Any real non-AI writers out there any more?

[Ginger Herten]

Using spelling and grammar checking software, are not what people are complaining about. Those things merely assist human writers make their own ideas more polished and accessible.

Now I don’t think they should usually be given free-rein while editing, they will often do things like assume you meant “trucK” when you accidentally typed “fruck” shortly after your love interests get a hotel room, so do use it carefully. Grammar checkers frequently want me to do things like use simpler sentence structures and avoid the passive voice, when I have deliberately chosen those for stylistic reasons. If you just 100% always go along with everything grammar checkers suggest, it will make your stories a bit flat. So use them with judgment.

When used carefully spelling and grammar checkers just make thing smoother and more readable, which is a good thing. I literally just used spellcheck several times while typing this. Without spelling and grammar check, my writing would be filled with errors, like misspelled word and extra “the”s and such.

Using translation software is not what people are talking about either. It is unfortunately a little harder for a person to not just allow the translator to have total free-rein, since if you were bilingual enough to second guess google translate or Reverso Contexto (which is better than google translate, but is not free, and it creates flash cards from vocabulary it translated,) than you could just write in the language you wish to publish in. My one suggestion here is that if you are using a translation program, include BOTH the original along with the translation. I always do this when I am writing to people in another language, so they know that it happened, so they can retranslate if something isn’t clear, and incase they actually speak my language anyway. For all you know, you may be translating everything from say Spanish to English, when a third of your readers are native Spanish speakers anyway who would love to read the original Spanish.

People are unhappy about “generative” AI. I use scare quotes deliberately, since there is nothing genuinely generative about it. ChatGPT and its ilk, are plagiarism machines. They create nothing, just chew up, swallow, then regurgitate what humans have created. Sure it’s remixed enough to no longer be really recognizable, but that doesn’t make it truly original. And sure, humans also take inspiration from things, but when we do, we give it a truly new perspective.

For example, Shorngirl did a retelling of a movie, “Princess on the Lam,” sure some of the plot structure and a few specific elements as a nod to the movie were there, but it was neither plagiarism nor a simple chewing up and regurgitation. It was a richly told story from her uniquely human point of view.

And I absolutely get the desire to use AI when feeling stuck. What inspired me to write “AI Temptation” was actually resorting to it at work. Without going into too much detail, though writing is not my only or even main work task, it is one of them, and one that must happen before I can complete other tasks. The writing there isn’t particularly creative, it mostly needs to be accurate and descriptive, though I occasionally can throw in a pun or something. I had the worst writers block, not writing for here was not that big a deal, I could wait it out. Not writing at work though meant I had a huge bottle neck where I could not finish what I needed to. I resorted to using chatGPT, and it did get me unstuck. It however couldn’t actually take over what I needed to do, the things I had it write were highly inaccurate. Somehow fixing the inaccuracy, just kind of got things flowing again though.

• This reply was modified 5 months, 1 week ago by Ginger Herten.
• This reply was modified 5 months, 1 week ago by Ginger Herten.

[Chechako]

It’s quite rare for non-technical topics to come up on this forum (and that’s precisely why it feels so sluggish), but this particular topic is definitely interesting enough to share my point of view.

At first, I passed it by: someone doesn’t like the use of AI-so what?
For me, the choice of whether to use AI is like eating… say, pork. Some people don’t eat pork for religious or ethical reasons, or on doctor’s orders- but that’s a personal choice for everyone, so forcing an absolute ‘no pork’ stance on others seems unacceptable.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly the approach I saw here: using AI is evil, it devalues creativity on this site specifically and in society at large.

This reminds me of the debate back in the 19th century, when simple, high‑quality, cheap photography emerged.

Among artists, many argued that it would kill art-that realistic painting would be destroyed, and eventually no one would paint at all.

But that didn’t happen. The availability of cheap, high‑quality photography spurred new movements in painting-from Impressionism to further avant‑garde art, -and also gave rise to artistic photography as a genre.

Reading those old arguments now is quite funny, but back then it was seen as a serious threat.

AI is a great helper for humanity; it’s a direct continuation of the development of the internet and, to some extent, of research into atomic structure and particle interactions.

The arguments I’ve seen against AI are rooted in various phobias and, frankly, in a rather low level of storytelling ability.

The main difference with AI is that if you give it a well‑crafted brief, unlike most human authors, it can construct a story with a coherent plot, character arcs, and consistent motivations- a beginning and an end.

That’s the real difference between AI and the work of living authors. Just dive into the archives and analyse the stories produced, say, before 2010: with rare exceptions, they are formulaic, uninspiring pieces (and TheInvisibleMan subtly nailed it— even the most nauseating writing has found a fan willing to pay money for it.)

As has been rightly noted on this forum, AI is constant iteration on existing data and solutions. Our brains work the same way, by the way. So the issue isn’t AI itself— it’s how well you can formulate a prompt to get decent, quality output.

Right now, in the literary world (not just on this site), we are going through a period of ‘Joy‑ification’ (I’ll coin that term after the nickname of a certain prolific author)- a massive flood of low‑quality, poorly structured AI‑generated material. It will end soon, as AI becomes ‘smarter’. And then those authors who decided they didn’t need to adapt will simply lose their audience, just as the realist painters who stuck to their unchanged techniques lost theirs. AI will beat them.

I see nothing wrong with using AI, whether for creative purposes or practical ones— translation, adjusting style to fit a particular character, using specific markers to describe scenes.

If someone finds that unacceptable-that’s your problem, not mine.

[Diacritical]

Let’s assume all the AI hype is true. I’m not interested in debating how good it is at writing a story, so let’s give the pro-LLM-generated stories camp the best possible starting position, the AI hype is true, it can write a good hair fetish story. Why would I come to this website when I could simply prompt the chatbot of my choice to create a story more tailored to my own tastes? Why would I spend time browsing to try to find something I’m into when I could just tweak a prompt that worked for me before and get something guaranteed to be of a certain level of quality?

Additionally, the issue is not necessarily that LLM-generated stories are guaranteed to be worse than human-written; I am assuming I have read and enjoyed prose that has used AI without noticing, the models are getting pretty sophisticated, and I have certainly read human-written stories that were poor quality. The issue is that text generation has led to poor quality output on a scale that was previously unprecedented. It is very difficult to use the front page of this site these days.

[Author]

Posts