About AI use in edits

[Eldoria]

Sis, I may be a 'legend' but that comes from my drawings, not the writing.

And I reached to forum peeps whose opinion I trust, but no one replied so far.

And enough with the edits. I'd like to know if I should cotinue to write with what I put up. It's what led to me editing my work in the first place, to try to improve on it.

I'm sorry to hear about your situation. What I can do here may not be of much help to you, but a little. Ultimately, I leave the writing and editing decisions to you.

 

[Hans.Trondheim]

I'm sorry to hear about your situation. What I can do here may not be of much help to you, but a little. Ultimately, I leave the writing and editing decisions to you.

Nah, tis fine. I just want to know if my writing is still worth continuing, mainly because real life is slowly encroaching my resources and time.

I can't hold on everything, so I should cut my losses and cut cleanly.

Oh well, life sucks.

 

[BeezussWrites]

I mean, I did that before, and still nothing. How can you ask for feedback when no one is answering in the first place?

I've written about 150k words total through a few accounts for my stories, and I've never got a single comment that wasn't from me talking to a friend and asking them to take a look at my work. I sent my stories to paid beta readers, and all they gave me was "this is generic and it sucked.” I’m pretty good at taking criticism, but when the only criticism you’re getting is from people you have to pay to give it to you telling you it sucks, it kind of sucks a large amount of your confidence away. I feel your pain on this my man, and if you ever want feedback/are willing to settle for mine, feel free to send the full story my way and I’ll actually get to telling you if it’s worth continuing or not.

But for now, I’ll just give you an idea of what I can see on this post. I took a close look at your three versions, and I’ll break down what the AI change your story into, so you can make your own decision on where to go from here:

First, we are told how a scene feels almost every time, which leads us readers to be unable to immerse ourselves in the scene. Let’s just take a look at this from your passage: “They wanted me to carry the trays manually, exposed and vulnerable.” Exposed and vulnerable don’t do anything to help out the passage, and they are instantly explained through a way better frame with the next sentence that talks about the Vietnam war and dense greenery. What specifically makes him feel exposed? In your original version, you explained what it felt like to be exposed, and how it related to his current situation. In the ai versions, we were told that he felt exposed, without any reason to understand why.

Second, which ties into the above point, is its ruthless need to trim pacing. Ask ai to give you a rating on any of your work and see what I mean. It always believes there’s fat to be trimmed, and that fat is usually cutting long, flowery descriptions that might often help a scene feel more alive in favor of something shorter that it believes “means the same thing.”

Words that mean the same thing don’t often feel the same to us humans, but ai can’t tell the difference.

Let’s take a look at this piece from your original:

“where you suddenly hear the trees and shrubs speak Vietnamese for a moment, and then a hail of bullets and explosions would follow seconds after.”

Now take a look at the AI’s version:

“the kind where the trees suddenly started speaking a language you didn't understand right before the first flare went up.”

It got rid of the “for a moment, and then” in favor of just “right before.” It believes it’s cleaner, which it definitely is, but it lose the cinematic feel in favor of word count. It might be a few words, but those few words serve to create tension that is now non-existent in the second version.

Lastly… AI just sucks at dialogue, and “sullied failure” is a perfect example of that. Ai doesn’t understand how people talk, but rather the context a conversation is spoken in. It sees this “high class” setting you’ve crafted, and reaches for a more elevated set of words to use instead. “Sullied” checks out logically, but when you look at “sullied failure” you know a person would never actually say this.

On top of that, it’s clear that it was meant to be a nickname, which it completely failed at. A nickname is supposed to be some sort of observation about the person it’s describing. Sullied failure doesn’t do that, and you clearly saw that yourself when you changed it to “useless lust demon” in the revised version. It clearly makes us understand what about him the maids didn’t like, while also giving us a better idea of the type of worldview people of their standing have.

The reason it’s bad to use AI to write is because its repetitive patterns will keep your story from getting to its full potential. Rather, you should reverse engineer what exactly the ai is doing correctly so you can apply it to your writing. To help you out, here are a few things I think it did well:

Ai is actually decent at filling in gaps some writers might have missed. Your original writing just said: “If those fell into the food, it would get contaminated.” I couldn’t tell if the problem was with the leaves touching the food, or specifically what would happen to him if they did. The AI fixed that by adding this:

Only here, the "hail of bullets" would be wet leaves and spiteful splashes of fountain water. If a single stray leaf touched the patrons’ food, the kitchen maids would have all the excuse they needed to declare me a "sullied" failure.

Now I understood both what he was trying to avoid and why it mattered.

My final point is actually a somewhat counter to my original point about AI over-explaining things, which sometimes can be a benefit to the author. Writers begin their story with a perfect idea of the setting they’re writing about, but forget that none of those ideas are visible to the reader. Like if I wrote something like: “The cold air made me shudder,” you’d know it’s cold. But if I wrote “I really need to patch that hole in the roof,” I shuddered. you’d understand that there was a hole in the roof, and that’s why the character was cold.

Here’s an example of the AI doing just that in your writing. We get “back on Earth” and “the saint’s visitors.” This now made it completely clear that this was some sort of Isekai/Fantasy world. Though, if this is part of a larger piece and the readers are already aware of this, then these might become a bit redundant, but based on this excerpt, they help out a ton.

I know from personal experience how hard it is to continue writing when you’re endlessly yelling into the void for someone to give you advice, only for no one to ever notice. Don’t think that the goal should be not to write with AI, but rather to improve your craft to a point where AI is no longer needed.

 

[Rolanov]

Nah, tis fine. I just want to know if my writing is still worth continuing, mainly because real life is slowly encroaching my resources and time.

I can't hold on everything, so I should cut my losses and cut cleanly.

Oh well, life sucks.

You'd better take a break for a while, mate. Don't pressure yourself too much, especially when it involves creative work. Do something outside your usual routine or things you actually enjoy.

It's just a guess, but are you perhaps reading others' work and feeling discouraged about your own writing?

 

[Erysion]

It's just a guess, but are you perhaps reading others' work and feeling discouraged about your own writing?

From the look of it, he is reading comments Retard Road users posted on his stories and it make him want to stop writing.

Hans might have left Retard Road Legends, but they followed him here.

 

[Rolanov]

From the look of it, he is reading comments Retard Road users posted on his stories and it make him want to stop writing.

Hans might have left Retard Road Legends, but they followed him here.

That’s lovely, perhaps they’re proper fans or secretly in love with Hans? Since they’ve got bags of time to follow him here as well!

 

[greyblob]

I dunno about it. My writing has been charmless even since conception.

I don't think the reception of the original work tells the same.

Now this is the part where I'm confused. If I try to change it on my own, I still get bad feedback like "Why use this certain word?" or "Do you really have to use this weird sentence construction?" Stuff like that.

Yet, when I try to fix it with AI assistance, I still get confusing feedback.

So how do I really do edits? I'm no English native. I want to fix my narrative while cutting at the words as well. I've been doing sentence by sentence too, if I think it should be done.

i'm not an english native either. for edits, the best advice i can give is read published novels. find a genre you like, download some books and read them. your writing will change drastically without you realizing it.

for more concious work, its about patterns imo. you observe patterns and you look for them. when i was learning english in school, writing had 19 rules. that was it. its just a bunch of patterns that get repeated.

Too much sentences starting with "I"? rewrite it a bit differently. Using a word too many times, find a synonym. etc etc

beezus's comment is really good and goed indepth

 

[HouseDelarouxScribbles]

It seems that I am too late to write an evaluation since the author has quit writing. It is a difficult ask, since evaluating this asks for knowledge of AI, experience of working with people who learned English as a second language, and literary comparison at the same time. In general, I find that the AI has improved the writing, but not in a grammatical sense; the prose is quite readable by itself; I think Gemini focused on giving clarity to events happening, which is a skill the author can pick up for themselves as well.

Spoiler: Evaluation For Hans

The author is painting a picture of a dangerous diner 'walk'. He describes the danger like that of a warzone, with unseen enemies like in the Vietnam War, with possible saboteurs lurking around. I liked the original version, it had an 'energy' where you could feel the Main Character tensing up because his co-workers might appear out of nowhere to sabotage him. However, this energy doesn't remain consistent throughout the passage, and dips because of how the author's word choice affects the rhythm of the passage. Let me give the most obvious example:



>>... and then a hail of bullets and explosions would follow seconds after. Only this time, I might get a hail of flying leaves and droplets of water. If those fell into the food, it would get contaminated.

>>>Only here, the "hail of bullets" would be wet leaves and spiteful splashes of fountain water. If a single stray leaf touched the patrons’ food, the kitchen maids would have all the excuse they needed to declare me a "sullied" failure.

In the original, the author describes the danger by building up the 'hail of bullets'. This is a good setup, since the imagery of the 'hail of flying leaves and droplets of water' works this way. However, the following sentence is a bit 'weak'; after bullets, the result is... contamination! It is not established why that is such a big deal, so it falls a little flat.

What Gemini has done is to 'identify the stakes', why does this matter to the Main Character? The reason is that the food will be sent back by the maids, and the Main Character gets deemed a failure. This is a stronger way of helping make the 'dangerous service' stand out.



>>...Duck for cover, if you must. Give them hell if you want to survive. Peel your eyes open if you want to prevail.

>>> Duck for cover. Keep the tray level. Give them hell if you want to survive.

Here's another example of Gemini editing for clarity. The author is leaning his reference towards the war movies with an increasing rhythm, where the stakes get higher. ('duck... survive... prevail') Gemini has chosen to pull it back to the service by inserting 'Keep the tray level'. in the middle. The reason is possibly because 'peeling your eyes' and 'prevailing' is of a lower intensity than 'giving them hell' and 'surviving', because if you survive, you already win the war! Both in Vietnam AND in the service!

Both can work, to be honest. If it was me and I wanted to keep the author's voice, I would simply flip the sentence around, 'Keep your eyes open if you want to survive, give them hell if you want to prevail'. It would still work for the author who wants an increasing rhythm in the danger, while keeping the references on the Vietnam war movie scene.



Lastly, I associate 'Paint It Black' with Westworld (laugh), so I didn't quite get the Vietnam War movie connection. I started to notice a pattern in Gemini's edits at this point which is that they tend to edit the language to be softer, so the 'bullets', 'hell', 'die' are edited out. This is a preference thing to be honest, and not for me to decide. If the author feels that the war setting is important enough to give the scene the proper gravity, then the 'violent' descriptions should be kept. This is also Gemini's style of writing, where they will go for the 'safer option'. Personally, I imagine the service like a scene out of 'Shokugeki no Soma', where even the most mundane things in cooking is made into a Michelin Star-worthy cooking move, so a little exaggeration is okay! It IS a good audio reference for those who 'get' it, since my brain manually played it when mentioned, so Gemini was right to keep this one in.



As a last word, I have no problems reading the original passage; I do however agree with Gemini that their edits improve clarity, tie back to the plot better. A side-effect is that the language tends to be softened and some Geminiisms (laugh) are inserted. You can message me if you want to know more about the rhetorical devices that are very obviously Gemini and not you!

I think that understanding the author's intentions, and understanding the AI's intentions is important. Authors want to improve with helpful feedback, but editors also have their own tendencies, whether it be AI or human, so understanding what each side is trying to do creates a better work at the end of the process!