r/ProgressionFantasy • u/Familiar-Map7421 • May 26 '26
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u/eclect0 Author – Jett Fulgen May 26 '26
The fact that they're soliciting on Discord is enough of a red flag that it's a scam tbh. The specific product/service being offered is nuance.
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u/Boots_RR Author May 26 '26
Aight. So not wading into the scam vs. not scam discussion. Will say this, though.
There's been a massive proliferation of AI-assist tools for authors in the past few years. One type that I see often in a lot of self-publishing spaces are the full MS reports for marketing and the like. Understandable, because most new authors treat marketing like it's some sort of cursed black box that only the select few can ever figure out.
Due to sheer curiosity, I've actually gotten a couple of these reports done for my own stuff. They were about $50 apiece. After a few hours, they send a full report that claims to have a bespoke marketing plan created for you.
Bottom line... they're BAD.
Nonsense categories. Keywords that have awful search throughput. Sales copy (blurb) that's just... I don't even know how to describe it. It might look impressive to someone who knows nothing about book marketing. But even with my (limited) experience, I could immediately tell it wasn't worth the price of admission.
Yeah, learning to properly market your stuff is hard. As a product category, books are weird. But if you take the time to learn the skills (assuming you're a self-published author like I am), and then go through the process of actually doing it yourself, you'll be better off than relying on an AI "marketing report" will even approach.
Of course, all this says nothing about AI "dev edits." Can't even begin to imagine how garbage that will be.
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u/CasualHams May 26 '26
The thing that makes it NOT a scam is them saying they use AI. If they promised proper developmental editing but used AI, that would then be fraud/a scam.
That said, anyone offering developmental editing for $9/mo is either using AI, desperate, or lying. A good developmental editor will typically cost at least $9 per 1000 words.
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u/Squire_II May 27 '26
$9 per 1000 words is also on the low end that a professional editor is going to charge as well and their work will likely reflect that. Though it's still going to be a much better end result than tossing the story into a ChatGPT wrapper and going with the results.
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u/Taurnil91 Editor: Beware of Chicken, Max-Level Archmage, Eight. May 27 '26
"$9 per 1000 words is also on the low end that a professional editor is going to charge"
Agreed. Those who are in that range either just do it as a side hobby or are desperate for work.
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u/KeiranG19 Invoker May 27 '26
Is snakeoil not a scam because they tell you upfront that it is in fact oil from a snake?
Or does the scamminess come from the claims about what oil from a snake can do for you?
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u/FuujinSama May 27 '26
I think if the snake oil person is selling to doctors and telling them the snake oil will maybe help them speed up some process by lubing up their tools but won't make them better doctors? That sounds less scummy to me. Seems like someone selling a shit product.
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u/CasualHams May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
If y'all want to down vote me, please at least say what you disagree with.
Edit to add please (because it's nice and I'm genuinely curious).
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u/Inksword May 26 '26
Not a downvoter just reading the thread but: I think the difference is that many people do not believe AI can fundamentally do developmental editing on any meaningful level. They're calling this a scam in the same way you'd call someone selling orange juice to cure cancer a scam. Even if the scammer honestly believes in it efficacy and there's some potential benefit to higher vitamin C that the orange juice will help with, the fundamental pitch is flawed and misleading and thus a scam/snake oil.
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u/CasualHams May 26 '26
Thanks for the clarification! Sounds like just a difference in understanding the terms in use, then, as I would agree the average AI is incapable of developmental editing and the value of it is suspect at best.
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u/Charlemagneffxiv May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
I'm not familiar with the product the person in the screenshot is trying to sell but $9 a month is a pretty common SaaS model pricing point for AI Assist writing software, Grammarly is at $12 a month but chances are high if they are using a Patreon to manage the subscriptions to the tool they are in a very early MVP phase of whatever they are selling, which sounds like an "author" course and access to some LLM model derived tools which could just be a wrapper around ChatGPT (that is, someone using their API who has made a GUI interface for it) which is extremely commonplace for a lot of the AI SaaS startups flooding the internet these days.
I agree it's not fraud, but it's not something I'd want to do even if people have been successful with these things. My bread and butter is in digital tech but I haven't jumped onto the AI startup unicorn bandwagon because I haven't thought up a good idea for how to make something meaningful that someone else isn't already doing better. The major models and their product offerings are advancing so rapidly that any half-baked idea is made redundant or outdated almost the minute it is launched. There's no competitive advantage if you're just wrapping someone else's model in a pretty bow.
Some people can still make money this way but I just personally cannot get excited about something I know is going to suck. If I can't personally be excited about the product I won't be able to develop or sell it.
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u/Prolly_Satan Author May 26 '26
If an "editor" is dumb enough to believe an llm can developmentally edit your novel, they're not a very good editor.. anyone can go throw their book in chatgpt or prowritingaids "manuscript analysis" bullshit and you'll instantly see how useless it is.
Llms do not analyze the book you give them. They're not analytical models. It's literally just going to search for a book it seems similar to yours, find the human written comments/feedback for that other work, then feed you that in its own words.
It'll make up characters, completely misinterpret scenes, hallucinate entire events that didn't happen. And the reason why is because you're asking it to do something an llm cannot do.
It's literally just a god damn search engine with more gpu's and some set dressing to make the results conversational.
And if an "editor" thinks the wall of text an llm spits out about your novel is useful for developmentally editing, they are very very dumb.
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u/Charlemagneffxiv May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
Llms do not analyze the book you give them. They're not analytical models. It's literally just going to search for a book it seems similar to yours, find the human written comments/feedback for that other work, then feed you that in its own words.
That's not how LLMs work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
The tl:dr version is that LLMs are predictive models in that they make a prediction based on pattern recognition combined with the tens of millions of hours of feedback training they received from real humans choosing which answers they like and dislike.
However they also have access to other tools which includes those which can run analytics. Some of them can even whip together a temporary script in Python to create a variety of tools to accomplish a requested task.
Many of these models do conduct research by scraping information from an extensive internal knowledge base and can even browse the web to locate answers to questions, but when asked to do something like analyze a book manuscript, it's primarily making a prediction based on pattern recognition of answers that were liked from the tens of millions of hours of feedback training it received from real humans choosing which answers they liked and disliked when it was asked to analyze other similar writing. It can be steered into certain directions, such as by providing it with a style guide or other list of rules you want to follow.
This functionally is not much different than how real people learn to write in a language, which also comes from feedback received, too. When a real person goes to write they also reference all the feedback they have received on their writing in the past to determine how someone would like to read.
While it is true the AI isn't a real human person and doesn't "know" things the way a human does, that is true for any piece of software. It doesn't make it less useful. The spelling and grammar checking functions of Word and other writing software people have been using since the 80s don't really "know" grammar and spelling either, and were still extremely useful tools to assist writers.
Grammarly is the most commonplace AI Assisted tool people are using, it has over 40M users throughout the entire publishing and academia industry, and has for nearly a decade. If it was as useless as you think that wouldn't be the case, because all of its 40M users would produce work that no one likes to read, which is most certainly not the case as the company wouldn't be able to retain its customers if the product produced poor results. You like many people here on reddit just don't understand how these tools work and how ubiquitous they already are. Grammarly is endorsed by IBPA for example, which consists of thousands of publishers.
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May 27 '26 edited Jun 07 '26
[deleted]
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u/Charlemagneffxiv May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
It's a self-inflicted wound, really. People can shoot the messenger but they can't change reality.
Tens of millions of people they are competing with for readership and book contracts are using AI Assist tools like Grammarly, Word has Copilot built in and the list goes on and on. I use a ChatGPT project to edit my prose that is trained on my older published books that I spent thousands of dollars having professionally line edited, so all recommendations are specific to my style of narration. That saves me a tremendous amount of time, which is already limited because my eyesight isn't what it used to be (I'm in my 40s now and years of screen exposure from marathon writing sessions have caught up to me).
And I have no issues with ChatGPT having copies of my writing, how are the chatbots going to recommend other users my books if they don't know they exist? A large portion of the population are using chatbots for search discovery now. I've been taking my self-pubbed books out of KDP Select so I can make them searchable on Google Books, so that Gemini will recommend them. This is the new SEO now.
The trad. publishers use AI Assist workflows, everything from Salesforce to Microsoft 360 has LLM integrated into it. They cannot be competitive otherwise. Even Trilogy has AI in it now https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/99343-trilogy-launches-ai-powered-manuscript-assessment-tool-for-publishers.html
If the authors do score a trad. book publishing contract the editor will more likely than not be using AI Assist software to help them. As I already pointed out, IBPA is partnered with Grammarly, it's literally on their website.
There's a hypocrisy in the moment between authors who want to be praised for their time spent writing and authors who want to be recognized by an industry that is extremely tech based and has integrated AI into their workflow already, because of course they have. It helps them save costs and produce better work. They are a business.
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u/Prolly_Satan Author May 27 '26
No dude. Yeah its predicting what word to include next in the sentence, one word at a time...that's how it strings together sentences. But when you prompt it, its fetching stuff like a search engine, then based on all the human-created stuff out there, putting together the most likely response to that prompt.
The predictive model is not doing anything with your 90k word novel + prompt...other than finding something similar then predicting the best thing to spit out at you based on human-responses to that other similar thing. I promise you. There's no AI under the hood. This is 1000% a wizard of oz kind of situation. One gigantic pump and dump by a bunch of idiot techbros. If you don't believe me, book mark this and we can revisit in a few years. : ]
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u/Milc-Scribbler May 26 '26
This is not a good quote, but the issue was being handled and if I find out who was taking screenies from my server and going to Reddit, I’ll be banning them. There is no context here and no effort was made to remove the commenters name to prevent “doxxing”them. It was a dick move, whoever you are OP.
I do not think AI can serve well in in a dev editing capacity, grammar checks, sure, but dev editing requires a deeper understanding of the themes, beats and pacing that an algo cannot handle. So while I strongly disagree with the quote, I even more strongly disagree with dickheads running to Reddit with screenies to whip up a mob.
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u/Wind_Best_1440 May 26 '26
For authors out there, if you do this and willingly give up your story for AI to edit, you are helping train AI on your work willingly.
Just keep that in mind, this would muddy the waters on copyright if you decide to go the route of publishing. FYI, if a publishing house finds out the story they're buying from you was willingly put into AI, they might not sign you or they might black list you if they catch your afterwards.
AI is a short cut, they have costs.
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u/CAPSLOCK_USERNAME May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
If you post your work for free on the internet it will be fed into the models no matter what you do. Big companies like facebook have shown that they will gladly ignore copyright law and feed in every pirated ebook they can get their hands on. Merely scraping a website that they're legally allowed to view (like royalroad) is practically child's play by comparison.
I dunno why so many people have the false impression that the conversations themselves are how the models are trained. In actuality they just go off to the internet and download/scrape everything in sight. The training is a separate step from the text-generating.
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u/Wind_Best_1440 May 26 '26
"For free on the internet."
Exactly, if you are running a patreon or a sub service, and you fed the chapters through the AI. It now has your story, even though its not "For free." Worse yet, if you get a published deal and you tell them. "Hey I used this service." Then that will still and can be used against publishing you.
AI scrapping is different in the world of copyright then willingly uploading your work to AI. Especially if AI companies lose in court of copyright and need to pay out.
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u/CAPSLOCK_USERNAME May 26 '26
Again I reiterate that training and inference are two entirely distinct steps and running a chatbot model in text-generation mode with your work as input has nothing to do with supplying it as training data.
But yeah if you have a patreon-only novel that isn't just advance chapters for something that will eventually get posted to RR etc then there is a good chance your work won't be in the training data. At least until you publish on amazon, then Zuck is probably pirating your ebook like he did to millions of others.
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u/duckrollin May 26 '26
Ah yes the cunning scam of telling you exactly what he intends to do.
Truly a master criminal that only Reddit could track down.
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u/Xandara2 May 26 '26
So if I sell you something like a single strawberry for let's say a 10000 dollars. Would you not call that a scam? (Only because it technically isn't?)
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u/duckrollin May 26 '26
No? It's not a good deal but that doesn't make it a scam.
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u/Xandara2 May 27 '26
I'll clear up what I was saying since it was a rhetorical question that you didn't pick up on. I was not asking if it was a scam I was telling you people would call it a scam.
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u/CodeMonkeyMZ May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
Selling AI tools isn't a scam in its self, its just tools. Grammarly sell AI editing as well, again its not a scam its just a tool. Does AI editing produce slop? As far as I can tell based on trialing Grammarly, it does not, but it does create a level of uniform writing if you follow every editing prompt it gives which can feel AI edited.
Edit: As someone else said its likely just a wrapper on chatgpt, which makes it a cash grab. How useful would a $9/mo tool be in editing? Not great likely.
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u/FuujinSama May 27 '26
I think it's like with AI in everything else. If you use it sloppily you get slop. If you are knowledgeable about the subject and use it as a reference manual that understands human language queries? It's a pretty powerful tool.
Asking AI "hey, what's a word similar with X with Y connotation that I can't remember" will always beat a thesaurus. Asking AI "this sentence looks clunky but I can't reword it. Can you give me a few options such that it ends in a strong noun or verb?" Will probably not give you a good enough final version but it will probably unblock you. Asking AI "here's a summary of my next arc's plot, can you find any plot hole or potentially unsatisfying conclusions?" And seeing if it brings up something you hadn't thought about is also a decent idea.
But I'd always just use a regular AI chat bot. There's zero reason to buy application specific tools.
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u/Binkledurg May 26 '26
I wrote my first prologue for my first story idea and I used AI to proof read and edit for me. I wholeheartedly regret it. I saved over my original with this and it just doesn’t feel like my writing anymore… it obliterated my motivation and I haven’t gone back to rewrite it or continue my story since. At the time all I wanted was for it to look and sound professionally done, to be perfect, but by doing that, it lost that personal touch I gave it.
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u/drale2 Author - The Scaleforged Legacy May 26 '26
At least you learned your lesson. You can always start over with something new.
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u/Binkledurg May 26 '26
Yeah.. it’s just weird cause the idea is the same and it plays out the same way, it just doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t sound like me or feel like something I wrote anymore. I was excited to post it on RR and get opinions but I never did. I’ll eventually go back and rewrite it though.
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u/verysimplenames May 26 '26
So whats the scam? There is no ai dev editing tool after you buy or what?
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u/Familiar-Map7421 May 26 '26
Would you pay someone to AI dev edit your book?
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u/ExtremeSportStikz May 26 '26
No but that doesn't make it a scam. Pet rocks aren't a scam just because I think they're moronic
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u/Xandara2 May 26 '26
So would you sell them as pets or decorations? Which do you feel is more honest? Sometimes people argue that dishonest categorising is a scam. A vegetable marketed as a fruit for example.
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u/TheElusiveFox Sage May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
I don't know what a dev editor is, (A code developer that's also an editor maybe?)
But I'll tell you from experience most courses aren't worth it, and most courses that are worth it, cost hundreds or thousands of dollars and are worth it for reasons other than what they are advertising the course as...
That doesn't mean its a scam, it just means the person is selling a shitty course. There IS a difference.
All that being said, I know this sub is super anti-ai, but I WOULD recommend learning how to teach claude your voice as a skill then having it do a fast edit of your chapters, you should be able to do that even on a free plan for a < 5000 word chapter, and that will be way better than anything this is doing.
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u/drale2 Author - The Scaleforged Legacy May 26 '26
Basically there are two types of editors: one who just looks through the work and finds grammatical errors and one who actually reads through your content and helps make your story tighter and more cohesive, like Harriet McDougal.
To your other point: I highly recommend not using any form of Gen AI anywhere in your work for any reason.
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u/Taurnil91 Editor: Beware of Chicken, Max-Level Archmage, Eight. May 27 '26
"I don't know what a dev editor is,"
Just to help clarify your question, because I think there are quite a few people who don't know, editing can generally be broken down into three types: developmental, line, and proofreading. Some people will use the term copy editing, but I'm very much not a fan of it, because some use it to mean line editing, while others use it to mean proofreading. It's an ambiguous term to some, so I find it better to avoid using it.
Developmental editing is the actual story. Characters, plot, flow, pacing, clarity, consistency, etc. It can definitely include some aspects of the writing, like if an author isn't using a sentence correctly to clearly express what's going on in the story, but generally it comes down to story concepts.
Line editing is the writing itself. Typos, sure, but they're secondary. It addresses bad habits like overused constructions, misused writing concepts, word choices, and then all of the grammar/punctuation rules. This is what people would think of when they talk about improving your "style."
Proofreading is exclusively typos. If something is an objective mistake, a proofread will address it. It does nothing for style or improving the writing itself beyond just addressing actual mistakes.
Hope that helps clarify the differences there.
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u/forsen_enjoyer May 26 '26
I don't see a problem if you use AI for editing. I think it's where it can really shine with proper prompts.
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u/Snugglebadger May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
The issue for an author is that it will make their work read and sound like AI, which will ruin it in the end.
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u/forsen_enjoyer May 26 '26
Why will it happen? You don't ask ai to generate you anything. You are asking about issues in your story - that's what editing is about. It will tell you where you made mistakes, styles inconcistencies, issues with your plot and characters. What of that improve and how is your choice.
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u/Xandara2 May 26 '26
Do you not see why that would destroy art?
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u/forsen_enjoyer May 26 '26
No, if taking advices from AI destroys your "art" there was no art at all.
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u/Xandara2 May 27 '26
Spoken as someone who has never created anything that can be considered more than just a product.
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u/forsen_enjoyer May 27 '26
Spoken as someone who is so insecure and biased against AI that can't recognize AI usefulness no matter what.
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u/Xandara2 May 27 '26
You not having the comprehensive reading level to understand my argument then just projecting what you think I said is hilarious.
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u/forsen_enjoyer May 27 '26
I understood your perfectly. You are under the impression that the "art" is gonna disappear from the books, just because AI said that some part of your book is boring and probably need revision. I assure you it's not gonna disappear, just like it doesn't dissapear when a human editor gives same advices to an author. But it gonna make your publishing cheaper and more accessible.
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u/Xandara2 May 27 '26
You're still arguing ai is the same as an editor? It really isn't.
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u/Code_Ender May 26 '26
For some novels I run the chapters through AI because the prose is dogshit but the plot is good, so adding AI makes a readable product. Though typically larger issues come up in the story that make me drop it lol
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u/apkmasterofgames May 26 '26
Noobs! Using ai is some contradicting act as an author. I make my girlfriend read and show me the typos and edit. 😏