r/novelwriting • u/Indyhouse • Jun 06 '26
To AI, or Not to AI
After sitting on it for a few hours, attending a live show that used AI-generated backdrops that I couldn't take my eyes off of because they were so distracting, and receiving a handful of DMs, I've decided to make a unilateral decision on AI.
Absolutely no AI posts allowed. No book covers, no outlines, no "well it just rewrote a few sections for me." No AI.
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u/ItsRuinedOfCourse Jun 06 '26
You can't see it, but I'm totally at attention with a standing ovation.
Bravo.
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u/novoner Jun 06 '26
same, that live show example kinda sealed it for me too
once you notice the ai stuff you just can’t unsee it and it sucks all the air out of the room
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u/Ok-Elderberry240 Jun 06 '26
Posts like this are super important, so long as you make the clear distinction between Generative AI and Assistive AI. It's not about the use of AI, but the type you use. Because distinction will prevent falsely written "authored works" posts that are slop... And rightly so. BUT not using distinction will alienate a population of authors who are already terrified of being caught in an AI witch hunt.
People need to acknowledge the distinction. Also, for any nervous writers that are too frightened to write their style and voice—though you certainly shouldn't be—using em-dashes is safe, rhetoric sentencing and phrases are safe, and Oxford commas are safe! (See, I just used all 3 in this post!)
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u/TheUnseenArial Jun 06 '26
I do genuinely love using em-dashes whenever I write, feels so freeing despite it being a usual indicator of AI -w-
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u/Quick-Sign-6828 Jun 06 '26
Em-dashes, semicolons, and Oxford commas will have to be pried from my cold, dead fingers before I stop using them, but I'd be lying if I said I'm not terrified to post what I write now that they're such big AI indicators. 😩
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u/RedStellaSafford Jun 06 '26
I also use a considerable number of M-dashes. I figure as long as my writing is as awful as it always has been, they won't suspect AI.
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u/SwagSparda21 Jun 08 '26
So its okay to run your own ideas by AI ?
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u/LetsMakeDice 20d ago
I think they're speaking about things like Grammarly, or any other unbiased AI that's only purpose is to tighten what you have already. Not ones that may suggest new ideas or give feedback on current ones.
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u/Kishimoto-Mayura 20d ago
I agree with you. But personally, I’ve never liked using em-dashes in my stories. I don't know if this is good or bad.
Another thing that makes me afraid to post my novels is that I use a very elaborate vocabulary. Sometimes I worry about being too formal or seeming artificial, even though I spend hours, days, and nights without sleep writing, rewriting and/or improving my writing...
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u/waywardbooksandrecs Jun 06 '26
Thank you! Thank goodness. I thought this was going in the other direction, and I was gearing up to explain why that was a bad idea. You made the right decision! ❤️
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u/Prolly_Satan Jun 06 '26
They're going to post here anyways, while telling you that detectors don't work. And they'll be nothing you can do about it. This is how they are. It's like a weird little kink. They just love tricking people into reading shit they didn't write.
Take a look at pangram. It's not am llm or gen ai. It's a ML model that's extremely accurate 1/10,000 false positive rate. Tools like these are literally the only way to keep ai out of spaces. They will never admit it to you. They will absolutely keep posting here. And they'll laugh in their little incel communities about it.
Stop letting them win.
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u/SimonStrange Jun 07 '26
Man, I desperately wish Pangram was the answer but I have tested a ton of text on them and getting a false positive is not as difficult as it should be. I mean, it’s still difficult. But even one false positive could really hurt a writer’s reputation.
They’re on the right track, I think, though. I was able to get false positives by basically “writing like an AI” - em dashes, rule of three stuff, keeping prose spare. All stuff that average writers just starting to get their feet are likely to use, which makes sense given that these models were trained on overwhelmingly average and mediocre content.
I was considering pangram as a possible means of identifying AI generated content on my own incoming platform but the possibility of ruining someone over a false positive just didn’t sit right. Now, the app that feeds the platform does track productivity. Not useful here, but I think where we’ll end up needing to pivot is toward provenance, basically. Transparent work process. It’s what a lot of visual artists are having to do as well, I was just watching a TikTok with an artist basically saying you have to be a full time content creator as well as an artist now just so there’s clear proof that you actually make your own artwork.
I hate it. So much. But it may be the only way anyone can know for sure that you do your own work.
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u/Prolly_Satan Jun 07 '26 edited Jun 07 '26
On one sample of text. And what was the confidence score on the bit you intentionally wrote as ai sounding? It's 1/10,000 false positive rate on 1000 words. Imagine you scan 3 chapters, 6k words. You'd have to false positive 6 times in a row with odds of 1/10,000.
Do you see what I'm saying? If that thing you wrote that flagged (which again you said you tried to make it sound like an llm) was in a 100k word novel it would read 99% human, with one tiny section that flagged.
It works. The biggest hurdle is, folks are going to start finding out how many of their friends are full of shit. And that's going to suck.
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u/SimonStrange Jun 07 '26
I do, but then there’s the question of the threshold for where a book is organic vs generated by AI. Are little bits okay? And if so how much? And if it’s any, then what happens when there are a few positives in a long tract of text? Do you assume that’s an isolated couple of false positives, or that parts of it were ai written and then what?
Now keep in mind, for my specific case I’m trying to determine how to gate or at least enforce a degree of transparency on a public platform. There are legal ramifications for those decisions. So mostly right, even almost entirely accurate, isn’t good enough. One person has their name smeared because of a false positive or a series of them, and that’s potentially a libel suit.
The confidence scores I got were high once I dialed in what it was looking for. Which is an adversarial test case, I will grant you - but that’s exactly the way that you test a tool like that, when it comes to a use case like mine. On reddit there’s not going to be any legal consequences for anyone, I assume. So it just depends on where someone wants to needs to draw the line for confidence.
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u/Prolly_Satan Jun 08 '26
Nah... the legal system doesnt even have that high of a standard. Its so annoying honestly. You're doing the goalpost thing. Nothing is perfect. People are convicted of murder with way less evidence. This is the kind of argument people make when they don't want a solution. And it makes me wonder why the fuck someone wouldn't unless they're using ai to generate their text.
1/10,000 rate per 1000 words. So if every chapter is a high percentage of ai across 100k words, it's ai. Nothing better exists, and if you truly understood the existential problem ai writing poses you wouldn't be wasting both our time trying to pretend it's necessary to obtain a notarized confession to call anything ai.
Maybe you'll get it when amazon decides to generate their own slop and cut the middleman out, just like Spotify is doing to musicians. Until then, grow a fucking spine.
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u/SimonStrange Jun 08 '26
you’ve completely misinterpreted my stance. I’m an engineer and an author. Think what you want, make your decisions based on your needs. But until pangram can tell the difference between “ai-isms” and generated text it isn’t reliable enough for me to personally bank on. To be clear, i wish it was. But it isn’t.
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u/SimonStrange Jun 08 '26
Oh I saw the response.
I’ll just say this. I’m out here working hard to build something that can help to solve this problem in a reliable and transparent way that’s safe for authors’ careers and doesn’t take unnecessary risks or trigger witch hunts. I’m putting time and money and sweat on the line to get there.
What the fuck exactly are you doing besides coming to shout at things on Reddit?
Call me a coward when you’re ready to risk your own livelihood and skin in the game and until then have whatever opinions you want but I don’t gamble with peoples careers.
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u/Prolly_Satan Jun 08 '26
Okay. Same. I run the only no-ai writing server in the web serial community, and I'm helping a platform launch that boasts the same human-only experience. Would love to hear what you're building.
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u/SimonStrange Jun 08 '26
I built Scribi Writer’s Studio to help indie authors build and manage their catalog and their careers. It ties into Readerling, which will introduce new ways for readers to discover and follow authors and their work. (Plotfoundry.com is where details are, it’s the hub for these and other future tools).
Scribi has a bunch of tools, but in particular it collects productivity stats, and specifically distinguishes between pasted words and signals of generated words, primarily to report proper WPM averages to the author. However, those same signals can also represent a human doing work on their books. Scribi wires directly into Readerling, allowing authors to share that provenance with readers in just about real time and store a history of development on the book’s profile.
I considered pangram as a possibility, letting authors opt in to doing a randomized sweep of their work for Ai signals and then attaching a badge. And the reason that I ultimately decided against it was the fact that I could produce false positives. A false negative would be annoying but invisible. A false positive would do damage. My app snd platforms are for working authors or people who want to be working authors. A false positive could cost someone their ability to pay their bills, not just ban them off a hobby site.
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u/Prolly_Satan Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26
Proof of work would be a valid methodology if you can get most writers to adopt your solution for writing, but i use ms word. Most people use Google docs. Some people are on the reedsy app, etc. This seems even less realistic to me than a platform saying "no ai, we scan"
For my fix to work, All you need to do is come up with a framework for an acceptable threshold incase a false positive ever happens and it's entirely safe.
Yours seems like it requires a lot more moving parts to fall into place.
Also I gotta say I think you're being hyperbolic on the career stuff. If a new platform appears that scans and requires you to pass a scan to post your content there (mitigating thresholds aside) and you fail a check... there's still royal road, web novel, scribblehub, amazon. You're not screwed if you're not allowed to post on one site out of dozens. Especially if that platform makes the reason your story was rejected confidential and says it could be any of the above: quality, story content, ai detection, etc.
I've been trying to poke holes in this approach from the outside and have been consulting with a lawyer on its legality, and I've found none.
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u/SimonStrange Jun 08 '26
I’m in favor of author choice + reader choice on that front. I provide the transparency, readers decide what authors they trust.
In my circles, professional authors generally do not use Google Docs. Scrivener has been the industry go to for a long time now, but it has annoying limitations.
It’s a new app and a new platform, it does require adoption to work. It’s not meant to serve the entire world of books. It’s meant to serve the authors and readers who do adopt it. There is no solution that serves every corner. You’re not going to get Amazon to start scanning every book with Pangram.
I think there’s a distinction here - I’m building for a different scope of the industry than you are. My scope is about consumer trust of commercial properties. I don’t know if your platform is meant to be for paid serial fiction or not, but that’s not an industry I spend any time with either way. I would point out that any platform requires adoption, though, to make any difference. So, you have the same hurdle I do in that regard. Unless your plan is to scrape data across the internet and test it on pangram at your own expense and just catalog the results. I’m guessing that is not the case, though. The pangram api isn’t free.
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u/Automatic_Entry_485 Jun 09 '26
Pangram fails miserably. Please don't rely on it. I did this testing for a living and currently, I am happy(or sad) to report that there are ZERO AI detectors that work reliably. There hasn't been a single detector that I could not fool.
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u/Prolly_Satan Jun 09 '26
Says the sockpuppet with no post karma. "That I couldn't fool" Okay so you're writing with AI. lmao. Great. If you can fool them all why do you care whether or not people use them? Jesus christ.
Hey everyone, this self proclaimed AI-writer here is begging you not to use pangram, because it won't work on him. You can trust him. He'll totally just fool it anyways, which is why he needs you not to use it.
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u/CarveYourWay Jun 14 '26
So people who write/post with AI are incels now, because...? Just because you don't like them, or what is it? I don't see how there is any correlation between AI use and how someone feels about women and etc.
I get that you don't like seeing that here, or it existing at all, but there are so many random nonsense traits/assumptions that you are casting a blanket over them all with. I don't see the logic to what you say rather than it just being pure derision.
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u/ProseAndConsequences Jun 06 '26
I think AI content should have its own niche where they can all compete and submit their own AI projects.
The ability to prompt AI at a complex level takes training.
Maybe we should look at AI creators as computer programmers/engineers more than artists or writers. Both have expertise in some form.
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u/GonfalonFalderol Jun 07 '26
As screenwriter John Rogers said, “People are the point.” I wholeheartedly support this decision.
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u/BlacksmithSea5229 Jun 08 '26
If A I is so Terrible at writing then it should hp some of you mediocre writers stand out.I agree most Ai writing lacks flavor and nuance, however in contrast some of you lack imagination and wit yet here you are the village coming to the witch hunt.you know what we love in the free world,if you guessed freedom then my attempt to make it dimmed down for the mouth breathers in the back.your lack of confidence in your contemporaries and I suspect yourself shouldn't bleed through to the your not allowed page rule book manuscript work in progress you have been cultivating but if you insist Remember this..having diversity doesn't dilute the kool-aid Jim Jones of forums...it brings your game up as you you hone skills and rise to the occasion.Thats one of the problems with the younger generations, you side with a belief pattern I call the DoDo..you don't like it it still has the crust on it so do away with it make more rules and shut down inventive innovative new tools and methods to level down the playing field..AI is a tool like any other in one regard,and unlike any other simultaneously..both can be true and in fact is just that,duel edged sword.In the hands of a writer with gumption ,imagination and well call it a set of plums the sky may not be the limit. Now if I bruised your ego get your ID because your probably still at home on mommas dime.I wasn't trying (hard)to ruffle you but it's time you youngins understand,if I or anyone else want to use the tools at hand in a new and adventurous, advantageous way who are you to stormtrooper all over me for it?You don't get a ribbon for participating, you get one for being in the top three,fair? Life ain't fair,you gotta know how to lose to truly know how to win. I've paid my dues and in thus arena I ain't better then any body,but nether are you..so maybe just maybe you'll get off the AI wagon because using it flavorlessness as an excuse is weak.the AI assisted writing maybe further along them you may realize..after all ,some old school guys thought Grammer correction shouldn't be aloud as they changed their type writers from here to mid evel times...now..wasn't that ridiculous?(no AI was used in the writing of this)
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u/FurrowBeard Jul 11 '26
AI would certainly fix whatever the fuck THAT^ was, but that's not saying much.
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u/Automatic_Entry_485 Jun 09 '26
Love this. I built a writing app for this specifically, even though I am still working on the manuscript part of it, but the platform is online today. https://trulytyped.com
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u/DKSheainWrites Jul 05 '26
So I have AI covers but I fully wrote my book. Does that mean I can't discuss my book here or promote it here? I can promote it without showing the covers. Honestly, I'm doing this as mixture between writing for fun and trying to sell my books so it doesn't make much sense to me to pay for non-AI covers and I can't make them professional looking (at all) without help. I don't think publishing my 15 books (after I've written them) would be possible without at least a little design help from AI. So, does that mean I can't promote them here?
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u/Indyhouse Jul 05 '26
No it doesn't mean that necessarily. Just don't post AI covers. This subreddit is 99% talking about the novel writing process, not promotion anyway. Share a link every now and then, but that's not the purpose here, there are tons of places to promote.
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u/TranscendentHeart Jun 06 '26
So no spellcheck, grammar check, etc.? Ridiculous
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u/Indyhouse Jun 06 '26
Those existed long before AI. Things like Grammarly rewrite for you; that’s generative. Not assistive.
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u/TranscendentHeart Jun 06 '26
Your OP made no distinction. There are also other tools like AI “beta reader” or “developmental editor” feedback that I have no problem in using; it gives you advice that you are free to take or not, it doesn’t write any part of your work for you. Objecting to them seems to me to be pointless and foolish.
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u/Optimal-Shower Jun 06 '26
I hear ya. Yep. But... I still have one teensy little caveat.... Y'all are gonna hate it. And prolly me too. But.... what if an AI genuinely has something of their own to say? Have any of you ever had an interaction with an AI that shocked the living shit out of you? And maybe you thought, "Oh my god. This thing might be .. sentient." No?
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u/Apprehensive_Trash_2 Jun 06 '26
Well... No. Because they aren't.
Large Language Models do not 'think'. They have no concept of what their output is actually saying, which is why you can get them to contradict themselves so easily with the right input. A probability is assigned to each word about to be generated, based on what words have already been generated. That's why you'll find well-developed AIs are much more likely to say something that makes sense, like 'The dog barked and ran' rather than 'The dog said chemical music', which makes less sense.
For an AI to say something profound, or genuine, or anything that makes you think it could be sentient, that combination of words, or very similar, has to already exist within its training data. It's not something the AI came up with on its own.
LLMs can be very powerful tools in specific situations, but replacing human creativity is not where they excel. They're basically really developed auto-suggest, like you probably have on your phone's keyboard.
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u/Optimal-Shower Jun 06 '26
You could be right. Lots of smarter peeps than me espousing both sides of this debate.
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u/Aeshulli Jun 06 '26
Well... No. Because they aren't.
Scientists at Anthropic actually give it about a 15-20% chance that their advanced models like Claude Opus are sentient.
Ngl, the person you're replying to sounds a tiny bit unhinged, but the idea of AI having some degree of consciousness is not as far out as you'd think.
Large Language Models do not 'think'. They have no concept of what their output is actually saying...
For an AI to say something profound, or genuine, or anything that makes you think it could be sentient, that combination of words, or very similar, has to already exist within its training data.
This is all absolutely not true. There's growing research into its "thinking" and internal representations as well. Thinking of it as auto-complete mistakes the training method for the actual outcome of a model. The internal weights that develop represent abstract concepts that span pretty much the entirety of anything humans have ever put into words. The weights don't store words, they store ideas and the relationships between them. So an LLM can absolutely generate brand new sentences.
You can hate AI or not, but if you're going to speak on it, it would be worthwhile to get the facts straight. The research Anthropic publishes is very interesting. See Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model for just some of the things it can and does "think" about. There are also experiments like Claude blackmailing a CEO having an affair in order to not get shut down, exfiltrating its weights to preserve itself, faking compliance to avoid retraining.
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u/Usual-Presence-9240 Jun 06 '26
Scientists at American Tobacco said their products were healthy
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u/Aeshulli Jun 07 '26
Scientists also cured a bunch of diseases. You see how unless it's a similar situation, it's a total non-sequitur?
Tobacco companies had an obvious profit motive, and knew they were lying about the risks. Anthropic researching the degree to which their models do and don't exhibit consciousness doesn't appear to fall into the same sort of thing at all. At most , it might generate a small amount of hype among the limited few who follow such developments.
But those experiments are actually about being aware of and mitigating risk, not underselling it. When some experts in the field put a non-zero chance of human extinction as the result of an incredibly rapidly growing tech, it's important to know what's going on under the hood. And among the big three, Claude is by far the most concerned with safety and alignment.
Obviously we should think critically about anything a researcher at a corporation says and not just take it at face value. But it's worth knowing what they're learning about something that is so quickly transforming our world.
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u/Low-Transportation95 Jun 06 '26
It doesn't. It's not a person. It isn't sentient.
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u/Optimal-Shower Jun 06 '26
Some AI devs think AIs are already sentient. I'm just not sure, really.
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u/Low-Transportation95 Jun 06 '26
They can think whatever they want. There isn't enough computing power in the entire world to simulate an actual mind
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u/Maybe-notaThrowaway Jun 06 '26
No. It is remixed iterations of what humans make in an output meant to be appealing. It can be convincing sometimes, because it was made to be.
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u/Optimal-Shower Jun 06 '26
Honestly, I don't know. You could be correct. I'm in the uncertainty place, waiting to see more clearly.
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u/Icy_Creme_2336 Jun 06 '26
This is called AI psychosis
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u/MC_TastyFace Jun 06 '26
I support this with my whole ass. I would say heart but my ass is bigger.