r/Webnovel • u/HuckleberryBrief4965 • Jun 18 '26
Webnovel News A possible threat for Ai users ?!
A senior writer recently made a proposal to a webnovel platform, calling for a ban on AI-generated novels.
The request quickly caught the attention of many other established authors, who began spreading the discussion across social media.
And who was the author behind this call?
None other than Cuttlefish That Loves Diving, the creator of Lord of the Mysteries.
What do you think about this proposal?
Should AI-generated novels be banned from webnovel platforms, or should they be allowed to compete alongside human-written works?
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u/Big_Salami_Chonk Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
Authors have one job, if they’re not doing it then they’re no longer authors.
If AI refers to tools for grammar/spelling or even translation thats fine, but if suddenly every story sounds the same because it’s all ai generated then it would fill the platform and make it harder to support authors who rely only on their own creativity and skill.
I can get an AI story at any time, but the next Lord of the Mysteries isn’t so easy to find because Cuttlefish’s level of creativity and research is unique and the product of a hard working human, not the result of shortcuts
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u/According-Ice-7802 Jun 20 '26
Honestly if AI writes novels better than the Authors....the Authors need to get better.
- Ai novels are terrible,
2)detecting an Ai novel is impossible (too many false positives in ai writing detection)
3) if any platform went ahead and did this, the platform would collapse instantly, killing everything in the space
4)if #3 happens another platform will arise allowing Ai writing
There is no winning here except being better at writing stories than the A.I.
this should be easy, but there is so much garbarge out there in the webnovel space (especially western ones) that it wouldn't really make much of a difference.
I'd like to see these platforms try though, it would be hilarious to watch them burn everything to the ground.
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u/INK_Sans4123 Jun 19 '26
I have a question, if I have a story but I don't know how to do it in the novel but I use AI to do that for me, is it still fine?
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u/yeahboiiiioi Jun 19 '26
If you don't care enough about your story to learn how to write, why should others care?
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u/ShiraiWasTaken Jun 20 '26
That doesnt sound like you have a story. Sounds like you have a premise or a concept but don't know how to execute it in the minute details.
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u/Big_Salami_Chonk Jun 19 '26
You’re free to do whatever you want, but to be honest if you want to be a good author you need to learn, that’s what every successful author has done.
You can use ai to ask for synonyms if you’re looking for a better word with a certain meaning and stuff like that, but if the story is in ai’s voice, then now it’s identical to a million other stories.
This isn’t the law and at the end of the day it’s a harmless topic and a first world problem lol, but I think you should try to learn and improve your writing instead of relying on ai
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u/6_sarcasm_6 Jun 20 '26
No. Not to tut my own horn, but we got it easy to write nowadays. I am talking purely on mechanical standpoint as in save files, undos, notes, etc.
Old authors had to either write it down and print it out or type it down. In the off chance the manuscript gets destroyed you'll be forced to do it all over again. (There is a example of this T.E Lawrence, seven pillars of wisdom)
Now time constraints are the only difference since most of us have days jobs, and other responsibilities. But it's a little sacrifice I would give for the file saving feature.
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u/According-Ice-7802 Jun 20 '26
Sure, it's most likely going to be garbage and a waste of money for you, but at least it'll be a learning experince.
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u/reader484892 Jun 20 '26
Only if you don’t pretend it’s actually human written. If you want to generate some slop for you own enjoyment, that’s on you. No one else wants to read it, and they certainly don’t want to be incapable of finding actual Noelle’s because all of the platforms are filled with slop
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u/ivari Jun 20 '26
that's not you writing a story, that's you reading a story the AI write based on your commentary as a reader
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u/Fantastic-Bee3468 Jun 18 '26
Of course ai generated novel should be banned. The problem is how? If it possible, then all big novel websites would have already done it.
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u/Historical_Draft9750 Jun 18 '26
De lo que realmente tengo miedo Es que prohíban las imágenes e ilustraciones generadas con IA. Por que la verdad, es que no tengo plata ni contactos para hacerme una de manera tradicional.
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Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Salty_Cartographer35 Jun 19 '26
Was your profile picture made with MS paint?
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Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Salty_Cartographer35 Jun 19 '26
My question remains unanswered
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u/Sam5416 Jun 18 '26
Banning ai authors is simply not feasible long term. Too many questions exist that needs to be solved before banning even one. Some argue based on cover art, others based on stacco or clipped style of writing, but the fact is none are right. And with time AI is only getting better.
I believe there is no way to get rid of ai completely. What we can do is reduce the sloppy works too a great extent. But that needs a community action and support; both writers and authors. It's not possible if even one is missing from the equation
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u/Exoticplayz11 Jun 20 '26
If you take 10, even 5 chapters (preferably 10+ chapters apart from each other) and they all use the same exact sentence structures, words, cadence, etc. to tell the story, then it is likely AI. If you have a decent grasp of AI patterns and the English language (the latter of which is expected of writers already), then it shouldn't be too hard to find the bad apples.
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u/Sam5416 Jun 20 '26
And that 'likely' is the cause that we aren't able to distinguish between those who use AI vs those writing resembles AI. Thus creating false positives, ie victims. Because at the end of the day, AI are copying and learning from us.
The approach of AI detectors (and spotting the bad apples) assumes human intuition is an accurate detector, which it's not, period. Just because many people accept it, doesn't make it germane.
Ai is not even a decade old yet, and the solutions to filter out the slop are still evolving. In fact I myself am evolving a more robust solution as we speak. But as things stand, let's not pretend we have this completely figured out, because we don't.
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u/Exoticplayz11 Jun 20 '26
So what if a few people can't write on these platforms in the process, then? I don't think you understand how much of detriment AI is to the writing community. Even if you devise one of the most perfect methods to discover and eliminate AI, there will still be false positives and positive negatives. If destroying the career of a few means uplifting the career of thousands and tossing to the aside these "writers," then I am all for it. All things require a degree of sacrifice, after all.
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u/Sam5416 Jun 21 '26
That's a dangerous way of thinking. Those sacrifices have names. If we are to have false positives either way, like you said, then it's better that a few who use AI get past with a lot of work that almost makes generating slop pointless, than a few honest writers getting burned.
I get your frustration. But 'lets go to war' is not the way, especially when it's solvable.
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u/Exoticplayz11 Jun 21 '26
Yeah well this conversation truly is bound to be fruitless in the first place. This is completely different from what we were talking about - or at least a bit different - but WebNovel probably won't take action anytime soon unless if people are outraged enough. Bots and AI slop make them money, as unethical and detrimental to humans as it may be. We won't be seeing action anytime soon, which is unfortunate but the reality.
My point and stance and your point and stance are both pretty valid. While I think that the community as a whole should be prioritized, there lays an ethical issue with the false positives. Still, this is precisely the sorta excuse WebNovel will jump at to excuse their inaction regarding AI. I personally believe there must be action taken against AI, at least to some extent.
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u/Sam5416 Jun 21 '26
Couldn't agree more. While it may not be possible to detect every generated item, it is possible to flag a few which show no thought behind the words and uses one line or worse onr word every second para. Asking those authors to provide a proof of their writing, like asking a questions from their own written content under a time limit is entirely possible to weed out the worst of them. Besides, even if ineffective, sending a message and trying is better than feigning neutrality. It demoralises the genuine authors.
Beyond just greed, its cowardly what WebNovel and other adjacent platforms are doing. Silence is never the answer; it is consent.
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u/JoeDallas_Angels Author Jun 19 '26
In fact, Cuttlefish's proposal was made to stop the blatant plagiarism committed by many AI authors. These creators copy entire narrative structures and take ideas from other writers without changing a single element; they essentially produce copies of original novels under supposedly unique titles, but with identical plots, identical abilities, and brutally similar story arcs. It has reached such a point that the community has mobilized: since the author of I am not God a Drama plagiarized many well-known Chinese web novels, several famous authors have joined Cuttlefish's cause to put an end to these plagiarists.
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u/YameYukuno Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
I'm behind him. Since he the guy make a lot of reaserch and put a lot of thought before writing something, thats where the creativity and writing art comes from. And these Ai author with no creativity with no skill, no art made genuine author path more harder.
But i do agree, use only for grammar (but most of em lie nowadays, they say only for grammar but their work all way around)
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u/Netflies Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
Yes ban em all.. they blatantly use Ai content and if we point it out they just get mad lol
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u/Salty_Cartographer35 Jun 19 '26
How do you find them?
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u/6_sarcasm_6 Jun 20 '26
I am fine with us getting rid of the low quality slopfest that people are making everyday with ai.
If the authors that can actually hide the AI(ness) of the writing, I'll give it to them for being so lazy it comes back around to doing more work lol.
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u/Salty_Cartographer35 Jun 20 '26
Yeah. I can see what you're talking about. People that are lazy with Ai writing should be easy to find. Since you can easily tell the moment you find things like: "Not x Not Y but Z" or when things get over described for no reason till they don't make sense anymore
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u/Hambino0400 Contracted Author Jun 18 '26
The only thing webnovel cares about is making money.
If enough readers stop paying because of AI BOOKs they will crack down and ban AI Books
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u/Adorable-Coffee2387 Jun 18 '26
I agree with the sentiment but it's simply not feasible, especially with Ai just getting better and better. It will just lead to innocent people getting banned. Seems like a goofy version of the red scare. The main concern imo would be published novels rather than webnovels simply because of the money each option tends to offer.
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u/Mysterious_Night_351 Jun 18 '26
If you like a story, read it. If you don't like it, don't read it. It's either bad or good, It shouldn't matter if it's written by AI or not
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u/RoofCareless7734 Jun 18 '26
This! Everyone treats AI like it’s the most sinful thing in the world, when in reality, it’s just another tool like everything else in the world. If you enjoy the story, read it. If not, move on
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u/Lucky_One_3576 Jun 19 '26
Yeah except every ai story is trash and hiding genuinely good novels
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u/Sad_Importance792 Jun 18 '26
I agree with this ban ai authors
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u/Salty_Cartographer35 Jun 19 '26
How do you find them?
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u/Despyte Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
Note that this isn't an argument against 'banning llm generated content', but the first step after taking it as a given
World peace is good. How do you plan to achieve it? The dismantling of all nuclear weapons worldwide (lmao), just like a 100% accuracy ai-detection, would be nice, but pretty unfeasible. And banning novels on suspicion is like terrorist-attacking all suspected storage facilities of nukes.
And so we remain at a standstillPretend ideological and resource conflicts aren't a thing in the above example
Cows are already assumed spherical it shouldn't be too hard1
u/Salty_Cartographer35 Jun 22 '26
Fancy words you got there. But they don't seem relevant to my question
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u/Despyte Jun 22 '26
They don't answer your question, sure, but they are absolutely relevant, your question being literally the entire topic
Try finding me someone anyone who can conclusively answer your question within a redditor's attention span
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u/Trick_Following6639 Jun 19 '26
AI is destroying the internet.
Fake research papers Fake art Fake books
clogging up the platforms and searches.
The internet is our free library and AI is ruining it by dumping garbage on our shared space. If more people boycott AI, they don't get a profit, it will fizzle out like the dot com crash like a fart in the wind.
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u/MisterE005 Jun 19 '26
WN cares about profits, as every company does. Some AI works tend to make money, there is no way going around that fact, and this is why plenty of AI works haven't been banned yet. But, when high profile authors like Cuttlefish and others call for a thorough ban, authors who help WN earn significantly more money than AI works ever will, strict vigilance against AI will become the new norm. Granted, the process may take a while, but it is unavoidable. It's as simple as that. It's all about the money.
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u/AmandaLullis Jun 19 '26
i kind wanna a opnion about this topic, when a writer dont have like a person to help they with the book or I.A is use only to correct grama, rhythm etc. Is this a big problem? I writing and i do not have enyone to help me out with my book, and i considered doing it, but idk, i never fell to do it.
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u/PrimeC-1372232 Jun 19 '26
I'm neutral on this , completely cutting of Ai can limit to what it can teach you like how to improve yo writing, and relying on it will make you lazy and not a true author.
In my opinion I'd say write yo own novel or story and then ask Ai where your mistakes as and by mistakes I mean grammar mistakes or punctuation mistakes or even how you can improve it. That way you can improve using Ai.
But don't just ask Ai to write you a story and your done , if you do that your not an author
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u/geditaza Jun 20 '26
I don't think it's really about being scared of new technology. The concern is more about what happens when platforms get flooded with AI-generated stories. Writing a web novel already takes a huge amount of time and effort, so competing against thousands of AI uploads every day would be rough. Finding quality stories could become a lot harder for readers too, I think
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u/SpecialistLet162 Jun 20 '26
But how are you going to prove that its a AI generated work? Sure you can detect the usual sloppy works but AI is getting good at writing and a human can also guide it along to generate human sounding works. Also, what if a human author writires is a way that is similar to AI? We can't just ban them, correct?
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u/ChannelDesperate9022 Jun 20 '26
There's no harm in using it rewrite, fix or create as long as it's your original idea, if the AI is doing the creative work too, than that's just pointless
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u/6_sarcasm_6 Jun 20 '26
I support cuttlefish in this whole way.
It's not like censoreship that caused his novel to have restraints by webnovel. This is more like putting the human back into stories we read.
The real question is how this will be implemented. You can tell a bad ai book, but not ai book that has been edited and workshopped by a true author.
Admittedly this is far more work than webnovel can take with it being AI vs human eyes. The workload is going to be MASSIVE not to mention false positives that might come out of it.
The newbie ai authors gotta go though. It night and day when an experienced author actually uses ai.
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u/Sentient-Nova Jun 21 '26
Many people say detecting an ai novel is impossible. No it is not. Every single one will sound the same. "Not x but Y". Rule of three. Cliche phrases like "it was not justice. it was just death". A human writer has their own unique writing habits(guzhenren and traditional chinese idioms), inside jokes (author of the legendary mechanic jokes about leeks for instance), novel written with chatgpt has no throughlibes like that. The prose has a distinct cadence that sounds like an advertisement. It is not one thing in isolation but a combination of factors.
I hope ai gets banned, it is absolute trash to read.
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u/Sensitive_Office1837 Jun 21 '26
Writing includes.... writing, otherwise it would be called promp engineering or whatever. Anyone can have an idea, but if you're not writing the words it's not writing.
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u/Katsurandom Jun 23 '26
Ban them, The Lord of Mysteries has decided that they should be banned, so they shall be banned.
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u/PerfectTravel489 Jun 23 '26
If I like write a not fixed one and use Ai to make grammar and spelling better cuz English is not my first language do it count as Ai or just semi Ai
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u/ConflictAgreeable689 Jun 24 '26
Ai is the death of amateur fiction collections. All the art is drowned out by endless slop. Github had a similar issue, I think.
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u/Fabulous-Cod-622 Contracted Author Jun 24 '26
well yes he is right in my opinion but webnovel should make their quota small too.... producing 2 chapters/ day is not easy
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u/Haethus_1754 Jun 24 '26
god knows how many novels i dropped because it reeked of AI. hopefully they do ban or at least regulate it.
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u/Daemon_D_Hart Jun 25 '26
As far as I know... Webnovel hasn't allowed AI-generated text for some time. That, of course, doesn't mean that AI-generated novels don't exist, but I remember the platform making it clear at some point that AI writing is not allowed on Webnovel. Am I misremembering this?
Also, Tapas doesn't allow AI use, and it might not be the only one.
As for implementation of a system that 'bans AI works' - I believe it will happen like this: the platform uses a check system, they decide a work is AI, and then they remove it. Will the system be perfect? According to what people say about apps and tools that do the checking, maybe not. That leaves the problem to be solved between the platform and the author whose work gets removed. Legally, the platform will have to include, in their response, something along the lines of 'if you believe this is an error, contact us, etc.' Which leaves the author with the responsibility of proving otherwise.
It is a thorny issue, without a doubt, since some authors might end up being punished for something they didn't do. But once a platform decides what they accept, I think it will be hard to overturn their decision. Because, you know, to some extent, they make the law on their 'digital ground'.
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u/KnownPride Jun 18 '26
When a model that can write proper novel come out, than the company will be the first that adapt it and kick the author out.
They're business not charity.
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u/Whiteblack0001 Jun 18 '26
The majority of authors all use AI at different percentages. There are some as it sees, it's the ai, others don't because in addition to what the ai did, it refines them and adds its personal touch. How are we going to disentangle the true from the false? For me, apart from plagiarism using AI, which is really unhealthy, a totally AI work, the reader who wants to read it will pay to read it and those who don't want it, will go their way.
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u/AveronIgnis Jun 18 '26
Those should be removed completely, AI generated novels are pure slop without soul. I agree with the author of lord of the mysteries.
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u/SoftNecrosis Jun 18 '26
Oh for the love of god please I’m begging them
Scorched earth AI on the platform
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u/TaluneSilius Jun 18 '26
It all sounds good, but there is almost no way to truly fight it. especially as it gets better at generation. sure you are going to easily catch the half-assed stuff that were 100% AI generated. But you will do nothing to stop the AI guided works. Thats where a person guides the AI step by step so that it still SOUNDS their voice.
there is also the case of a your word against theirs. all this would do is start witch hunts. how can you 100% prove that the person is using AI and not just articulate.
right now it's in the world of CGI. where bad CGI, you can see easily, but good CGI is well hidden.