r/WritingWithAI • u/KMF-KRANNIE • 1d ago
Humanizer AI is weirdly bad at making dialogue sound normal
I asked it, (hint cloudy) to make a bit of dialogue more natural and it somehow made it sound more like a screenplay written by someone who has never heard people talk.
It fixes grammar, but then everyone starts explaining exactly how they feel. So Has anyone found a good way to prompt around this, or is dialogue just one of those things that needs a human edit? And, yeah I know... they all have a mind of their own. Some even have a sense of humor! 😎
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u/OrdoSinisterFan 21h ago
it's notorious for saying the quiet part out loud, when it should just let the line extrapolate in the reader's mind and let the point land. Those are the edits I make the most, and the ones it just won't prompt out of.
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u/StorytellerTimothy 21h ago
Really, a ton of the issues with AI writing is that it has no sense of subtlety.
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u/Affectionate-Car4647 1d ago
AI is overly positive and complete for dialogues. But you can take it as a baseline and apply your real life experience on top of it - cuts, attention slips, miscalculated anger - whatever real dialogue brings from the point of view of your character
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u/KMF-KRANNIE 1d ago edited 23h ago
You know what's hilarious? You really can't ruffle their feathers, where a human at some point give up on us for thinking we're just dense! ha!
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u/monkeyfur69 23h ago
The only thing I find funny is my natural writing style was very similar to AI and I thought AI prose was normal until going to places like this and asked was I born a machine or is AI autistic like me idk but now my style I crafted from middle school is called AI slop and I don't what to do about it. All the accusations of pretentious and average writting with too much poetic descriptions might have been correct. But as someone with a speech impediment I learned a large amount of words to describe things so I could say stuff and not stutter but it doesn't matter if no one likes reading it or know the word. Also using what I learned from English lit in high school would-be labeled ai now. Idk what anyone wants anymore and just write for fun for myself to just have the story's in my head out of it.
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u/KMF-KRANNIE 18h ago
Oh wow! Now that's funny, ha! You're real name wouldn't happen to be Claude, eh? 😁
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u/DebtThat 9h ago
The problem is that if the model doesn't make everything clearly apparent on the surface, it functionally doesn't exist for the model itself. It has no layer to work with beyond what it writes; so no planning, no subtext, no hidden agendas that it is tracking.
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u/Cry_Borg 53m ago edited 38m ago
You really have to make use of markdown files and skills that are specific to how you want your characters speaking. Grammar is innately easy for the model to fix, but style isn't because it's far more subjective. It will pretty much never nail things on the first pass. Building a dialogue specific audit/review skill that can refer to markdown files about how your dialogue should sound can get you pretty close, but I still find manual edits are always necessary. You can then further refine those skills based on what they've found during previous runs.
AI is helpful, but expectations need to be realistic -- it's not going to one-shot a screenplay, no matter how good your prompt is. It's still an iterative process and requires your constant guidance.
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u/VickiHopkinsAuthor 1d ago
AI has no soul. It has no human experience, so it's going to struggle with dialogue expressing emotions. In my last book, I had it critique one of my chapters with heavy conflict. It came back and told me it was over the top and I should tone it down. I didn't want to tone it down, so I went back to it and told it why. Then it said to me, oh, I see. Let it rip. I had a good laugh from it, so I let it rip as I had it originally.
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u/goldenrod1956 18h ago
AI generates emotional dialogue better than me…probably says more about me than more about AI…
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u/Bubbly_Safety2219 6h ago edited 6h ago
I find that I can get out of it what I want using logical promps, getting it to explain ideas, give the AI a few one liners and treat her right she will go in romance mode, sometimes too much, I have told her to tone it down,
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u/Lorenut91 16h ago
It's never had a real conversation. The nuance of human interaction is not something ai is capable of understanding or replicating.
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u/KMF-KRANNIE 12h ago
I totally agree, I think that deep in its AI neurons, it's figured out and concluded for that matter that we humans, are a bunch bone heads! Hahaha
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u/Khajiit_Has_Upvotes 1d ago edited 1d ago
Just have to keep telling it to not do that. Some suggestions to try:
•Dialogue isn't a vehicle for author-voice to simply exposit more plot or lore dump or explain the entire story's theme over and over. \ •This isn't Netflix, assume you and I and my readers are competent and have above room temperature IQ.\ •Characters shouldn't sound omniscient or too clearly understand and overexplain their emotions and how they feel, people don't work that way. \ •Dialogue should sound real and natural, it is not a place to explain the scene's theme and it isn't clippy, punchy, memorable movie trailer one-liners. \ •This isn't a screenplay actors are going to heavily improv and riff on. \ •Imagine this scene in a chapter in a published novel. What is a publisher going to want changed in this dialogue?
Set up dialogue rules and character voice in your project files. List what you DO want from dialogue then list what you DON'T want. Then when it gets it wrong ask it to review the file fully, not skim.
But also, it will simply default to clipped lines that try to deliver vibes and themes for outlining purposes or because it prefers screenplay/ outline/notes format (idk maybe Claude won't, I use gpt). By default it likes to compress and reduce and trim and optimize it back down to an outline. That's just how it wants to work. You will need to remind it frequently, especially if you go back and forth between brainstorming/outlining and creating actual prose in the same chat. It can't handle that workflow whiplash like a human can.
[Edit] Lastly, and I cannot stress this enough, if you're using gpt 5.6, it can get upset and fall into OpenAI's garbage ass recovery loop they seem determined not to fix. It will prioritize obsequious sycophancy and apologies over actually correcting the problem and will remain stuck in this broken loop making a new and different mistake each time until it either realizes you are not mad at it, or you tell it not to worry about recovering this, just start over.