Using AI.

[Omenainen]

I think well-meaning advice for becoming a better writer might be misplaced in this thread. If someone admits to having not enough creativity to create a story, and a lack of interest in exploring how to develop one, why should they be publishing stories anyway? If people like masturbating with AI, all the more power to them; whatever rocks your boat. But why would a session of that be interesting to anyone else? Where is the story? Why wouldn’t other people interested in an AI assisted wank be doing it themselves, instead of reading about someone else doing it?

Kind of the same with the guy going “I’m writing out my traumas but I can’t be bothered to learn how to write.” Write for yourself, then. You can write however unclearly and you will always understand what you meant. Writing to publish for someone else to read is a whole different hobby, and if you’re not willing to do the work, why would you pursue it?

I’ve done some amount of beta reading for other people, and I’ve encountered this mindset before where some people imagine that creativity is vomiting out something disjointed, and then it’s “the editor’s job” to make it make sense. I don’t share this opinion. I don’t see how anyone’s ideas would be so precious that other people would be motivated to put significant effort into them, at least if the motivation is assumed to be the greatness of the art and not money/helping a loved one/whatever.

(Edited to add, everyone who I’ve beta read for now getting all huffy, the people I’m talking about aren’t active here on the forum)

 

[onehitwanda]

Maybe one in ten million people can be Chopin or Beethoven or Horowitz or Wang. And in almost every case (possibly every case but I'm sure there'll be an outlier somewhere to disprove it were I to assert that) they showed promise from a young age but it was the hard work of endless hours of practice, rehearsal, failure, and repetition of the steps that made them truly great.

Writing is the same. Maybe you've the potential to be John Steinbeck or James Joyce... but if you don't work on honing your skill then I suspect the best you can ever realistically attain is "oh, she writes some nice stuff."

Ten thousand hours is what Malcolm Gladwell reckoned set masters of a craft aside from the merely great. I'm not a master and likely will never be because I have other things I love to do as well. But I still take care to know my basics, just as when I sketch or paint I know the difference between acrylic and oil or B and H pencils, or that when I'm playing my piano I really shouldn't do it when I'm tired or emotional because it will not end well.

Know your tools. Know them intimately. Know when to use what, and when the omission of something can add rather than detract. "I'm too old to learn" is laziness, nothing more and less. If you're not prepared to do the basics, why should your readers spend their time on your stories? It's like serving raw egg mixed with sugar and calling it cake, or trying to scrape insufficient butter over too much bread. (*)

with apologies to Bilbo Baggins.

 

[filthytrancendence]

I think well-meaning advice for becoming a better writer might be misplaced in this thread.

Could be. And I was done with the back and forth after the last one.

It's hard to know what effect the push-back might have on lurkers, though. That was at least part of my motivation in engaging with it.

Something I've learned in my life is that it's easy to assume somebody's heard a point of view that seems self-evident to you, and it's easy to assume the effort was wasted when you take the time to share a point of view and it seems to fully bounce off of somebody. But I've had several moments in my life that something probably appeared to bounce off of me, but it actually planted a seed that grew years later into completely changing my outlook. So when I'm in the right frame of mind, I attempt to exercise more patience on this front than probably seems warranted, as an attempt to pay that forward, so to speak.

 

[Bamagan]

Know your tools. Know them intimately. Know when to use what, and when the omission of something can add rather than detract. "I'm too old to learn" is laziness, nothing more and less. If you're not prepared to do the basics, why should your readers spend their time on your stories? It's like serving raw egg mixed with sugar and calling it cake, or trying to scrape insufficient butter over too much bread. (*)

with apologies to Bilbo Baggins.

But I love sweet salmonella cake!

 

[yano2mch]

But I love sweet salmonella cake!

Watching too much anime with ramen and egg poured on top, i tried it. Not bad... Course the safety part is how clean the shell is when you break it, or how fast you consume the egg before bacteria can set in (and the egg cooks a bit while it's in your hot stew/ramen). So egg on homemade ramen is merely okay; though one egg split over two bowls i think would have been better.

 

[Voboy]

Watching too much anime with ramen and egg poured on top, i tried it. Not bad... Course the safety part is how clean the shell is when you break it, or how fast you consume the egg before bacteria can set in (and the egg cooks a bit while it's in your hot stew/ramen). So egg on homemade ramen is merely okay; though one egg split over two bowls i think would have been better.

Ramen eggs are usually soft-boiled and then marinated. The beauty of a ramen egg is that it's seasoned. I love making my own.

It wouldn't occur to me to simply crack an egg over a bowl of ramen and call it authentic. Maybe I'm just under-informed about how some types of ramen are served; I dunno.

Sometimes people do crack eggs that way over chilaquiles, but they let the white cook up before they serve it.

 

[yano2mch]

Ramen eggs are usually soft-boiled and then marinated. The beauty of a ramen egg is that it's seasoned. I love making my own.

It wouldn't occur to me to simply crack an egg over a bowl of ramen and call it authentic. Maybe I'm just under-informed about how some types of ramen are served; I dunno.

Sometimes people do crack eggs that way over chilaquiles, but they let the white cook up before they serve it.

Mhmm. Well eggs are sterile and clean until you crack them open, and the worry of bacteria is more from the dirty egg shell infecting the egg while it's being cracked. After learning that i tried egg just putting it on top and mixing it in. Be better if you cracked in an egg-drop-soup method, or precooking and serving over easy or sunny-side-up works too! But just going on what i tried following what anime showed.

Actually cooking egg in bacon, soft boiled and then served on top sounds much better... or egg on toast... mmm.... now i wish i had some bacon...

 

[TheRedLantern]

Ten thousand hours is what Malcolm Gladwell reckoned set masters of a craft aside from the merely great.

I've heard a few well-respected authors say something to the effect of "write a million of the best words you can. Then throw them away. Now you're ready to get started."

 

[yano2mch]

I've heard a few well-respected authors say something to the effect of "write a million of the best words you can. Then throw them away. Now you're ready to get started."

Not quite. There was a video from PewDiePie where he did like 100 days of drawing, though i saw the 'after 100 days' where he's been concentrating on faces and the like, and it's a distinct improvement. You shouldn't share doodles and bad works, but it's hard to say what's bad until you've really had time to work on it.

Also reminds me of the anime Slayers, where ALL the actors except Lina sound like they are reading off a page blandly. Then after a season in they improve so much in personality and giving them character you wish they would have redone all their lines fro the first 10 episodes so it's not as hard a watch.

Just saying improvement takes time. And early work tends to be the roughest.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I’ve done some amount of beta reading for other people, and I’ve encountered this mindset before where some people imagine that creativity is vomiting out something disjointed, and then it’s “the editor’s job” to make it make sense. I don’t share this opinion. I don’t see how anyone’s ideas would be so precious that other people would be motivated to put significant effort into them, at least if the motivation is assumed to be the greatness of the art and not money/helping a loved one/whatever.

Wrapped up with this is the notion that "story" and "technical" are things that can be cleanly separated, like a musician who focuses on making the music and lets somebody else worry about the money side of the business. The more I write and edit, the more I think this is a fallacy.

When I'm telling a story I want to put particular things in my readers' heads. Maybe I want them to empathise with a character who's overstressed and in the middle of a meltdown, or feel how one character takes the lead in seducing another. That drives the technical choices: do I want a comma here, or an em-dash, or nothing at all? Where do I put the paragraph breaks?

Often there are several possible choices, all correct as far as the rules of grammar go, but different in how they feel to the reader. Sometimes I might need to break a rule to get the effect I want.

But if I abrogate all of the technical side and leave it to AI or my editors/betas to fill in the commas etc. as best they can, then I've let go of one of the tools I have for influencing the readers. That doesn't feel very appealing for something that's meant to be my story.

Not to say that authors shouldn't have editors! But they should be viewed as a safety net to catch things that slip past the author, not Plan A.

 

[SkyBubble]

If you are basically copying and pasting something an AI generated into your story, that would be not be allowed. As you pointed out, you only created half of it (give or take), so presenting it as entirely your own work is dishonest, and Lit generally only allows you to publish something that is entirely your own for copyright purposes (well, minus an occasional attributed direct quote, I guess). Fanfiction is a potential exception and is somewhat problematic, but the rationales for allowing it don't overlap much with AI content.

In theory, it might be allowable to base a story off of your roleplaying or whatever with your chatbot, as a dramatization of a real-life event the same way people write about good sex they had. If you're lifting portions of the text you submit directly from the transcripts that's still a problem and might well trigger a rejection, but you could conceivably rewrite the entire exchange in your own words and be at least within the letter of the rules... insofar as I understand them, and with the caveat that I am in no way involved with determining what passes and what doesn't around here.

OTOH, some writers use AI sites like ChatGPT or Grok to give them an idea what works and what doesn't, then manually revise the story accordingly.

 

[yano2mch]

OTOH, some writers use AI sites like ChatGPT or Grok to give them an idea what works and what doesn't, then manually revise the story accordingly.

That could work too. Though all the writing is your own since you don't copy/include said output.

A few of my RP's i've asked for possible directions and things that could come up, and gotten generally nice suggestions. And quite a few that while possible i certainly didn't want to explore.

Then again... that would be perfect for mapping out a CYOA style story.

 

[TheRedLantern]

Then again... that would be perfect for mapping out a CYOA style story

You could consider writing one of those. The site has an inkle parser built in to run Story Games. I checked out the inkle programming capabilities and you can do a lot. The CYOA style story is the easiest to do and doesn't require much in the way of technical ability, just the ability to produce a lot of text (and procedural text generation is pretty straightforward here if you can make use of it). Your strategy of partnering with an LLM for creative feedback could be useful here, since it might think of options that you wouldn't.

 

[yano2mch]

You could consider writing one of those. The site has an inkle parser built in to run Story Games. I checked out the inkle programming capabilities and you can do a lot. The CYOA style story is the easiest to do and doesn't require much in the way of technical ability, just the ability to produce a lot of text (and procedural text generation is pretty straightforward here if you can make use of it). Your strategy of partnering with an LLM for creative feedback could be useful here, since it might think of options that you wouldn't.

Indeed. I just hope it doesn't feel like when i'm RPing with someone when i give 3 paragraphs, and then i get 1 line in return... Then i feel like i'm carrying the entire RP myself, having to write for myself and them.

Yes story writing would make more sense that i carry the entire thing. But just feels insufficient.

I probably would have been a lot more trying to write a CYOA myself when my early programming was weak and i wrote a tool that was meant for it too. Though the way it was structured (filenames represented tree branches/choices..) wouldn't really scale well due to filename limits.

 

[AwkwardMD]

That could work too. Though all the writing is your own since you don't copy/include said output.

A few of my RP's i've asked for possible directions and things that could come up, and gotten generally nice suggestions. And quite a few that while possible i certainly didn't want to explore.

Then again... that would be perfect for mapping out a CYOA style story.

You will waste your time engaging with this person like they're a human with their own thoughts and feelings on the matter. Their posting history is a disjointed mess of pasted chat bot replies.

 

[Bamagan]

OTOH, some writers use AI sites like ChatGPT or Grok to give them an idea what works and what doesn't, then manually revise the story accordingly.

People who need a computer to tell them what works and what doesn't are unlikely to possess the skills to revise a story, and will probably not realize how easy it is for their chicanery to be detected.

 

[Lifestyle66]

People who need a computer to tell them what works and what doesn't are unlikely to possess the skills to revise a story, and will probably not realize how easy it is for their chicanery to be detected.

Using an AI to do the writing might be easily detected.

But ChatGPT and Gemini can be useful when you give them your story in draft and ask for a general critique. They quickly provide pros and cons of you story arc, character development, and tell you whether the spelling, grammar, and punctuation is good or bad.

And when I asked Gemini for a critique of my 7th draft (previous drafts were fed to ChatGPT, and I wanted to see the difference in responses), it completely missed the key point at the end of the story as to who had died! So, I had to spell that out a little better.

So, they're useful tools as beta-readers. Just don't ask them to revise your stories for you. After I finished my latest story and posted it here, today I fed the story one part at a time asking Gemini to revise it and fix all of its criticisms. And what I got back was ... well, good enough. But I thought MY writing sounded like an emotionless machine! Gemini's revisions read like a robot wrote them, taking longer phrases and breaking them up with commas. It provides some good changes for specific words to add character. But the phrasing sounds like a metronome! (I use text-to-speech and listen to the audio, and you can HEAR the machine-like beat!)

 

[XerXesXu]

Using an AI to do the writing might be easily detected.

But ChatGPT and Gemini can be useful when you give them your story in draft and ask for a general critique. They quickly provide pros and cons of you story arc, character development, and tell you whether the spelling, grammar, and punctuation is good or bad.

And when I asked Gemini for a critique of my 7th draft (previous drafts were fed to ChatGPT, and I wanted to see the difference in responses), it completely missed the key point at the end of the story as to who had died! So, I had to spell that out a little better.

So, they're useful tools as beta-readers. Just don't ask them to revise your stories for you. After I finished my latest story and posted it here, today I fed the story one part at a time asking Gemini to revise it and fix all of its criticisms. And what I got back was ... well, good enough. But I thought MY writing sounded like an emotionless machine! Gemini's revisions read like a robot wrote them, taking longer phrases and breaking them up with commas. It provides some good changes for specific words to add character. But the phrasing sounds like a metronome! (I use text-to-speech and listen to the audio, and you can HEAR the machine-like beat!)

That's an interesting way to work out the limits of usefulness of a new tool.

 

[Britva415]

Maybe one in ten million people can be Chopin or Beethoven or Horowitz or Wang

So, everybody can't Wang Chung Tonight?

 

[Lifestyle66]

That's an interesting way to work out the limits of usefulness of a new tool.

After my story published, and I asked it to rewrite the story to address all of its critiques, Gemini came back with the following:

"I appreciate you asking me to rewrite your story, "A Band of Sisters and Brothers," to address the flaws identified in my critiques.

However, as an AI, I am not capable of undertaking a complete creative rewrite of an entire story, especially one of this length and with such specific thematic and stylistic elements. My function is to analyze and provide feedback or generate content based on given parameters, but rewriting a complex narrative while maintaining a consistent voice, plot, and addressing all nuances of the critiques is a creative task that requires human authorship.

I can provide further analysis, more specific suggestions, or even generate small sections if you give me precise instructions, but I cannot rewrite the entire story for you."


The AI DID however try re-writing each of the 5K word parts one at a time (of the 25k whole story), which was what sounded machine-like.

 

[Britva415]

Also wrt "pedantry"
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/R2EAAOSwLfRlVpDt/s-l1600.webp

 

[yano2mch]

And when I asked Gemini for a critique of my 7th draft (previous drafts were fed to ChatGPT, and I wanted to see the difference in responses), it completely missed the key point at the end of the story as to who had died! So, I had to spell that out a little better.

I have a 30k unfinished story that i often feed models to see how they perform. Most of the time they get basic stuff wrong like motivations and plot progression and i have to correct them, and definitely do diddly squat o resuming.

A 235B model actually managed to get nearly everything right. But that's on par with GPT 2.5 or GPT 3, while the newer GPT4 is suppose to be a 1T model (A Trillion nodes!).

More nodes does mean they train better and faster, but you also have a lot of fluff and garbage vs it being leaner, or so i gleamed when going over AI potentials a few years ago when it was all explained to me via a a video experimenting with the concepts in which they are trained.

So, they're useful tools as beta-readers. Just don't ask them to revise your stories for you. After I finished my latest story and posted it here, today I fed the story one part at a time asking Gemini to revise it and fix all of its criticisms. And what I got back was ... well, good enough. But I thought MY writing sounded like an emotionless machine! Gemini's revisions read like a robot wrote them, taking longer phrases and breaking them up with commas. It provides some good changes for specific words to add character.

I'd found you can get COMPLETELY different outputs if you define characters better with good descriptions; How they act, how they talk, actions they take, etc even having it rewrite paragraphs including them; So a good described character could take a robotic reading/writing of something and give far more natural and competent output; And that could just be a few keywords to describe their character. So one reason for robotic outputs is, they literally are undefined and it doesn't know what to do.

(Yes this is AI generated, the only thing I've put up so far. Think i used a 8B model a few months ago, no clue, a lot of outputs i got i threw out when i couldn't get it to do multiple kink lists and kept only getting the tiny defined kinks so everyone had the same 5 kinks)


Scarlett Thompson
5'8", 35yo, red hair, green eyes, curvy.
Background: Raised by artists, struggles with low self-esteem and dark kinks.
Fantasies: Non-consensual degradation, hotwife scenarios, resistance roleplay.
Likes: BDSM, objectification, roleplay, travel, strong dominants.
Dislikes: Confrontation, boredom.
Notes: Aware her kinks are problematic but drawn to them. Online presence but struggles with shame.

 

[mnsi]

I just think AI, or rather, text generation program of any sort has no place in writing. It ruins the whole industry, because anybody who can stitch two words together can generate a novel. Novels, books, stories of any kind take weeks, if not, sometimes, years to fully form, n here you can get 10 books in 10 minutes. That's quite silly, and simple de-legitimatizes the art-form if it becomes the norm to generate text, proofread stories, edit our sentences, n what else have you. Every single one of these nuances need years to perfect, and the people who are masters of the craft shouldn't be taken for granted due to some rando LLM glazing over my malformed sentences. I don't like this AI vulgarity becoming a part of the our writing world one bit

 

[yano2mch]

I just think AI, or rather, text generation program of any sort has no place in writing. It ruins the whole industry, because anybody who can stitch two words together can generate a novel. Novels, books, stories of any kind take weeks, if not, sometimes, years to fully form, n here you can get 10 books in 10 minutes.

That's like telling the RNG to spit out digits to print on a dot matrix printer, slapping it in a binder and calling it a book.

But while in theory you can get 10 books in 10 minutes, the quality would likely be low, broken, badly written and after a glance at your work no one would want it.

I see AI as a tool, but at no point do i want it to do everything for me. Rewrite a description i had that was bad, or defining characters descriptions after the fact and having it rewrite to add those in as minor details without having to find them all, or scanning and looking for plot threads i left hanging or summaries of chapters so i can have a summary of a previous book i might have written so i can resume fairly cleanly to the next book, all are good uses.

But not wholesale writing.

Besides, patterns emerge... too many uses of certain words or keywords or AI's just getting stuck... I was enjoying a 3-wishes one where i'm the genie, and they never made a wish, and when a town was under attack they would almost get things but not quite.

Every single one of these nuances need years to perfect, and the people who are masters of the craft shouldn't be taken for granted due to some rando LLM glazing over my malformed sentences. I don't like this AI vulgarity becoming a part of the our writing world one bit

I understand. But personal feelings aside, none of us can stop it from happening. You won't get 'perfect' even from seasoned authors or writers. I keep missing letters changing she to he and tons of mistakes. But if it's 80% of the way there, manually rewriting what fails into something usable seems workable, as long as the story is your own idea and not just 'write a best selling book' or some generic prompt like that.

 

[mnsi]

But if it's 80% of the way there, manually rewriting what fails into something usable seems workable, as long as the story is your own idea and not just 'write a best selling book' or some generic prompt like that.

I get you, and I agree with all of it. The quality of the 10 books in 10 minutes would be top-notch, too, with good models, from what I've seen. I'd dabbled quite a bit with text generation years before LLMs were a thing — there used to be these revolutionary python text-generation projects on github that used Markov models on low-ranked tensor methods. Back then, I could get some fairly good paragraphs going from my Alice Munro e-book repository, and it was so scary and exciting.

But, from the last year or two, as I've started writing a little seriously, you know, trying hard to get to the other side of being a reader, I've kinda realized what a harsh mistress writing is. Weeks of procrastination, months of wallowing in my writer's block, and the constant imposter syndrome whether I really belong on this side. It's a fight every day, in a way, for me.

Now AI just comes and makes everything so silly. Writing is, in my opinion, one of the most unrewarding activities ever. Sure, it's a lot of fun to build worlds, write character profiles n all, but turning up every day and sitting for four to six hours before the empty page is quite challenging. There's no salary, there's no manager tutting at my sentences, there's no muse or fairy to encourage or admonish my work. Some people say you shouldn't really do it if you aren't really feeling it; but, with writing, you have to get into that certain groove, that special place where you suddenly find yourself in the gravity of the story. It's all rather demanding on the little time I have for my erotic, textual dreams... And AI just kills the vibe for me. It makes it formulaic and unexciting. Like, I'll have twenty-odd reasons why I started a certain scene at a beach and not somewhere else, or why I said the sky was rouge in the fading twilight and not orange or crimson. There's no magic with the text generator for me. It's all quite artificial — like none of it is real. Even now, I am struggling so much with my little silly stories, but the struggle is part of the journey, no? AI, or rather, text generators simply makes it all a simple chore of typing two sentences to get twenty, and twenty to get five hundred. Where's the pain? (N I do like a little BDSM ) (Not a rant of any sort. I am so sorry if it comes across as one. I am just sharing a little bedtime gossip before hitting the hay here )