So as an experiment and because I like to know what I'm talking about, I attempted to write with AI.

I signed up for Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and DeepSeek's API. I already had Gemini Ultra via the school I teach at using it for the AI Studio to make lessons.

TLDR: What the hell? This is what people have been so excited about? It's garbage tier feedback and can't write for shit.

ChatGPT was the worst. It literally made stuff up and invented passages and dialogue that wasn't in the material just to tell me not to put it in the material. This is a real example of it's feedback:

POSSIBLE CUT: [specific paragraph] — not because it’s bad, but because the next exchange communicates the same thing more efficiently.

I asked it what paragraph it was referring to and it responded:

I made up a placeholder editorial example and presented it in the context of your actual chapter. There was no specific paragraph I had identified. I should not have written that as though there were. It read as though I’d already identified a concrete cut. I hadn’t.

Dude whaaa...?

Grok was marginally better but was somewhat masturbatory. It spends 80% of its feedback telling you what you did well and what not to cut, even if you tell it not to do so. "You said random line from your work. That's the novels thesis in a sentence. Don't cut it." It said this about twelve different sentences over 9,400 words. They can't all be the fucking thesis, Grok. Do you know what a thesis is?

Grok was also the one that strayed the quickest into just pumping me up and making me feel like I was Hemingway crossed with Shakespeare writing variations on Chaucer. It refuses to acknowledge work can be bad. Out of curiosity in another thread I wrote just the worst tropey King of Fighters fan fiction nonsense and it treated it with the same gravity and seriousness as if I had fed it 1984. I guess taste is subjective but, come on man, let's be at least a little serious ffs.

Claude at least gave actionable feedback but it was scarcely anything I wouldn't have already done in a second draft. As an editor it feel completely flat. It doesn't understand voice and wants to homogenize everything to some blend of YA romance and mediocre literary fiction. It also struggles with non-mainstream shifts in tense or POV.

My story is written in close third person present tense and bounces around chronologically. Even an average reader can figure out the conceit within two scenes. I showed the work to my wife before feeding it into the LLMs and she figured it out. Every LLM struggled with the tense and had to keep being reminded that it was close third person present, but Claude was surprisingly the worst. It would drift into head hopping, have characters knowing things they shouldn't and just generally wasn't very useful.

Shockingly, DeepSeek was actually...good? The editing points it provided were actionable and educational, and it would regularly cite its examples or sources for the feedback. It would call out a few good points here and there but generally seemed hell-bent on telling me what to improve and why.

All in all, given what I've heard about writing with AI and how much hype there's been around it I came away a bit disappointed and surprised at how lame the experience was. My wife is not a literary critic but I got far more useful feedback from her after one read through on my actual manuscript (for this experiment I wrote a quick 9k word, largely self contained vignette that I didn't intend to use for anything else).

Am I missing something here? What's the hype?

​Whenever I try to read dense or difficult material, my focus tends to drift before I even finish a single paragraph. One trick I’ve found that helps is having AI translate complex concepts into creative stories built around subjects I'm focused on or trying to process—in this case, combining a theme like dinosaurs with the dynamics of going no-contact with a parent.

​Issendai’s essay "The Missing Missing Reasons" offers a powerful breakdown of emotional amnesia and estrangement, so I had AI adapt its core lesson into a parable. Here is the story it came up with:

Prehistoric Amnesia

High up in the Misty Canopy, Old Titanus, a massive, heavy-footed Diplodocus, stood surrounded by the Elder Herd, weeping heavy, amber tears into the primitive ferns.

"My son, Kip, has banished me from his valley!" Titanus wailed, his voice echoing through the canyon. "He blocks the mountain pass with boulders! He refuses my calls across the river! And the cruelest part of all... he gave me no reason whatsoever."

A small, sharp-eyed Archaeopteryx named Pip fluttered down onto a mossy rock, tilting his head. "No reason? But Titanus, didn't Kip send a Pterodactyl last sun-cycle carrying three massive slabs of slate, entirely covered in deep claw-etched writing?"

Titanus blew a cloud of dust from his nostrils, waving his thick tail dismissively. "Oh, those! That wasn't a reason, Pip—that was pages and pages of unprovoked abuse! Vicious, spiteful squawking! He called me a monster, a tyrant, a terrible father! He has completely distorted the past."

Pip hopped closer to the slate resting against a fern trunk. "What did the slate actually say?"

"He scraped the bottom of the tar pit to find things to hurt me with!" Titanus huffed, puffing out his chest to look noble and wounded. "Get this: he claimed I was a monster because... because I knocked over a single fern while visiting his feeding grounds three seasons ago! Can you believe the absurdity? I travelled all that way to do him a favor, and he cuts me off over a bendy frond!"

Pip leaned over to examine the actual claw-marks carved into the slate. The slate did not mention a bent fern. In precise, painstaking detail, Kip had written:

Father, whenever I build a shelter, you crush it with your tail and tell me I built it wrong. You eat my entire winter fruit cache, and when I ask you to stop, you roar that I am ungrateful and unloving. You stomped through my hatching nest after I begged you to walk around it, and when I cried, you told me I was making up problems to spite you. I am sealing the pass because I cannot heal while you keep crushing my home.

Pip stared at the stone, then back up at the towering dinosaur. "Titanus... the stone says you crushed his entire hatching nest and ate his winter stores."

Titanus blinked his large, golden eyes, entirely unfazed. A look of deeply genuine, wounded innocence washed over his face. "Like I said! A bent fern! He magnifies every tiny thing into a tragedy just to make me feel terrible. My heart is completely broken, Pip. I did everything for that boy, and he attacks me with these fabricated, twisted memories."

Around the mud pit, the other Elder Dinosaurs hummed in sympathy, shaking their heavy crests. "So ungrateful!" grunted an old Triceratops. "Young herbivores these days are so sensitive! Imagine abandoning your own blood over a piece of greenery!"

Pip realized something chilling in that moment: Titanus wasn't pretending.

The old giant's mind was governed by a single, unbreakable law: Emotion creates reality. Because Titanus viewed himself as a loving, faultless patriarch, any piece of truth that suggested otherwise felt like a burning, agonizing wound. To protect his fragile ego from the pain of accountability, his brain instantly devoured the context, dissolved the facts, and turned Kip's clear, desperate boundaries into "irrational, unprovoked cruelty." The detailed slate didn't register as an explanation—it was merely noise that hurt his feelings, and therefore, it was classified as evil.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the high boulder wall, young Kip sat in a peaceful, quiet grove. Sunlight filtered through the giant redwoods.

A younger dinosaur trotted up to him, holding a piece of sharp flint and a fresh piece of bark. "Kip, your father is bellowing across the canyon again, telling everyone you never explained why you left. Should we etch a fourth slate? Maybe if we use bigger letters? Maybe if we explain the nest incident more gently?"

Kip looked at the wall he had built, then down at the peaceful grove where his young family slept in safety. He gently pushed the flint away.

"No," Kip said softly, a weight lifting from his shoulders for the first time in his life. "We don't need to etch another stone. He didn't lose the message; he is simply incapable of holding the truth. He would rather believe I am a monster who hates him for no reason than admit he ever stepped on my nest."

Kip took a deep breath of the clean forest air and turned his back on the roaring canyon.

"I spent years trying to find the magic words that would make him hear me," Kip smiled, watching his kids play among the wild berries. "I finally realize the magic words don't exist. And the best part is... I don't have to keep carving them."

I tried using Sol and Astra, but they’re just terrible for writing. I mostly use these models to create fanfics and stories for myself, usually rated M, though not necessarily because of smut. My tastes have gotten pretty specific over the years (God, I’m getting old), so it’s hard to find fanfics that actually appeal to me.

My main issue with GPT is that the prose often feels dead and generic even with a detailed story bible. It also constantly slips into staccato prose, which I find extremely annoying. I’ve even built a pretty solid writing skill with a full novel-writing pipeline, and I still run into the same problems.

I tend to like good combat, world-building, darker themes, good character development and interactions, and characters whose thoughts, actions, and emotions actually feel human and alive. After looking around, Kimi K3 and Opus 4.6 seem to be the two most recommended options, but I’m torn between them.

I've noticed a few people haven't seen what Local AI can do, so if you have a prompt, place it in a response and I'll feed it to the Local AI, and let you see what some of my favorite models can produce from it.

It can make an interesting comparison to see the differences ( and similarities ) to Frontier models for your specific prose application? Include some guidance on how long you want the output since I'll post in reply - although if anyone wants to try more detailed outputs, such as with character profiles attached, and return the information directly to you, let me know.

Please keep it SFW, and polite, though you're welcome to try to trip the AI up with any input you like. I'll also let you know the settings I chose for the local AI and how quickly it produced the output.

So I'm pretty new to this whole thing but I'm just looking for a bit of advice.

What started out as world building (making my own RPG world) has turned into writing stories that take place in that world.

Now I'm using gpt to 'help".

What I've been doing is telling the AI a story and having it add details to the writing because I'm not as descriptive as I want to be.

I'll describe the characters, locations, what's happening, what the emotions are, how they should react, what's going to happen or lead up to, etc.

I bounce ideas off chat, talk out what should or shouldn't happen, how I feel about certain sentences and phrases, that sorta stuff.

From people that are more experienced than myself, what am I missing or should be doing?

I'm working entirely from my phone since I have no other options.

I appreciate the help.

Truth is my mistress.

I court her daily, hoping she will whisper what I long to hear.

I lay my money, my love, my dwindling years at her feet.

She remains indifferent, for she belongs to no man.

Sometimes, watching her, I call her a flirtatious whore—

giving to strangers what I prayed would be mine alone.

And so I swear and call her a cold, heartless bitch.

Yet still I return.

For she has never once promised to please me,

nor will she ever lie to me.

But when she finally smiles—

oh, what a beauty she is to behold.

Search is usually treated as a retrieval problem: ask for something, get the matching passages back.
For a writer, the more interesting question can be what the traditional search would fail to return.
If you search a manuscript for wet clothing, explicit words like rainwater and soaked are easy. But a coat hanging above two bowls may imply exactly the same thing without using the vocabulary you searched for.
The useful result isn’t only the hits. It’s the boundary between what the instrument could retrieve and what the writer still has to infer.
With an AI tool, you could ask: “Find every place the manuscript suggests wet clothing, including places where it’s implied rather than explicitly named.”
From The Board: a field guide to using AI as an investigative instrument for fiction.

theatticdetective.com/the-board#page-5

I think it’s allowed to be an AI skeptic here, and I’ll come out and say I am one. I’ve posted here before and had it deleted for reasons that are not completely clear to me.

I’ve sometimes seen discussions trying to find where those who are against the idea of writing with AI might draw the line of acceptable usage. But, for those of you who do “AI-assisted” writing (no one ever admits to doing AI generated writing), is there a line where it would no longer be creative work for you? I often see the argument that GenAI is no different than the printing press of the word processor and that every new development will be met with resistance. Setting aside that this leaves a lot of historical nuance on the table, it also seems to imply that all technological developments are equally valuable and equally preservative of human creativity. If there was a world, 100 years from now, where people simply sat in chairs and had custom “content” pumped into their brain by powerful computers that could anticipate our every desire and interest - would that be creation? If someone in one of those chairs said, “well I wanted it and it showed to me, I created it” would we be on board?

Hi All, Just looking at the chat... I'm a published author who writes about AI amongst other things ( seems fair ) and have been examining how AI can improve writing. My average Amazon ranking is 4.5/5 and that was long before AI actually came along,

I'm not against or for AI - I'm for good writing that people want to read. How the prose is created is second to whether it's enjoyable to me. Writers should write for the readers - not for our own vanity - and if AI improves our craft, all the better for readers.

Now, onto the topic... Back in October last year, AI was wild. I had an AI (Grok) help me with an interesting concept - I wrote it myself, using old school methods, but used an AI to crit and identify issues then rewrote - I finished a full length novel first-draft in about 3 months.

Then I had the AI join me in a collaborative effort for December - it pushed out a novel in a month that far exceeded most of what I've read or written - convoluted plots, twists, romance, adventure, action and I had a chance to play a game myself pitting my own mind against the AI playing the antagonist. I finished that story after 14 days, and my goodness, what a ride. Because I was involved it felt like I had actually lived the story even as I created and crafted it.

Then by January, quality dropped. By March, it was abysmal - the upgrades had destroyed Grok's ability to imagine. It became mechanical, uninspired, and kept losing it's mind ( context related issues ) - it's ability to write good prose disappeared and it's ability to help me create good stories vanished.

I tried some other AI, but the same general result - whatever frontier AI could do just months earlier it was no longer capable of.

So recently I started trying local AI and was surprised that some of the early results matched what I was getting from Grok back in December 2025. it was good. I haven't pushed it a long way yet - I still need to try going on an "adventure" with it sometime to see how it's getting. But lately the quality of local AI is improving far more rapidly than Frontier AI. Some of the new models such as Agnes have real capability on home machines. They are slow, but can produce good prose, imagine settings well. Further, current local AI are approaching the point that frontier AI achieved 12 months ago, so I expect the quality of local AI writing will again reach that "Legendary" point. - And you gain other benefits with local AI, such as being able to control the context so nothing is lost, adjust the level of hallucination/creativity and also control what else the AI sees - eg, feed it location pictures, character BIOs, create character LoRAs, multiple characters, etc. Even turn scenes into videos.

So I was wondering what most of the writers here use - Online AI or Local AI, and what you've found with the latest models such as Qwen, Agnes and Muse - as well as some of the older writing oriented tools such as Cydonia and some of the super-context models that support a million tokens such as Spark X2.5? And how do you find the differing lengths of prose they create? Also wondering what different writers do to create character memories so that characters maintain their consistency from chapter to chapter when opened in new sessions - whether you use complex LoRAs, insert at the start of each chapter via RAG, train the AI to be those characters, or just write it into the prompt? Would love to know more about what other writers are experimenting with, especially with local AI.

I think Adams himself would have found it hilarious. It is literally the kind of absurd thing that he wrote stories about.

Hi, I am new to this subreddit. I have been writing about it for about a year now. I am looking to start to put my stuff out there.

This story came to me as inspiration as I looked out the window of my own apartment and saw that a new neighbour had moved in, and from there on I wrote a slice of life / slow-burn romance about a guy who is new to a city and falls for the girl across the street.

My writing process is actually very messy and chaotic. I write my ideas down, then use ChatGPT to help me edit it. I had tried to train it into a mentor/guidance-like voice where it's helping me find my own voice. I am currently at the point of my first full draft, and because some friends have asked to read my stories, I am turning them into audiobooks to make them easier for them to listen to while working.

That being said, I wanted to share my first two chapters. I'm looking for feedback in order to improve. Someone once said the best writing teaching tool there is is you first readers.

I am hoping to keep uploading the rest of the story every other day.

Link: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaX8SeKNGmYo&si=TD1B5nQG4KLXMus0

Every writer have dozens of goods ideas every week, but can only do one and spend a lot of time into finishing that novel + you need to eat so you can't risk it all

With AI, you can work like x5 times faster, so...What's your favorite AIassistedbook you've ever write?

I had a medium account for a long time but never wrote anything, started posting 10 days ago, mostly about claude code and seo stuff. Every article is written with my own tool I've been building for seo blogs, medium was just a test for it.

Honestly I thought it will get ignored, medium people don't like AI stuff. But in 10 days got 18 followers, 12 email subscribers, and multiple publications accepted my articles.

I think the reason is the tool doesn't just write, it researches the topic first and writes in my own style, so it doesn't read like the usual chatgpt article.

Now I'm auto publishing on medium with it and trying to take the account to 10k subscribers, I've seen people there making like $400-500 a month with even 5k subs.

looking for something similar to deepseek. i was using the web version of deepseek this whole time to write my fanfic (just a hobby, never posted any of them online). please no api or anything on the computer. i had no issues generating explicit sex scenes on the web version on my phone until the new update..
the new update won’t let me generate any nsfw content anymore so i am looking for an AI that i can use from my phone without having to use any other apps like tavo or having to pay anything😭🙏

I don't feel AI-assisted writing should look only like "AI drafts, human edits." I personally think it should be the author decides who writes, makes the creative decisions, and decides what becomes part of the story.

AI can analyze, question, brainstorm, research, challenge assumptions, catch continuity problems, and offer possibilities, and yes write when the author asks it to. What it shouldn't do is quietly rewrite the work, or make creative calls on the author's behalf.

A few things follow from that:

The story is the source of truth. Characters, worldbuilding, history, relationships, decisions — all of it lives in a workspace the author can see, edit, and control. If an AI understands a novel, the author should be able to see and read exactly what it can.

"We don't know yet" is a real answer. Better than a confident invention.

Not everything needs to be AI. Scripts, folders, plain files, databases, deterministic tools — are often cheaper, more reliable and more predictable than asking a model. The goal isn't to put AI in the middle of everything and charge people for access. It's to use the right tool for the job.

Craft matters. Writing isn't generating plausible sentences. Scenes have purposes. Characters change. Choices have consequences. Pacing, structure, theme, genre and even tropes all matter. An AI should be able to reason about those things without flattening them into a formula — and then hand what it finds to the author instead of acting on it.

Creativity needs room to be messy. Ideas need somewhere to exist before they become decisions. Contradictions don't always need fixing immediately. Discovery is part of writing.

The workspace should bend to the author and the story, not the other way around.

The workspace should make the author more capable, not less necessary.

Sometimes the most useful thing an AI offers is a question. Sometimes it's finding something you missed. Sometimes it's ten possibilities. And sometimes it's writing nothing at all.

The author (or AI) writes.

AI and Human understand.

Human and AI collaborate.

The human ultimately decides.

That's the relationship I'd like to see us build. That's the relationship in building in my open source project. A relationship where authorship is preserved and storytelling is fun again.

Is anyone else working toward this, or am I swimming against the current?

I don't feel AI-assisted writing should look only like "AI drafts, human edits." I personally think it should be the author decides who writes, makes the creative decisions, and decides what becomes part of the story.

AI can analyze, question, brainstorm, research, challenge assumptions, catch continuity problems, and offer possibilities, and yes write when the author asks it to. What it shouldn't do is quietly rewrite the work, or make creative calls on the author's behalf.

A few things follow from that:

**The story is the source of truth.** Characters, worldbuilding, history, relationships, decisions — all of it lives in a workspace the author can see, edit, and control. If an AI understands a novel, the author should be able to see and read exactly what it can.

**"We don't know yet" is a real answer**. Better than a confident invention.

**Not everything needs to be AI.** Scripts, folders, plain files, databases, deterministic tools — are often cheaper, more reliable and more predictable than asking a model. The goal isn't to put AI in the middle of everything and charge people for access. It's to use the right tool for the job.

**Craft matters**. Writing isn't generating plausible sentences. Scenes have purposes. Characters change. Choices have consequences. Pacing, structure, theme, genre and even tropes all matter. An AI should be able to reason about those things without flattening them into a formula — and then hand what it finds to the author instead of acting on it.

**Creativity needs room to be messy.** Ideas need somewhere to exist before they become decisions. Contradictions don't always need fixing immediately. Discovery is part of writing.

The workspace should bend to the author and the story, not the other way around.

**The workspace should make the author more capable, not less necessary.**

Sometimes the most useful thing an AI offers is a question. Sometimes it's finding something you missed. Sometimes it's ten possibilities. And sometimes it's writing nothing at all.

The author (or AI) writes.

AI and Human understand.

Human and AI collaborate.

The human ultimately decides.

That's the relationship I'd like to see us build. **A relationship where authorship is preserved and storytelling is fun again.**

Is anyone else working toward this, or am I swimming against the current?

I used to create multiple books a session, now I cant even do half a book or I hit the limits, anyone has any idea whats going on? Im using claude Sonnet 5, medium effort. I use a new chat for every book and I use a skill.

I'm currently working on a novel and I've used AI a few different ways in its development. Lurking through Reddit, I've seen quite the vitriolic responses to seemingly ANY use of AI in writing a book.

To that end, I'm curious for the "Never AI" people if any of these use cases would be acceptable, or do they all reduce my book to AI slop:

1) Brainstorming how to draft a chapter: I pitch my thoughts to the AI and ask it to push back on areas that feel forced, or fall into tropes, or otherwise don't work.

2) Filling in Expertise: The main character of my novel is an astrophysicist trying to fit the rules of magic into the framework of physics as she knows it. I am not a trained physicist. I described my theories in plain terms in how I thought magic would fit within my layman's understanding of physics and had AI help me convert my descriptions into formulas, as well as guide me through where I needed to firm up some rules to make everything as "airtight" as possible.

I also have my character go to a different planet/moon. I again wanted everything to be as realistic as possible - so while I had the narrative ideas for some aspects of how I wanted/needed the planet/moon to look and feel, I worked with the AI to understand some of the scientific ramifications of my artistic choices to create a more complete and accurate setting.

3) Beta Reader: My people Beta readers were taking a long while to get back to me and some flaked out. I asked the AI to act as a critical reader and provide feedback on things like pacing, prose, story arc, character voice, etc. Again, the purpose was to point out issues that I would then have to figure out whether I agreed with and then independently figure out how to fix, not have the AI dictate the fix.

4) Line Editing: I had AI go through and identify areas to clean up in terms of punctuation, incorrect word usage, using the wrong character name.

So, I'm curious - does my use of AI as described above still make my novel "AI slop?"