I have directed AI to only look for punctuation and tense errors. It still misses some, but until I can get money to hire someone to go through it, it’ll have to do. I also have it scan for continuity. Sometimes, it will suggest I look at another sentence for clarity. But I have distinctly told it no rewrites. That’s why it took me so many years to finish my first book. I was still finding my way into the world and feeling out the characters. Now that I’ve lived with them for so long, the next books came easier. Not because of AI, but because I lived in that world for so long.
Good. You're being responsible and respecting the AI as it should be; a tool. Good on ya.
At this point, I have done more 'This shit is not AI' instead of pointing any works as AI. Regardless of what I think about AI, when giving feedback, I always try to be as fair as possible.
I call out AI usage when it matters, but it's more like how I call out that a story has too much of purple prose because the author keeps snorting the whole dictionary into their head. That is, even before AI I have already called out people for overusing punctuation marks for no reasons, repeating sentence structures, obsessing the same word over and over, and so on.
When amateurs do it, it's because they haven't learnt more (or some esoteric reasons). When dice app addicts do it, it's because they're loving the way their butler pampers them. Different reasons, but the expectation is the same: be better.
Okay, first, I ain't laughing at you. It's just me envisioning somebody snapping their head back, blinking and searching the room wildly for a moment of clear equilibrium with a plastered face of purple power that got me roaring.
Secondly, I hadn't thought of the fact that scammers would think that way; the gambling perspective. They're rolling the dice to see if they score on some naive dupe. That's... yeah, I'll have to be more vigilant in warning newbies often about that.
Finally, cool. Yeah, when catching on to the fact, I think you are right to weigh the import over the intent; if the content is there for pure entertainment, why spoil the fun? I'm chill with that.
I've been writing my story, posted here on Scribblehub, for more than a decade. It has evolved slowly over the years. I believe that, because of the tools available over the last year or so, my story has now reached an acceptable level of refinement, allowing it to be seen and read as the story I've always imagined it to be. It is my story. It is my characters, my scenes, my thoughts, and my imagination. Grammarly is a wonderful tool that makes it seem like I am actually good at writing. Is that wrong? I write almost exclusively in autoCrit, and their analysis tools help me be a better author. Is that wrong? I even use ChatGPT for help with my prose. Is that wrong?
Don't take this the wrong way, but if you've been writing something for ten years (with no help from AI), then shouldn't you already be able to refine your story well enough on your own? The general advice is to write regularly and you'll improve with practice, so you should be much better now than you were ten years ago. If you rely on AI for any part of the writing process, you're keeping yourself from improving and growing as a writer. If you don't care about that and want to keep using it, no one will stop you. Just know it's going to make your skills degrade over time.
I am an aircraft engineer by trade, have been writing as a hobby for 10+ years, and am certainly no English major. There have been times when I wouldn't even look at my story for a year or more, but I'd see the file on my computer, read it again, and get excited. I'd write for a while as I expanded the chapters and told more of the story. But would run out of time, and/or energy, and quit again.
However, I can truly say that, over the last year or so, my writing has improved tremendously with AI coaching. It has helped me with my prose for sure. On top of that, I have found a rhythm in my writing I never had before, and my punctuation and grammar have greatly improved, especially by paying close attention to the prompts I receive from Grammarly.
So, to flatly say AI is bad, to me, is wrong in the way I use it.
If I were to just create a prompt, let AI write it, and post it as my own, even I believe that would be wrong.
Does any of this make sense? Am I wrong in the way I use it?
Okay, I'm gonna address the three of yous on your responses here.
So, for over a decade, you practiced and trained your inner muscles to hone in one what you are good at. That's good, and I can see why after that amount of specialization AI would suddenly be an undiscovered territory to map out; you got exposed to new applications for your current skillset. I find that completely reasonable why this transition happened after so long. But I also agree that while the AI is revealing other ways to expand on that specialized writing, it is significant to be aware of how much it changes your style. If you take a step back and away from it, like tonight or something, and try writing, does it feel different when you do it without the AI offering advice? Can you keep that up or does something now feel... wrong? Like you don't sense how good it was before setting the AI down for a timeout. Try it out and, when you do, mull it over in your head.
As for my two cents: AI generated content, in my humble opinion, is not worth giving constructive criticism over. I don't care if the person even just takes it and edits what was prompted, because then they're just attempting to make it sound less like AI and even more of a betrayal of trust. AI accusations are becoming increasingly more common and serious, so if I consider something was made with AI I'll just quietly confirm or even just block. I would have to ask why there should be constructive criticism given when mostly likely they'll just copy and paste actual people's ideas in the generator. Why should I give over my honest hard work to someone who'll most likely just plug it in without really thinking about it? There just isn't a good reason.
Because at the end of the day, there is no concrete method of identifying and determining the differences between the two with a 100% efficiency. So inevitably I will give out good advice to someone I am giving the benefit of the doubt—hell, I love em dashes and colons and semi-colons, so good luck prying them from my cold dead hands.
I think even budging slightly on our okayness with GenAI is just... not a good idea. Before AI there was already so much crap being shoved on the internet already, and AI is now making content farms even so much worse than before, and flooding our every day lives with it. Hell, even the argument "well there's no market harm done by generating pictures because there wouldn't have been a sale for a web serial book cover," is just... dumb, honestly. Sorry, I'm from a time of the earlier internet when people had to make their images for their serials, or just draw them. I'm from back when Girl Genius was starting and there when they even printed physical media. And Girl Genius was one of the better ones out there at that time. There was such a variety of style differences because no one cared if it looked good.
Sorry, but it has to be said: a lot of people on the internet have turned into snobs expecting perfect pristine covers, which is just silly. You don't need a nice ai image to better showcase your story, especially when some of the top stories have no covers at all.
If a writer isn't even doing the real bulk of the writing—even if they do all the thinking and pumps all their ideas into Claude or ChatGPT, they are doing all of us a deservice; especially themselves.
Frauds. You dislike the same thing I do. I'd be with you as a shieldbrother on that front. Nobody should be passing off what the AI wrote as their own creative work.
For me, there is a real metaphysical difference between works that are generated and those that are pain-stakingly made and agonised over. For me, I don't want so much excess that the good stuff gets buried by the crud, when there's no reason to. There's a ton of juicy good steaks with compotes on this site from classical homemade meals... why do I want to get bogged down with cheap fast food when I have access to the good stuff? If that metaphysical difference doesn't matter to you, and all you care about is the physical content just existing, then I think we'll have a hard time agreeing on this topic at all.
Controversial hot take: not everything needs to be made. Hell, lots of story ideas I had have been scrapped, reworked, and redone. Not everything I thought needed to get posted. A lot of stories need to be baked a lot longer before they get shoved out—even mine! The one I'm posting now is just a rough draft I'm flinging out for fun. Over time I'll hone it, especially if I get good criticisms.
I will also add it's a bit disingenuous to discuss AI when people are primarily against the form it takes when it's primarily generative which is what we have an issue with—hell, even sites like Grammarly and ProWritingAid are turning into abject garbage because of GenAI, so I question if we even need these tools at all when we have each other and we can give advice and communicate instead of stare at a screen and read something made by something that isn't even human...
What's that phrase... something like "You all focused on whether you could, you never stopped to think if you should." That's what I'm getting here and I agree up to a point, but, strangely, I don't have a solution on where I disagree.
You're right in that there's too much excess. So much that the only real
reset would be something biblical that washes away the good, the bad, and the ugly all at once. But here's where my thoughts on it goes, that I'll eat a fine medium-rare steak and I'll also eat oily fries on the side, together on the same plate. And the fact is that both end up coming out the same in the end. Sorry, that's not my point I'm trying to get at here. The point is the experience in the moment, you know, you and them and us handling of it, the bite landing where it counts, the act of consuming it.
Now, content is like that too. Once it's out there, it's, well, floating around the bowl... unless somebody flushes it. And yeah, authors do mass purges sometimes for a variety of impulsive or valid reasons. Still not my main point.
My small disagreement is this: it just doesn't matter to me where the help comes from. That's a personal stance, not a universal one because editors, proofreaders, critique partners, those fellas, they all change the raw output of a writer. Assistance, whether it is digital or flesh, has always existed. That's where I diverge and hope you understand this is only my opinion.
