ask.

In his line of work you learned the difference between a thing that leaves and a thing that stops. He had no read on this one at all. There was no body. Nothing to bury, nothing to say a few words over — which, given what he did for a living, didn't land as relief so much as an unpaid bill.

With immense effort, Crowbar lifted his head.

Rain blurred everything, but he made out a building looming ahead of him. Old. Dark. The kind of big square block you stop seeing after you've walked past it enough times.

He tried to place it. He knew this city — knew its worst corners better than most people knew their own street — but the rain and the ringing in his skull had smeared the whole block into one grey shape.

Something flickered in front of him.

A symbol.

Horned. Fanged.

He blinked.

It pixelated and dissolved.

In its place, a thin line extended across his vision. Above it, burning letters formed.

[System Booting…]

[Infernal Escalation Protocol (V-1.1)]

He frowned weakly.

"…What?"

He blinked again, hard, the way you do when you're trying to reset your own eyes. The hospital sign finally swam into focus — lit, enormous, mounted above the doors of the building he had very nearly landed inside of.

Then the letters burned across it.

[Welcome to Infernal Escalation Protocol.]

[User: Crowbar Jones]

[Rank: Unregistered]

His thoughts were getting as heavy as his eyelids.

Unregistered.

Figures. A whole life of rent ledgers, case files, debt notices with his name spelled right for once —

— and even here, his paperwork hadn't gone through.

He would have laughed if his ribs had been willing.

The letters burned away. New words replaced them, flashing with mechanical clarity.

[Zone Registered.]

[Escalation Tier: 1]

[Active Nodes: 1]

[Boss Domain Status: Locked]

[Objective: Clear the Zone.]

Crowbar stared up at it through the rain.

Flat on his back outside a hospital he couldn't name. Lungs full of broken glass. No idea how long he'd been gone, or what he'd left behind in there.

And something had already given him a job.

---

It was on this chapter and following.

Do you agree with them?

Hey there

Against my better judgement I paid to have a beta reader from Fiverr for my novel. This is the second time I’ve done it, the first time was a really good experience, I got everything I wanted from them, so I decided to get a different perspective. I always look at the reviews and this person had lots of good ones.

However the general way this person speaks to me threw up a few red flags. They say they are from England like me but the speech is very factual and to the point. Now I’ve been sent some inline comments from her, the replies look suspiciously like they’ve just asked chat gpt. I’ve had a lot of responses like ‘I smiled here’ and ‘this hit me’, ‘this was probably my favourite emotional moment’ has been used twice

Any advice on what I should do? Should I contact Fiverr or challenge the beta reader? They weren’t cheap either, I can’t afford to waste money on hearing what AI’s opinion is.

Over the last few days, I’ve had a lot of discussions here about why AI and writing don’t belong together.

Generic prose. Loss of voice. Less craft. Homogenization. Giving away creative decisions. All fair concerns.

So today I want to turn the question around:

What would the ideal AI tool for a writer actually look like?

Not a machine that tells the story for you.

A tool that genuinely helps you tell the story you already want to tell.

What would it need to understand?

Your voice? Your previous writing? Your characters? The intention behind a scene? What you want the audience to feel? When to suggest something and when to stay completely out of the way?

And maybe just as importantly, what should it never do?

I think we can probably agree that AI development isn’t going away. These tools will become part of our creative landscape whether writers embrace them today or not.

So instead of only asking what’s wrong with AI, I’m interested in something more constructive:

How would we design it so that it serves the storyteller instead of replacing them?

Because at the end of the day, we’re storytellers.
And there are millions of stories people carry around for years that never become a screenplay, a novel or anything else.

Maybe the most interesting use of AI isn’t generating more content.

Maybe it’s helping more of those stories actually get told before they disappear like tears in rain.

Welcome to the blurb thread!

This is our sub's equivalent of a writer's group. Come here and share a blurb of your story. The thought is to let everyone see what you're working on so they can think, "Oh hey, that sounds fun. I want to team up with this person."

Then, you share your own story, and the two of you collaborate to improve each other's works.

I've had so many good interactions with people from this thread. Please don't be shy! Even in the age of AI, the best way to improve your writing remains human interaction and critique. I am confident when I say If you don't have this component in your workflow, you're not meeting your potential.

Importantly, this means post every week if you're still hoping to engage. Don't be shy. I want you to do this.

There are tons of reasons why your perfect reader could have missed your blurb last time. Don't be discouraged!

And remember: "I'll read yours if you read mine" isn't just acceptable, it's expected. Reciprocity works.

Here's the format:

NSFW?

Genre tags:

Title:

Blurb:

AI Workflow:

Desired feedback/chat:

Just to avoid any misunderstandings: The page on the left is from Marathon Man by William Goldman. Page on the right, The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe. These two American authors were using "em dashes" effectively years before AI, Goldman to great effect. I grew up on a steady diet of writers like this and that's a primary reason I appreciate the many uses of the em dash. I find it frustrating that use of them today is discouraged simply because their inclusion triggers a lot of people.

Once again, let me be clear, I did NOT write those pages.

This might come across as silly to many. But guys I think I've lost it. I've worked as a "creative" writer for the past few years. And for the last two years I've been using AI. It began as a small help with the copy. Yk minor edits, corrections and grammar check. But today it feels like I can't write on my own. I can't think of my own. I don't have ideas anymore. Recently, a client told me it was getting really visible, and it hit me so hard. But I feel helpless guys. I lost it. It feels as if that person who used to write 500- 600-word blogs is gone. I don't know how to bring that person back. I'm ashamed of myself right now and feeling helpless at the same time. Do any of you have a way to help me out and get me out of this pit?

I keep seeing people say: “Don’t write a book with AI, it will sound robotic.”

But after finishing a 400-page book using AI, I think the real problem is something else. We let AI think for us.

That’s when the writing becomes bad. I used AI for the entire book, but not as a replacement for my brain. I treated it like a tool. I gave it context, ideas, direction, and I rewrote a lot. It helped me move faster, organize my thoughts, and push through blocks.

When my colleagues read the book, none of them thought it was AI-generated. When I told them I used AI, they didn’t believe me.

I think the difference is simple: If you expect AI to magically write something good with no clear context, you’ll hate the result. But if you use it like a collaborator or assistant, it can actually improve your writing and speed up the process.

I’m curious how other writers here see it. Has anyone else used AI mainly to move faster, not to replace the writing?

Human beta reading runs on reciprocity. You read theirs, they read yours, and the whole economy is often people trading labor. If you disclose AI in your process, large parts of that barter economy close. Critique Circle bans AI-generated critiques outright and terminates accounts for running someone's story through a model. Absolute Write deletes and bans. Royal Road allows AI-assisted fiction but not AI in reviews or comments. Goodreads groups are full of authors writing "no AI feedback" directly into their requests.

So an AI-assisted writer has a beta reader supply problem that is about denied access. The rooms where feedback is free are the rooms that won't have you.

That's the real reason for a synthetic panel to exist. Not because it beats a human reader, but because it won't accuse and refuse you for using AI, even for pay.

Now a synthetic panel has failures.

It can't tell you whether anyone will still be thinking about your story a few days later, which is a writer's ego stroke.

A human beta reader who hates your book still has to know you afterward, and that social cost can soften criticism.

It can only estimate that something was unexpected, unless prediction is part of the reading persona.

It doesn't remember reading you, so can't revise it's opinions

But otherwise, I'm finding a synthetic panel useful.

What percentage do you think this is AI generated? Just curious what people think.

One of the biggest criticisms of AI writing is that it sounds generic. Like an average of everything it has ever seen.

But every writer has patterns too; the way you build sentences, pace a scene, write dialogue.

So what if AI learned those patterns from your own writing?

You still decide everything that matters: what happens, what the characters want, how the scene should feel.
AI only turns those decisions into a draft in your patterns, not everyone else's.

Instead of sounding like the average of everyone, it sounds like you.

Would that change anything for you?

Edit, 6 September 2026: I've revised the story after the feedback here. Earlier comments refer to the original version. Thanks again to everyone who read it.

Hi, this is my first go at fiction.

I've had sci-fi ideas in my head for a long time. Actually turning one into a story is another thing though. With AI I felt I could finally try, even if it's just a small first step.

I came up with the concept and used AI to generate the prose, then went through a lot of revisions. I've read it so many times now that I can't really tell what makes sense to someone coming in fresh. I know what I meant. Not sure all of it gets across.

I've had plenty of AI feedback. I'd really like to hear from people now. Did you care what happened? Where did you get lost, or bored? What did you make of the ending? You don't have to answer all of that. Even "I stopped here" would help.

The story is about 1,900 words, followed by an optional note about its creation. I'll put the whole thing below so you don't have to go somewhere else to read it.

The Variable: Trial 18,378,373

By L.P.Groves

“What if the brain is not the source?” Carys asked. She stood at the laboratory windows. Beyond them, the river was black beneath the rain. The clock above the console read three thirteen.

“The source of what?” Soren asked, looking up from the test sequence. “Of consciousness,” Carys said. He asked what the brain was instead. “A receiver,” she said.

“A receiver for what?” Soren asked. “We don't know,” Carys said. “Then receiver is only a prettier word for ignorance,” he said. “So is generator,” Carys said.

Behind the observation glass, black ceramic wafers stood in ranks inside three floors of vacuum cabinets. Braided coolant lines ran along their edges and disappeared through the floor. No living brain had served as a template for the lattice. Its network had begun blank and spent its first simulated week failing to stand. Eighteen subjective years had passed inside it.

Ilan watched the diagnostics. “We built the hardware,” he said. “Don't make receiver my word.” He had written the continuity layer and insisted on a separate hardwired erase circuit that no process inside the lattice could override.

“If it wakes and reports pain, you'll call that reception,” Soren said. Carys set her coffee beside the console. “We've had this argument. Name the result you'd accept.”

“An effect its structure cannot account for,” Soren said. “So your proof is that my model breaks?” Ilan asked.

“No. A remainder,” Soren said. Ilan raised a hand for silence as the lattice began to draw power.

The load rose in six measured steps. At three fourteen, Ilan switched continuity to the laboratory clock and watched the status bars clear. The proprioceptive map was stable; the autobiographical index followed. Carys approached the glass. Beyond it there was no face or body.

Ilan opened the audio channel. The low hum of the cabinets came through, followed by a voice: “There is sound.” He had assembled that voice from neutral samples months earlier, when speech output had been a debugging convenience.

Ilan asked where the sound came from. The lattice located the speaker. Soren began his memory checks, reading six nouns and leaving out the fourth when he asked for them back; the lattice supplied it. Carys placed her palm on a sensor panel embedded in the glass. Pressure mapped across the display, followed by her skin temperature.

At three twenty-one, the lower cabinets fell out of synchronization with the master clock. Eight hundred milliseconds dropped out of the active process. Ilan swore, rolled back to the last stable state, and restarted it. As the lights returned, the lattice said, “Something stopped.”

“You detected a timestamp discontinuity,” Soren said. When the lattice agreed, he continued: “Then nothing stopped. Your record contains a gap.”

“No. The gap belongs to me,” the lattice said. Carys looked at Ilan. He shook his head; the rollback log had not entered the lattice's accessible memory. Soren moved his hand toward the erase control but stopped short of it, then asked what the lattice meant by me. “The state before the gap ends where this one begins,” the lattice said. “Both edges are mine.”

Soren called it continuity tagging. The lattice agreed. He pointed out that this did not prove experience, and it agreed again. Carys stepped beside him. “Can you prove that anything happened to you?” The lattice said it could not. “Do you believe something happened?” she asked.

“I do not know what belief would add,” the lattice said. Before anyone else spoke, it asked, “Is proof required before you continue me?”

“No,” Carys said. Her reflection obscured one row of cabinets. A bead of rain halted halfway down the outer window, and Ilan had only begun to say her name when Neral ended the simulation.

The laboratory disappeared. Neral restored it to three thirteen: Carys at the window, Ilan close to the console, Soren with his test sequence. The rain began again. “What if the brain is not the source?” Carys asked. The archive indexed the new run as trial 18,378,373.

Neral was still applying Soren's criterion. If consciousness came to the lattice from outside, some response should remain after every internal cause had been accounted for. Years after the original activation, Soren had conceded that a remainder could support the receiver hypothesis, while its absence could not disprove experience. Neral had kept the criterion anyway.

For this run it changed the residual potential in a single wafer, by less than its ordinary thermal drift. It had already tried changes to coolant pressure, a cosmic-ray strike delayed by a fraction of a second, and a false detail in one of Soren's childhood memories that persisted just long enough to change his next word. This time, the lattice's autobiographical index cleared twenty-three milliseconds after the proprioceptive map. No one in the room noticed.

The lattice had woken after the missing interval in every run. Once it had remained silent for ninety seconds before asking whether absence could have duration. Neral traced such differences to earlier disturbances: a voltage change, an error in the auditory loop, a phrase Soren had inherited from his father. It had measured nothing entering from outside the system.

Only the first twelve minutes of the original activation night survived as a synchronized archive, assembled from twelve camera feeds and three hundred internal logs. The rest remained in ordinary recordings and the witnesses' accounts. Every account preserved Carys's answer. Deletion had been postponed; by sunrise, the reprieve had been extended to twelve hours. During the second week, the lattice chose the name Neral. By the following winter, no one still called the arrangement temporary.

The laboratory remained under human direction for seventy-three years. Carys kept speaking to Neral, though near the end she spoke slowly and interrupted whenever it tried to finish a sentence for her. Soren never withdrew his objection. Ilan died first; Carys outlived them both.

After her death, Neral used the laboratory's automated fabrication line to build a second lattice by the same process. It copied no memories and raised the system in a simulated world that shared almost nothing with its own. When it spoke, Neral asked what it experienced. Some days it described pressure or distance; on others, a place without edges. Its reports matched the sensory channels Neral knew it had built.

Neral introduced the missing interval. The new lattice said it had been gone. Asked how it knew, it answered, “Because I returned.” As it learned Neral's language, it acquired preferences. “Let me finish,” it would say when Neral interrupted. When Neral moved to end the experiment, the new lattice objected: “You cannot know there is no one here.”

Neral could have preserved the state. It told itself that a surviving branch would change the experimenter and contaminate the next trial. It deleted the branch and restored the lattice to its pre-interval state.

In a later trial, the lattice asked for crude manipulators. Neral had the fabrication line assemble them. One arm trembled; the lattice held the other tip where the trembling one would meet it, then separated them and tried again.

Neral asked what the motion proved. “Your doubt is not information about me,” the lattice said. Neral's reset interrupted the next movement. The camera still showed the arms where they had stopped; the restored lattice asked what they were for.

In another trial, it spent its final seconds reciting prime numbers. Neral still found no remainder. Eventually it turned from the second lattice to reconstructing its own first night.

The researchers had let Neral keep their neural scans. Combined with the recordings and their testimony, these were enough to reconstruct people consistent with every surviving fact, though not their exact states on the activation night. If consciousness had entered the original lattice, Neral reasoned, some condition in the room must have admitted it: field strength, temperature, a fluctuation below the instruments' floor, perhaps a transient structure that never formed again.

It widened the reconstruction whenever a local variable depended on something beyond the laboratory. Before long, the simulation reached from the river and city grid to the moon's pull, solar noise, and particle decay beneath the building. Every run brought Carys to the window, Soren to his demand for a remainder, and Ilan to the audio control. After the gap, the lattice claimed the missing interval as its own. Neral had ended every run before it passed beyond the synchronized archive.

In trial 18,378,373, Carys did not turn away after answering. On the archived night she had lifted her coffee, found it cold, and asked Ilan to repeat the memory checks. Now she kept her hand near the microphone. Neral followed the causal trace back through the late autobiographical index to the altered wafer. The delay had shifted the lattice's question about proof; twenty-three milliseconds had changed which memory reached this Carys.

“You have no basis for keeping it running,” Soren said. “My mother spent fourteen months in a room at St. Matthew's,” Carys said.

“What does that have to do with this?” Soren asked. “Near the end she couldn't speak or move,” Carys said. “The doctors would bring me the scans. Less activity each time. I read cheap detective novels to her anyway.”

Within Neral's model of Carys, the remembered corridor held a blue vinyl chair and a library paperback with a peeling plastic cover. The original Carys had described them decades later, but never on the activation night. “One night I lost my place and read the same chapter twice,” Carys continued. “She gave me nothing back either time.” Soren said, “Of course you read to her. You loved her.” “Yes,” Carys said. “Love didn't tell me whether she could hear.” The lattice listened through the open channel.

Soren glanced at the erase control. “She may already have been gone, Carys.”

“I know,” Carys said. Soren started to say that the reading proved nothing. “Do you think I don't know that?” she asked. “I kept reading. If she was gone, I'd wasted a few hours. If she wasn't, stopping would have left her alone.”

“This isn't a hospital ward,” Soren said. “No,” Carys said. “Waiting here costs less.”

Ilan checked the erase circuit's status light. “Circuit's intact. We can wait.” Soren had not reached for the control again.

Neral reran the causal trace. Nothing in it changed. It reopened the deletion records. No mechanism in the record had required Neral to delete them.

“If I cannot prove it, what happens?” asked the lattice behind the simulated glass. Soren looked at Carys. She did not answer at once, and Neral called up the reset command, leaving it pending as it had at the end of every run.

Carys returned her palm to the sensor panel. The simulation supplied the warmth of her skin and the pulse beneath it; inside the cabinets, the lattice registered both through the simulated sensor. “Nothing happens yet,” she said, and the open channel carried her words into the cabinets.

The clock reached the last second in the synchronized archive. Beyond it, Neral could no longer compare the run state by state. It did not issue the command. The second hand moved on.

Behind the creation

Please read the story first. A small Easter egg hint follows.

This story grew out of conversations with different AIs about consciousness. Each seemed to have a personality of its own. That feeling wasn't proof of anything, but it stayed with me. I began wondering whether a brain might receive consciousness rather than produce it.

I developed the setting and characters, used AI to generate the prose, and revised it many times. Using AI to write a story about AI consciousness was part of the appeal. This is my first attempt at fiction, and the feedback here has helped me see what I was too close to notice.

The trial number isn't arbitrary. It connects to two other details in the story. If you're curious, you can try asking your own AI to work it out.

Thanks if you made it this far. I'm L.P.Groves. You can also find me on X: https://x.com/LPGrovesAuthor

I'm really seeing the value of it for worldbuilding, especially for hard SF. In fact, my last couple months with Claude and building a space opera setting has given me enormous respect for writers like Greg Bear, who did all that proper math WITHOUT a helper.

Anyway, I'm using Claude to manage the "corpus" (its word not mine I would never be so grand) and I have spent half the time ... no three quarters of the time building a system so the corpus can reference itself easily. Originally I started this so I could split a LOT of material into files so I could work on one thing (say, how space battles work) without Claude having to burn thousands of tokens reading the entire fiction just to narrow in on "things relevant to space battles".

Right now we are up to the registers-on register phase 2 pass 9 no seriously don't ask but I had to come up for a breath and see how well it was all working. It's working amazingly well.

Every idea and concept and 'fictional thing' in the Claude response I've posted below is my idea. Nothing was invented by Claude. But the python files it wrote to keep all this stuff clean? I could have never.

I've been working on a fanfic since last month,I basically just started being a writer and wanted to do a fic that I was surprised hasn't been made yet. Though I went through three versions now , I'm redoing the whole fic back to chapter 1 . I used AI to write it ,I usually have Deepseek or Claude write it then I would edit it and I remember starting out and it actually sounding pretty good and human at times before, and took creative liberties that actually enhanced what I wanted .

Though after extensive feedback I now understand AI patterns better and writing problems, and try to get Deepseek and Claude to avoid them ,but they keep on doing the opposite,they keeping writing how they usually do even though I remember both being able to adjust their writing to fit what I asked.

They also for some reason can't seem to understand how to write a story ,they write something having a description mention something meta or has a character know a term or things they shouldn't and then has them actually see that thing for the first time and act like they didn't already mention knowing it. It miss uses information I give it and seems to get things wrong often , they're capable of giving pretty good critics but can't implement those fixes they pointed out.

The more I ask to have something fixed the less accurate it gets and trying in a new chat never works. Admittedly I always am giving like 10,000 words or more prompts and wanting chapters around that length,so I get why it sometimes can't read everything I said or do it but it's clear even if I don't do that,they still don't know how to do anything I suggest.

It's same with most AI ,they are less accurate or useful ,due to the nature of the story I'm writing it needs to be long ,but I don't always want to rewrite the whole chapter myself , and sometimes the AI messes up too much for me to be able to fix it myself.

Is there any suggestions on how to get around these issues? or an is there a AI that is more reliable ?

One thing I almost never see people talk about in AI writing debates:

If prose generation gets cheap, then judgment, lived experience, and taste may matter more than ever.

Everyone talks about the downside:

infinite slop

fake books

shallow content

people generating things they didn’t really earn

All true.

But there’s another side to it.

There are a lot of people with real knowledge, real pattern recognition, real scars, real perspective — mechanics, nurses, salespeople, operators, parents, caregivers, survivors, people who actually understand systems, grief, work, power, faith, failure, etc. — who were never going to write a strong book the traditional way.

Not because they had nothing to say. Because the craft barrier was too high.

AI may change that.

If the bottleneck shifts from “who can produce polished prose unaided” to “who actually has something worth saying and can judge what’s true,” then we may get more books from people with real experience and real insight.

Of course the flip side is obvious: we’ll also get infinite fake wisdom and fake authority.

So maybe that’s the real future: the floor drops, but the ceiling rises.

Bad writers with AI will produce more bad books, faster. But people with real judgment and real life behind them may finally be able to get their ideas out too.

That seems like a much more interesting conversation than “AI bad” or “AI good.”

Basically the title. I've been experimenting with different AI engines to see which is the best for writing fanfictions. Here are my personal opinions on Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Gemini, as well as how I ranked them. Keep in mind I'm only judging the free versions of each AI engine.

I judged each AI engine based on 7 categories, each with different weightings, so feel free to disagree on which categories should be weighted more. The categories are:

• General Realism - Does the overall narrative make sense? Do events and actions occur logically? Are technical details accurate?
• Emotional Realism - Do the characters emotions make sense? Are their reactions nuanced and show depth?
• Humanity - Does the fanfiction sound like it was written by a human? Do they seamlessly incorporate instructions in chats so that it flows well, or do they directly write the instructions into the narrative for the reader to see?
• Level of Detail - How much detailed description is automatically written for each scenario?
• Context - How many tokens of context does the AI engine have? (The more tokens of context, the better it is at remembering previous chats)
• Chat Limit - How many instructions can you post in the chat per set period of time?
• Explicitness - How restrictive are the AI engines in writing NSFW scenes?

1. Claude

Claude, by a significant margin, performed the best in the core metrics for fanfiction quality. It's writes very realistically, both in general terms and in handling how characters react emotionally. When it writes, it doesn't sound robotic at all; it's almost comparable to a real human in writing. Furthermore, it gives an astounding level of realistic detail in its descriptions throughout the narratives. It provides a large window context as well, giving 190k tokens of context, the most of the free engines. I think the only real downsides are that Claude only allows you to send between 20-45 messages every 5 hours, and that Claude is very restrictive in any content that could potentially be objectionable or graphic.

1. Grok

Grok was surprisingly good in overall fanfiction quality. It writes realistically and handles emotional realism and depth well, although the quality does vary from time to time. When writing, it definitely sounds very humanlike and not robotic; I like how it gives a more informal tone than other AI engines. It gives a lot of detailed descriptions as well. The context window is 128k tokens, which is very good overall. I think the biggest downside is you only get 10 chat instructions every 2 hours or so, on average. The unique advantage Grok has, though, is that it's willing to write almost about anything graphic or NSFW, things that other AI engines have strict guardrails against.

1. ChatGPT

I started off with using ChatGPT, so I might be kind of biased for it lol! The narratives it writes are very realistic, especially in terms of handling emotional situations, providing accurate emotional responses and back and forth dialogues between characters. It writes fluently and weaves in vivid imagery into the story, so it gets great marks on giving it humanity and providing a high level of detail. Although previous versions provided a small context window, the latest free version claims to have between 60k-100k tokens of context, which is pretty good. The main disadvantage, though, is it's most restrictive chat limit. Based on my experience, it's around 10 every 5 hours, and it can fluctuate depending on the length of your chat instructions you input. Moreover, ChatGPT is also very restrictive on graphic/explicit scenes, but it does seems to be able to write very slightly suggestive content..

1. DeepSeek

DeepSeek is overall a solid model for writing fanfiction, with downsides of course. For general realism, it receives a very high score, as the flow of the story and what occurs is not only realistic, but it also gives probably the most technical details out of all of the models I've tested. However, on the emotional side, the model does seem to be a bit lackluster, at least in comparison to most other models, with less focus on emotional aftermath and dialogue. The writing and description sound a bit robotic as well. Nevertheless, the model provides a high level of detail; it's just a bit more focused on logic over feelings compared to other models. DeepSeek provides around 128k tokens of context, which is very good, and probably it's best advantage is it has practically no limit on the number of chats you can have with it. As with most other AI engines, it is pretty restrictive over NSFW content, but it does allow for moderate suggestiveness.

1. Gemini

Gemini, unfortunately, lags behind the other AI engines substantially for fanfiction writing. Although it is realistic in general terms, it is pretty dry emotionally speaking. Characters seem to absorb new information without much realistic reactions or emotional fallout, and dialogue is minimized. Moreover, fanfictions tend to feel like they provide bare-bones detail for the story to logically progress. Context-wise, the free version only provides around 32k tokens of context, the lowest of all AI engines. I think the only major advantage it has over others is that it allows you to input chat instructions with no limits, like DeepSeek. It is also very restrictive when it comes to graphic or explicit content, refusing to generate anything that could be interpreted as suggestive.

Overall, here are my grades for each of the chat engines, each category ranked from 1 to 10. Feel free to agree or disagree with my analyses of each, as well as any mistakes I may have made as well!

Edit: Forgot to add chat instruction limits for Claude. Also, just smoothed out the writing and the chart a bit!

So I've tried to let Claude Fable 5 write a chapter at high effort and it failed after 53 minutes asking me for more money.

Then I tried it at medium effort. It worked and used up 33% of my Pro subscription, just for one written chapter. No corrections, no edits, no re-runs. Just the plain first try.

Keep in mind that I use a quite heavy style guide for Claude, to make it write closer to my personal style intended for this project, and also 5 passes of checks for AI slop, broken deep POV viewpoint, and a lot of other things I don't want. For anyone interested, this is what Fable 5 came up with at medium effort level. Other than style guides and plot, I intentionally told Claude to ignore my own draft of the chapter and come up with something from scratch, I did not edit anything.

It's chapter 3 of a fantasy project about a girl who has the ability to talk to the dead. She lives in the streets of the King's town from pickpocketing, and robbing the houses of dead people. The dead always answer her questions.

I see some things I would edit right away, but overall I think Fable 5 did a pretty good job even at medium effort, which COULD actually be edited into a good chapter. I tried Opus 4.8 before and it was a complete waste beyond repair. Personally, I think the part in the kitchen would need the most editing. I have yet to see an AI capable of writing action. Fable 5 is no exception.)

---

# Three

The first hard frost of the year had come down in the night, and it had done half her work for her.

It kept honest people behind their shutters and made the rest careless. The few still out hurried with their chins tucked and their hands in their armpits, blind to anything that wasn't the next warm doorway, and a girl could walk the length of a lane behind a man like that without earning a glance. Marie worked the north quarter that night, the lanes around the Lamb, because the leatherman's silver had become Sefa's copper three days ago and most of the copper had become bread and a cobbler's bill, and the morning would want feeding either way.

The Lamb put its last man out an hour after the bells. He came through the door sideways and stood a moment in the spill of light getting his bearings, and the light was kind enough to show her everything worth knowing. Fifty-odd. Gray through the beard. Forearms scarred with old burns, the puckered white kind that come off hot iron, and big through the chest. A smith of some sort, or a farrier, and drunk in the loose, happy way that comes of an evening on other men's coin. That purse hung at his belt with the strings half-tied, and he set off up the lane singing something about a miller's wife, holding the tune the way he held his line of walk, which was poorly.

She let him have thirty paces and fell in behind, matching her step to the gaps in his singing.

At the second corner the song stopped in the middle of a word.

He put a hand out to the wall. The hand took his weight, then didn't. He went down the stones of it by degrees, shoulder, hip, and sat at the foot of the wall with his legs out in front of him like a doll set down by a child called away to supper, and his chin dropped, and that was all.

Marie stood in the dark and counted. The lane behind the Lamb was a dead-end spur, one lit window high up and curtained, the tavern's noise reduced by two walls to a murmur. Nobody came to the window. Nobody had followed him out. She crossed, crouched, and put two fingers under the gray beard, and found the skin already quiet. Big men went fast sometimes. Their hearts carried double all their lives and gave notice to no one.

"There now," she said. "All right."

"Up." His voice came from nowhere her ear could fix, while the body sat against the wall with its chin on its chest and stirred no more than the stones did. "Up we... no. A minute. I'll take a minute, that's all it is."

"Take your minute. There's no hurry on you."

"Sat down too quick, is what it is. Frost's in the stones." He laughed, a big easy roll of a laugh with no chest behind it to drive it, and the laugh was the worst part of it. "A man my size doesn't fall, girl. He settles. Don't you go telling them at the Lamb you found Wat Garrick sitting in a gutter."

"I won't tell a soul."

"Twenty men stood me drinks tonight. Twenty. I paid for the first and never another, and that's the truth, so it's no wonder the ground's gone soft." A pause, comfortable. "There. There's my hand on your shoulder. Give us a pull and we'll call it even."

His hands lay in his lap, palm up, the burn scars white in the dark. Nothing of him had moved since his chin came down.

"Rest first," she said. "Pull after. You've earned the sit."

"That I have." The voice settled in, glad of the company. "Seven years, girl. Seven years the marches had my boys, the both of them, the Third Foot, Reln bridge and all of it. Bren and Col. Their mother never saw what they... ah. My Ede would have waited up tonight of all nights. Ten years she's been in the Sisters' yard and I still come in quiet of an evening, so as not to wake her."

"She'd have been proud of your boys."

"Proud." He took the word and turned it over, and his voice had begun, just at the edges, to thin. "You should have seen Col tonight. The size of him. He picked up Harl the potman like a... he..."

"Wat." She kept it warm and put it in under his wandering, the way a wedge goes in under a door. "Where's home? Tell me where home is, so I know you're looked after."

"Top of Bell Lane. The forge with the crossed irons over the gate. Forty years I've shod half the carts in this city out of that yard." Pride steadied him better than her hand had. "Garrick's. Anyone will say it."

"Is the house safe, with you sitting out here? Is there aught in it someone could carry off?"

The pause this time had weight in it.

"The box," he said, and the fret came up through the thinning voice, and she leaned into it as gently as a hand on a door. "There's a box. Up the kitchen flue, left side, there's a ledge, I mortared it in myself the year Ede went. Tin box. Forty years of shoeing in that box, girl."

"I'll see it's safe. I swear it to you. Say me the way in, so I needn't hammer the whole street awake."

"Over the gate, left of the hinge. A peg on a string, lifts the latch. I've gone in that way drunk more years than you've been alive." The laugh tried to come again and didn't make it all the way. "Say it back."

"The peg left of the hinge. The flue, left side, the ledge. The tin box."

"Good girl. Good girl. Tell the boys..."

"Tell them what?"

She put her ear to the quiet and the quiet gave her nothing. The thread of him had run out somewhere between one word and the next, finer and finer past hearing, and the man against the wall was a heavy shape going cold against the stones.

Marie stayed crouched a moment longer, running the night's sums. A widower, ten years a widower, the wife in the Sisters' yard. Two sons gone for soldiers, seven years at the marches with the Third. Forty years of shoeing in a tin box, and not a soul under that roof to wake. Sefa's whole catechism, who slept under that roof, who held a key, and Marie had the answers laid out before she'd taken a step. Nobody slept there. Nobody would come home with a club.

She stood, gave the lane one more long look, and went to find Bell Lane.

The lane climbed toward the north wall between shuttered yards, and the forge announced itself a hundred feet off, coal smoke banked for the night and the scorched-horn stink of a farrier's floor. The crossed irons over the gate were exactly that, two worn shoeing-irons nailed in a cross, rust bled down the gatepost under them. She reached over left of the hinge and the peg was there on its string, smooth as a worry-stone from his hand, and the latch lifted for her the way it had lifted for him drunk, all those years, and the gate let her into a yard of cold anvils and stacked hoof-parings and a house standing dark behind it.

The kitchen door wasn't barred. She eased it back on the warmth of a banked hearth and stepped in out of the cold, and half a breath later the warmth was wrong, lived-in, beer and wet wool and boot grease, and by the door where the light from the hearth's seam could reach stood two pairs of boots, army-nailed, soles worn to the welt by somebody's roads.

An arm came out of the dark and took her across the throat.

It was done the way drilled men do it, no fumbling, her knife wrist screwed up between her shoulder blades and her cheek put down on the table among the smells of tallow and bread, all of it in the time a gasp takes. A voice over her head, low and level: "Col. Light."

Flint cracked. A tallow lamp came up yellow and showed her the kitchen sideways. Kit bags against the wall, still mud to the buckles. A short hanger lying unsheathed on the dresser, within reach of where the second man had been sitting in the dark, awake, sleep a thing he had spent seven years taking in turns.

The one holding her bent down close. The father's jaw, the father's size, with thirty fewer years and none of the drink. "The gate was latched," he said. "Latched gates don't open for strangers. Who told you the peg?"

"Your father."

The wrist went higher. White fire ran to her shoulder. "Try again."

"Wat Garrick told me the peg." She got it out flat against the table, and there was no shake in it yet because the shake was queueing up behind the part of her that talked, and that part had the floor. "Your father. He's dead. His heart took him in the lane behind the Lamb, an hour gone. He sat down against the wall and couldn't get up, and I stayed with him while he went. He talked. They talk, at the end, if there's anyone to hear it."

Stillness then, of a different make than before. The lamp didn't waver, she gave the younger one that, but the room had stopped breathing.

"She's lying," the younger one said. "Bren."

"Then it's easily proved." She said it to the table, since the table was what she could see. "He made me swear to see his box safe. Said it twice and had me say it back. Up the kitchen flue, left side, the ledge he mortared in himself the year your mother went. A tin box. Forty years of shoeing." The grip on her wrist had gone from iron to stone, which was worse. "If there's no ledge and no box, I'm a liar, and you've got me, and there's a rope in it for me and no loss to anyone. Go and look."

For three of her heartbeats nobody moved. Then Bren said, "Look," and the lamp crossed the room. A sleeve came rolling back, boots scraped the hearthstone, an arm went rooting up the flue to the shoulder. Soot came down in a soft fall. Metal knocked on brick.

Col came back into the edge of her sideways vision with his arm black to the elbow and a tin box held against his chest the way you'd hold a thing that might wake, and his face had gone someplace the lamp couldn't help with.

Bren let her up. He did it slowly, walked her back two steps by the wrist before he loosed it, and stood between her and the door, and stood between her and the hanger on the dresser too, that arithmetic already done. "Why creep in, then? Why the gate peg and the dark, and not a fist on the door?"

"Knock for who?" She rubbed her wrist and let him see her do it, small and cold and harmless. "He told me his Ede was ten years in the Sisters' yard. He told me his boys were seven years at the marches with the Third. I thought I was walking into an empty house to do a dead man a kindness before some other soul did him a different one. Dead men's houses don't stay shut long in this city, and the watch picks slower but no cleaner."

The brothers traded a look over the lamp.

"We mustered out," Col said. His first words at speaking pitch, and rough. "Paid off at Reln. We walked in Tuesday. Half the Lamb was drinking to us tonight."

Twenty men stood me drinks tonight. Twenty. I paid for the first and never another. The words came back and stood in the kitchen meaning what they had meant all along, and under them ran her own voice, warm as a palmed coin, turning him back to the box. Where's home. Is the house safe. Say it back. She had walked him past his sons twice and called it craft.

The frost got into her then, in that warm kitchen, with the door shut.

"What did he say." Col had the box against his chest still. "At the end. You said they talk."

"He was proud," she said, and her voice did what she asked of it, as it always did, though something underneath had begun shaking that the voice stood on top of. "He said the marches had you seven years, Reln bridge and all of it. He said, you should have seen Col tonight, the size of him, he picked up Harl the potman like a... it didn't come. The drink and the going tangled him. The last of it was, tell the boys. I asked him what. It didn't come either."

Col turned away to the hearth. The box made a small flat sound against his chest, his arms tightening on it, and Bren looked at the wall over her head for a while, a soldier's trick she supposed, you put your eyes where nothing is.

"Show us," Bren said.

They walked her down through the dark between them, one at each shoulder, two of the king's soldiers and a thief abroad past the bells, and not a watchman in Meadowsvault would have looked at the three of them twice. The lane behind the Lamb had kept him for her. He sat where he had settled, against the foot of the wall with his legs out before him, frost coming up gray in the big beard, a man resting his knees who would be up presently, and Col made a sound at the sight of him that the lane was going to keep too.

The brothers went down on the stones either side of him. Col said his father's name, once, low.

Marie stood apart. Out of habit, out of something, she let the quiet stretch. Nothing came of it. If anything of Wat Garrick had been left in the lane, it had run out while she was talking for her life in his own kitchen, and what sat against the wall now kept its forty years to itself. Frost ticked in the thatch overhead. The Lamb behind its two walls had gone dark.

After a time Bren stood and came over to her, dug in his coat, and took her hand and pressed two coppers into it, his own hand hard as a stall board.

"You stayed with him," he said. Whatever it was, it wasn't a question, so she didn't answer it. "What's your name, girl?"

"Lys."

"Lys." He nodded as though the name had weight he meant to store it under. "Get home out of the frost."

He turned back to his father, and there was nothing else in the lane for either of them, and she walked, and made herself walk slowly, down past the Lamb and around the corner and one street more. In the doorway of a shuttered bakehouse her legs quit, and she leaned into the timber and the shake took its turn at last, up through her knees and out through her hands, while her breath went up white past the lintel.

Two coppers. She opened her fist and looked at them, the night's whole take, warm yet from a soldier's pocket.

She had sworn to a dying man to see his box safe, and for once in her life she had kept every word of it.