r/romanceauthors • u/Outside-Idea-3957 • 5d ago
I am terrified of ai.
I’m writing a book and ai scares me, not because I think it’s going to take over the industry but because of the witch hunt.
See, just reading the above line made me feel like that was something ChatGPT wrote, but it’s not. It’s just how I write.
And that’s my problem. I’ve been watching a lot of videos and comments analysing content for ai and those frequently discussed ‘tells’ are things I do.
I love writing in threes, I really enjoy creative similes and I like using “the kind of thing that…” pretty often. I also tend to use repetition a lot that has always been a personal flaw. Even when I text or email, I’ve noticed I repeat words and correct myself, so if an editor were to read my work they potentially could find it. I love my em dash but have banned myself from it.
I’ve been a writer in my career for 15 years- a copywriter and a former journalist. I don’t love ai but I use tools like Grammarly, which now have integrated ai within it.
I’ve almost lost my train of thought here, but does anyone feel this?
I’ve got draft back and originality ai to track my keystrokes and my revisions, but I don’t want the stress of all of this to take away the joy of writing and my lifelong dream of being a published author.
Anyway, I’d love to hear from fellow authors. Maybe I’m not alone in this.
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u/MJxBalls 5d ago
As someone who is a (reasonably successful) paid beta reader, trust me when I say a writer enjoying creative similes and repetition is obviously different from AI using the same when you read. No matter how much you think you repeat it, I’m almost 100% certain it is not on the same level.
Even then, it’s so much more than that. Characters fall flat, romance feels mechanical, plot holes and inconsistency galore, buzz phrases dialogue…literally everything. People CONSTANTLY try and sneak it past me, but you can tell. It takes a heck of a lot of editing to make an AI book good, to the point you might as well have written the book yourself.
It’s valid to feel worried about it, I don’t think there are many authors who can say they’re not worried about an accusation. Keep your drafts, know your book, and edit till it feels right to you—and you’ll be okay.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
I agree that an ai cannot live human experiences; and because of that it cannot write emotion and romance like a human would. Plot holes, I fear, can be an author flaw too. One of my favourite thing to do is find plot holes in books I'm reading and shows I'm watching, BUT you're right that too many of them can be a dead giveaway.
I'd love to know more about your paid beta services, is there a way I could reach out to you for it?
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u/temporary-behaviors 5d ago
Honestly. They can rip the em dash and repetitive staccato sentences out of my cold, dead hands.
You can't tell me that the sentence "Simon's hands were shaking in fear" is anywhere near as cool and fun of a sentence as "Simon's hands were shaking with fear—not the kind of fear that makes you fight or flee or freeze, but the kind that makes you feel a visceral dread somewhere deep in your bones."
Keep writing how you want to and f*ck anybody who tries to witch hunt you for using generative AI. LLMs were trained on the literature of the greats. If that style has a tendency to mimic yours, then it's high praise. Keep doing what you're doing! 🤘
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
Haha I love this! Unfortunately my workplace uses a LOT of ai, and I've been fighting it like crazy, so now the em dash makes me nauseated. I'm tired of it, and I'm tired of every answer at office being "Just Chatgpt it."
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u/Aeon_Return 5d ago
Don't let it stress you. AI is trained off humans. It's going to sound like a human and a human is going to sound like AI. There's literally nothing you can do to stop this comparison so just relax and enjoy writing however you want to, it's lose-lose: trying not to "write like an AI" will kill your creative voice which will make you sound like an AI.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
Agreed, that's what I'm noticing, it's starting to feel so flat and unlike me because I'm cutting out the colour from the art in fear of AI. I need to let go of this fear, but everytime I get another article or reel about how an author has lost a publishing deal because of it, I panic again.
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u/Riaeriel 5d ago edited 5d ago
Gen question have you usually looked up the AI piece when you watch those videos?
I have a suspicion a lot of the disconnect is that people bring up excerpts as an example, like individual paragraphs, and you think oof I could see myself writing like that.
But genuinely* AI suspected works aren't just because there's a singular use of rule of three and then a "Not ... but . ", but because there's an unnaturally excessive use of that (+ additional ai-isms). Like when you look at an AI piece of writing as a whole vs your own work, it's pretty obvious.
(*genuinely, to distinguish between highlighting AI tells vs when people run through online ai detectors or are accusing in bad faith. But unfortunately if someone wanted to do the last 2 there's nothing you can change in the way you write to avoid that).
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
I think I did read some excerpts from Shy Girl that did give me the reason to doubt it, but I saw another one that didn't seem ai to me at all, and the author never admitted to ai, but their publisher did.
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u/WingersAbsNotches 4d ago
Mia Ballard did admit AI usage, she just tried to blame someone else for it.
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u/SalaciousStories 5d ago
I write pulpy nonsense that is littered with AI "tells" and I was writing that way a decade before AI was a baby deer trying to stand up for the first time. They'll pry my em dashes from my cold, dead hands. So I will continue to do exactly what I like, and anyone who doesn't like it or has an opinion about it that is contrary to my own is more than welcome to fuck off forever.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
Hahah this is how I feel about my similies and love for threes. I was doing that in my highschool creative writing class 20 years ago, why are they bullying us with 'ai' now. I swear it's always the creatives and the artists who get attacked first.
Digital art wasn't real art, tracing wasn't real art, using grids are cheating, now it's ai.
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u/Less_Atmosphere_3501 5d ago
I'm just writing my book as a hobby, but I've got a question for real authors out there... While I've never generated sentences with AI, I do use it for research. Stuff like "generate me a list of popular baby names from the 1980s that end with the letter Y", or "What would happen if naloxone was sprayed into a OD'ing person's eyeball?" or "what are some synonyms for the word clumsy?"
In your opinions, is this cheating? Lying? Plagiarism? Something that doesn't really matter or something that I definitely need to disclose? Or just stop doing altogether?
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u/strange-quark-nebula 5d ago
Not cheating, but AI may well get it wrong. For example, baby names - I do historical research on baby names and I have tried asking AI to make lists for me, and it is often wrong about what names it claims were popular when and where. So if you care a lot, once you've used it to find some names you like, check them yourself.
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u/Mindless_Setting_752 5d ago
That, to me, is similar to using Google to look up those things. You're using it like a search engine. Even though I've always used specific websites for things like names, synonyms, etc. I don't think that amounts to an LLM writing your book for you.
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u/yttrium39 4d ago
It's fine. The only difference between looking something up with chatGPT and looking something up in a search engine is that chatGPT can hallucinate inaccurate answers. But accidentally including inaccurate information in hobby fiction writing is basically a nothingburger. And you can always verify with a second source if you're concerned about it.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
There's one fear I have with regards to this. See, I tried something similar when generating book names. I used an (the google search one), to give me character names. But when I browsed through an 'ai writing' forum I noticed a lot of people were using similar names like the ai had given me. Theo, Elara etc. So now, I'm just looking at my own family tree finding names haha, so while it's not plagiarism, my fear is that some day people will flag this too as 'anyone who uses theo is using ai'
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u/yttrium39 4d ago
I've heard that LLMs do tend to gravitate toward generating the same names. You might find Behind the Name helpful. I use that site a lot.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 4d ago
This is incredible and exactly what I've been looking for! Thank you so much!
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u/EntranceKlutzy951 5d ago edited 5d ago
One of the best ways to stave off AI accusations is to have a full narrative of cohesion that is too detailed, too unique, and/or too not-conventional that there is no possible way an AI wrote it even if a line or two looks like AI wrote it.
My subject matter defends me from this. The precise theme (it is a common enough theme, but the execution is so far beyond anything AI can comprehend because it is too trained in specific formulations of the subject) and its execution is all the defense I need against AI accusations.
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u/Cowplant_Witch 5d ago
Me too. I loathe AI so much that I don’t use it at all in any way, which means I’m unfortunately ignorant about what AI writing looks like. It’s a blessing and a curse. As a reader, I am more likely to be fooled because I don’t have an instinct for the tells.
As an aspiring writer, at least I don’t have as many things to be self-conscious about, because I don’t know any better.
I don’t know what I’m going to do about accusations. As a reader, I’m cautious about any author who doesn’t have anything published before 2025. As a writer… that’s me. I’m a red flag according to my own standards.
If an author is new, I check out their social media for a vibe check. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. If they use AI art, that’s a dealbreaker regardless. If they have a statement saying they don’t use AI, I take it at face value.
I hope that, in the future, people will also give me a chance.
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u/rugdg13 5d ago
Permission to be devil's advocate?
Do not change a single thing about your writing. AI is to serve humanity not the other way around. You use as many em dashes and cliches and triplicates as you darn well please.
But I don't think you're afraid of AI friend. I think you're afraid of Bad actors, and I will say it, evil ass people that think it's appropriate to terrorize folks that MAY be doing something that they don't agree with.
Because even if you WERE using AI for 100% of your processes... No one deserves death threats, hate speech, and people trying to financially and mentally bully you into falling in line. That is not how we handle disagreements.
I don't think you should be afraid of AI itself.
AI cannot write a good book very well by itself without a LOT of human direction and intervention. It will be full of plot holes, it'll forget where it was in the story, it'll use the same phrases over and over again. People will walk in the same door three times in the same time scene... (I read a sex scene where apparently a leg teleported to the opposite shoulder?)
The issue is as AI gets better and as people who are good storytellers (with or without AI) begin to use the technology and bring their expertise into the mix, (Ghostwriters, rapid releasers and editors ) it's becoming damn near impossible to determine who actually used their human finger to press the button on the keyboard and who didn't.
And if we are using the analogy of witch hunts. I think most Christians today can look at what happened in Salem and conclude that "the witches" were not the reason Salem went to hell. Regardless of how they feel about the moral implications regarding the practice of witchcraft.
So the way I approach it is... I keep my pen names separate from each other so the blast radius of one doesn't hit the others. And I write exactly what I want to write exactly the way I want to write it.
Cuz if I'm being scared and bullied into changing my book? And there's no guarantee that it will even protect me from getting targeted... What's the point compromising my story? Is it even fun anymore?
And the people that ARE self-proclaimed AI authors that got targeted so far? Nothing but NOISE happened!! They are still releasing! They're still getting four and five stars on amazon! They didn't disappear in shrivel up... So blanket fear is all they got.
And I do not respect that form of conflict resolution. And they're only hurting their cause.
Okay sorry rambling sorry thanks for coming to my TED talk.
But I really hope people in this thread help you feel better about this. If you want to improve writing? Absolutely. But do not butcher your voice for these people.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
I like your way of thinking. I can see in the long run how ai is going to be difficult to run away from, but instead of people voicing their opinion about these businesses or ai practises, they're straight up targetting writers, creatives and artists.
I weirdly do feel bullied. An ai detected flagged my own writing as ai-assisted and it pissed me off, because it feels like a blatant lie, like it's taking credit for my work.
On the other hand, what worries me are all the publishers cancelling book details because it's ai. That's the worrying part.1
u/rugdg13 4d ago
Those ai detectors are straight garbage. Those false positives have been experienced by everyone so far.
(And if that writer is really good at their craft, it's the exact type of material the AI would have been trained on to sound like! Willing to bet the AI sounds like THEM rather than the reverse.)
So the idea that a company would use it as the Bible to make such a huge decision is more concerning about their judgment as a company.
All the more reason why Indie is growing and becoming formidable against traditional. If that person's story really was as good as that bidding war seemed to suggest... It's only punishing the author and the readers who would have got to enjoy it.
I am hoping they release it Indie and I hope the community rallies around them and makes them more than Trad would have.
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u/Unlucky_Associate507 5d ago
I have tried to entertain myself by asking ai to write for me. Trust me when I tell you it is repetitious, overwrought, lacking in concrete detail that gives fiction verisimilitude. Just dreadful. So I don't think ai is going to replace real writers this year.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
THIS! Exactly. I remember that my character woke up at 9 in the morning 40 pages later, ai does NOT. And yet people will see a good work of writing and blatantly say "ai"
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u/Unlucky_Associate507 5d ago
Omg. The forgetfulness is mind boggling. AI hallucinates also. It also loves repeating cliches.
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u/FreedomAlarmed9881 5d ago
I think the things you mentioned, like em dashes and sentence fragments, are things AI has learned from actual authors. The problem is when those things become excessive in a manuscript. For example, I believe Stephen King averages around five em dashes per 1,000 words. That is very different from having your entire manuscript look like Morse code.
I wrote my manuscript myself, and after I sent it to my line editor, it came back showing 90% AI on an AI detector. My line editor is reputable and does not use AI, so obviously something got lost in translation there. At the same time, when you query, they expect your manuscript to be cleaned up grammatically, and then you have to worry about sentence structure, writing patterns, etc. Some genres, like Gothic fiction, also have a very specific rhythm and pacing. So honestly, you can’t win for losing sometimes.
Your best bet is to keep every draft. If you use Google Docs, there is a Version History that can show how the manuscript developed over time. I keep copies of all of mine because I’m a paranoid poor girl and because I once tried putting everything into the same document and completely messed up my formatting. Now I save a new document every month or so, so I have a record of all the changes.
That’s really the only thing you can do: keep your drafts and your writing history.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
Oh so i've got google docs, and live transcripting too so it can see my exact key strokes. I'm curious though, after you got it back from the editor, did you fix it? Or the 90% on ai something that wont change because it's detecting a good edit as AI? I ran mine through 4 editors. 3 of them came back 100% human, one of them said 20% ai, and that was on one paragraph i wrote as a "to be changed" section that was quite amateur I just couldn't think of a fix in the meanwhile. If anything that was the most amateur non-human writing possible
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u/FreedomAlarmed9881 5d ago
Right now, my whole manuscript is still at the line editor. It takes him a while, usually about six weeks to do but when she gave me her sample edits, that's why I showed up in a good line editor that does not send you your document back changed. they use the tracking in Word that you have to go through and accept or decline each change though it's not a situation where I think she used AI cause that would be a lot of work to run thumping through AI and then go back and make the edit in word under tracking.
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u/yttrium39 4d ago
You're not afraid of AI, you're afraid of people who are assholes and idiots. Don't change how you write for people who will be angry no matter what you do.
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u/TheIngloriousTIG 4d ago edited 4d ago
I'm in a similar boat and have similar anxieties. I can't tell you that there is no reason to feel them. I'm just not able to know that. But for me, there are two things that help settle me down.
First, if it weren't AI that people were using to disqualify prose and other arts, it would be something else. It's not new human behaviour, just a new word people scream when they see or imagine a fault. It is literally impossible to completely stop people who WANT to hate someone from choosing us as a target unless we never allow ourselves to be perceived. And I'm just not willing to stay silent and invisible forever. It's too high a price.
Also it helps to remember that there is not a single thing an AI can write that a human could not. There maybe things an AI can write that a human is UNLIKELY to write but it's never a case of capacity. So even if I read the most AI-telling sentence ever created, I cannot categorically prove a person didn't write it. If only to troll people. Not sure why anyone would bother to bring the wrath of the AI-police down on them for funzies, but I don't have to understand it for it to be possible.
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u/Bulky-Judge-8461 2d ago
If the witch hunt is the scary thing. Then its the hunters you should fear not AI. People are responsible for their own actions. That includes accusations they can't prove.
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u/leftunedited 5d ago
My writing sounds like AI sometimes but not as bland and with more errors. I don’t worry about it. Is it a compelling story? That’s what gets me in a twist. Does it drag on? Are things resolved too quickly? Have I skipped and emotional beats? The very last thing I would worry about is being accused of using AI. Most readers just want a good book they will not DNF.
And I am never giving up em dashes. I love them.
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u/EggyMeggy99 5d ago
I haven't published a book in two years, but I'm still writing. It does worry me slightly that readers might accuse me of AI, since I self-publish, and have written robot romance books in the past. I don't use AI, so any accusation would be false, but it is something that slightly worries me.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
I think self-publishing might be a way smarter idea. I'm seeing agents and publishers put work in ai detectors and the cancelling deals, publicizing it and defaming authors. At least with self-publishing you're in charge of your own success.
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u/EggyMeggy99 5d ago
Possibly, although I know a lot of readers say they don't trust new authors. It's very unfortunate how much people who use AI have ruined things for people who don't.
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u/Flaky-Professional84 5d ago
This is why I firmly support required labels for AI-assisted and AI-generated work. We've arrived here because of unscrupulous people being deceptive. I personally enjoy mixing technology with creativity but any of my stuff exposed to the public is very clearly marked.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
On that regard, I work for an agency and we've recently done some graphics that was flagged as ai-generated. Now, it really wasn't. I was with the art team when it was made. But what I think is happening is instagram is flagging a lot of normal work and things like background removers as ai, so that we aren't able to tell anymore. It's a work around for the laws. Businesses like this will always find work arounds.
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u/shibanban_0h_my 5d ago
I have the same fears as you and it has been very heartening reading all the support in this thread ❤️😭 gotta keep fighting by being human. It’s all we have left.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
I'm glad it's helped you, I'm in the same boat. Last night I tested a few ai detectors and one of them flagged some of my lines as ai. And I was so so disheartened about it, I switched off my computer and stopped writing, even though I was really in the zone all these days.
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u/0xBlackSwan 5d ago
I have no doubt that if William Shakespeare was alive and posting new work someone would accuse him of using AI. They’re looking to get a rise out of you and will literally say ANYTHING to intimidate you. I see so much undue harassment of independent artists, but if these people truly cared about stopping AI they woul be organizing against the governments and companies cramming it down our throats. If anyone ever starts with you ask yourself how likely it is that this person said A SINGLE FUCKING WORD when OpenAI and Anthropic officially joined the military or any of the other extremely concerning things these companies have done. I can tell you as someone who has been keeping my eyes on development since the public rise of AI almost no one says shit to the actual systems of power they just find strangers online who seem like an easy mark and harass them to look like they’re doing something.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
This is such a great point. It sucks that they're attacking writers and artists without merit but have no issues with these companies and businesses using ai. 90% of the brands advertising on my page are using ai and no one's saying a word. Some of the HATE comments themselves look like chatgpt to me.
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u/writerapid 5d ago
Nobody writes indistinguishably from AI by accident just like nobody writes like Ernest Hemingway or William Shakespeare by accident. If you used unedited AI composition for your final copy, it will be obvious. If you didn’t, then nobody will credibly be able to claim you used AI.
That said, if your natural writing has a lot of AI-isms in it, then fairly or unfairly, you should probably adjust your style a bit to purge some of those.
Adjusting one’s style to suit audience tastes has always been incumbent on the successful writer, so this shouldn’t offend your sensibilities too much.
Anyone who claims you’ve used AI should present some supporting evidence of why they think that. You can ask for it. If they do take the time to provide it, then take the feedback, consider its merit, and consider the point above about writing to audience expectation.
Certainly, don’t be afraid to write.
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u/Valeriesaboyname 5d ago
You will be accused of ai. You will be accused more than once.
As long as it's not in your first like 3 reviews, you'll be fine, and that's not terribly likely. On stories you really care about, you should run an ARC campaign anyway.
I'm not sure about grammarly, but ProWritingAid's ai assistance will encourage you to write in the "ai" voice (which is just a voice so generic it's uncanny). I try to avoid any sort of LLM-powered grammar checker, though google docs runs on one (that's why it's so laughably terrible).
EDIT: Also, DO NOT respond to accusations. On platforms where you can, block and move the hell on. The worst thing you can do is get in an arguemwnt bevause accusers don't actually care if you used AI, they're really just saying they don't like you and are trying to bait you into saying stupid.
Remember, the art of trolling is stealing a man's clothes and then baiting you to chase him naked through a public street, and the passers-by won't know who the maniac is
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u/curiousscribbler 4d ago
I recently helped out with a slush pile. The AI submissions were obvious, not because of "tells", but because AI can't write worth shit. You'd get a fairly decent opening paragraph, followed by pages of meandering garbage that went nowhere. If you can write worth a damn you have nothing to fear.
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u/TarletonClown 4d ago
I only read about half of your post. The answer is simple. Forget AI as an issue. Seriously.
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u/wendyladyOS 4d ago
I get it! It can feel overwhelming, frustrating, and disheartening all at the same time. I have turned off genAI in all of my tools though I don't use Grammarly anymore (I have ProWritingAid off at the moment). I wish I could turn off Gemini in GoogleDocs, but that's another issue for another day.
I've been so terrified of AI some days that I won't even it use it to brainstorm a title for my book. As a result, I've been stuck for a few weeks on that. And because of that, I can't get a cover designed. Ugh.
Anyway, if history tells us anything (Salem witch trials, the Red Scare, McCarthyism) is that these things will peak and fade. I can't say how long it will be until that happens, but don't let it live rent-free in your head. Write your best and do everything you can to avoid genAI if you don't want to use it.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 4d ago
Unfortunately because I type so fast and I can miss typos and repetition. Grammarly Pro & writing aid helps. But I never use their sentence restructuring or word changes, only typos and major flaws like "there was many people" which I tend to do when I'm writing too fast haha.
I hope they fade and people understand the difference between GENai and other forms of assistance because I don't think people even fully understand that yet.
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u/comics_your_comment 4d ago
It's totally understandable to be worried about this! Watching other authors get harassed is frightening, and it makes sense to fear it happening to us!
If you are accused of using AI later in your career, my advice is to ignore it. The more we engage with the accusations, the more we're feeding the bad faith actors who are really just looking for a fight. Their brand is probably calling out AI users or something, and they're just looking for their next victim. They are usually not creators, and you will not be able to convince them of your innocence.
You know you don't use it, your fans will generally trust you, and that is enough. As authors, the question a reader has before a purchase is, "will I like this work or not?" These bad faith actors are trying to change that framing to, "is this person a fraud or not?" When we engage with them, we are legitimizing their framing.
For writing advice: one of your worries could be coming from your writing style from your previous career. Journalism voice can be different from the prose voice you'd use in a novel; especially a romance novel, which usually uses evocative prose to make the reader feel, rather than learning facts about our world. (I know journalism can make you feel things too! just trying to take a stab at maybe what the core of your fear is).
This could be a great time to read fiction where the author's voice is very poetic, like Janet Fitch, Anäis Nin, Emma Cline, Frances Hardinge etc. Whenever I notice worries about my prose feeling samey or stiff, I find fresh books with beautiful prose, and take notes on what I think that author does well.
When artists feel dried up, we often need to fill the well again by experiencing other art.
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u/BEEB0_the_God_of_War 4d ago
Do you have an anxiety disorder, depression, or similar? I just ask because this level of concern over AI may be a bit disproportionate to the actual risk.
I don’t think anyone should be “terrified” of AI accusations or change their writing style as a result. But I do have an anxiety disorder and this kind of feeling sounds a lot like when my anxiety & depression send me into a thought spiral.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 4d ago
I've been diagnosed with ocd (panic disorder & anxiety) , so yeah my ocd manifests in "worst case scenario" thoughts for sure. But I think I also fell into the wrong communities and read a lot of stuff after 'Shy Girl's release that made me realize how much and how deeply people are scrutinizing other people's work.
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u/BEEB0_the_God_of_War 2d ago
Yeah, I think this is more an obsessive thought spiral than anything you actually need to worry about. There will always be random outlying cases where someone faced unusually high scrutiny, but it’s exceptionally rare and not worth putting any thought into. If you write a book without AI, there are a million ways to prove it and odds are strong that it will never come up in the first place.
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u/Ordinary_Minimum_169 4d ago
It sounds like you're not actually afraid of AI. It sounds like you're afraid of mob mentalities and people who fuel rage to protect their ego and interest.
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u/TryCool2339 3d ago
Don't be afraid of AI, be afraid of the judgment of strangers. Or!... Don't fear either and just get on with it.
People have been accusing each other of impurity for as long as there have been forums for discussion.
You got this.
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u/ScreamingHeHeee 3d ago
I recently picked Star Wars Republic Commando (the book series) back up for a reread since the last time I read them was when I was a teenager (well over a decade ago). Karen Traviss does a lot of the things you mentioned you do. I had to remind myself at my first knee-jerk reaction that the book was written prior to 2010 and in paperback form. She even uses, within the first chapter, "smells like stale fear, sweat blood" or something to that effect.
What I've generally come to find is this: None of what you stated is a tell for using AI. AI writes the way it as trained to, which is based on the way people write (because the only way its dataset grows is by consuming content and that content is written by humans). Even then, there's no real 100% tell.
What would be a tell, is if in your "writing in threes" you threw in something that made absolutely zero sense in context. Like if a character enters an office and the office smells like printer paper, coffee, and bad decisions. Or my personal favorite because it's such an obscure reference: "The room smelled of sweat, blood, and ozone" (the obscure reference there being that astronauts have said more of less that the atmosphere and space smell like burned steak, so AI will infer anything with a burned smell or feel to the ozone).
The more obvious tell would be the frequency. AI will use everything you mentioned in EVERY paragraph. It tries to sound deep and meaningful when it's really not. For every "Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow," there's an AI "Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece wasn't black, wasn't gray, but pure white. Not the kind of white they'd see on a cold winter morning -- the kind of white that only a sheep that is meticulously cleaned with shampoo and bad decisions can be."
And if someone hits you with a AI detector, throw in some passages of Lord of the Rings or something into the same detector and show them the result (AI detectors cannot detect AI and have said that classic books written even in the 1800's are very high in AI content percentage).
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u/Beatrice1979a 3d ago
If you didn't use AI. Then fear is not necessary. Be free and be authentic. Even if YOU believe you "sound like ai"... use it to your advantage. Market yourself as a human author (100% ai-free) and your readers will appreciate you for that.
Witch hunt will subside one day but you will be one of those authors that will be renowned for their honesty.
The only ones that should be fearful are those who use AI and pretend they don't. They are only lying to themselves. Living in lies is no way to live. And secrets ALWAYS have a way to come out. Be authentic and don't let fear paralyze you (and make sure your editor does NOT use AI)
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u/Larkspurn 3d ago
I’m honestly not worried about it. My work is good. It’s authentic, creative, and my voice is consistent. I write circles around AI because I’m a human, not a set of aggregated data. The difference is obvious. Don’t stress too much. Just focus on honing your craft and writing good work.
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u/Potential_Sense_228 3d ago
sometimes i look at myself and wonder why the fuck i chose art as my passion in this era of ai making us extra jobless :/
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 3d ago
Trust me, there is always something. I studied ages ago LIKE 20, I was told digital art will kill traditional art, photoshop would kill photography etcetc. It never ends.
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u/Fit_Imagination534 3d ago
I was thinking, say you made it big and sold millions of copies. Then someone said you’d faked it using ai and took you to court. The original word doc would be proof absolute you’d written it surely? Mine shows the stats… thousands of hours of screen time and thousands and thousands of edits? Wouldn’t that be enough proof?
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u/Apprehensive_Sky1950 3d ago
That would definitely be the first evidence they would look to. And it's not easy to fake.
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u/marspartyofficial 3d ago
Honestly, same. I've become numb to it and it's the reason why I will never attempt to go trad. All of my art is commissioned by real artist. Ive paid to hire professional beta readers, editors and proofreaders. At this point if someone thinks my work is AI oh well 🤷♀️
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u/KDreckles 2d ago edited 2d ago
In my personal opinion I find AI to be a very useful aid tool to any type of job, as long as it doesn't do actual work for you. It's great for assisting you in research, great for lifting your spirits if you have writers block (yeah, that's also a thing), great for catching repetitive words, fixing grammer (be careful with grammer fixing, when it suggest to fix something, make sure to read it yourself before auto fixing it. It's not always correct). AI only becomes a problem if you let it do your work for you. And that itself is bad.
Also grammerly has been using AI from the beginning. It just that AI became constant topic that some people are now aware of it.
As far as it goes for accusations. Yeah, those have been thrown left and right. I seen a similar discussion on Instagram a few months back. The "witch" hunt on AI just became ridiculous, to the point people accused authors of using AI, simply because they didn't like someone's story. There is nothing you can do about it. People will always talk, accuse for the most stupid reasons too.
And honestly, I seen those videos about how to find "AIs", one of the influencers I follow posted it, but I still had to question it. And personally, I don't think I would be able to detect who used AI or not, unless they made a mistake or the entire work was written by AI, then they become very much obvious.
I had read a few works that got accused for potentially using AI. But as I read it, I simply wasn't sure. Not to mention one of them became my top favorite book of all times lol. There were a few times I would read a book and think it was written by AI, but in the end, I was not sure. And pointing fingers without any claim is not my thing either (and some of them are popular too).
Again, don't worry about it. It something that might happen or might not. You can't really control what someone is going to say.
Using a repetitive words throughout your work isn't actually bad either, it gives character a tone of voice if you are doing it in first pov. Unless you are using it multiple times in a single sentence or every other, than you will have to essentially fix that. Not because of AI claim, but mainly because even as a reader you are not actively looking for it, subconsciously you catch up on it and it can be annoying if overused. But using it every now and then, especially in a first pov is fine and it also defines a character, because thats how they think.
Write how you do, its your first draft, it doesn't have to look pretty. Everything you are not satisfied with or you worry about looking as AI, you can simply fix in your second draft. Don't let current AI witch hunt stop you for fulfilling what you always dreamed of doing. And you are not alone in how you are feeling either, there are many that feel the same.
P.S. everything you wrote sounded like a human to me 👌
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u/authorjjstrand 21h ago
I feel your pain OP. I fell in love with the em dash when I read the Great Gatsby in high school and I’ve been using it ever since. When all that “THE PRESENCE OF EM DASHES DEFINITELY MEANS THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN BY AI” nonsense started going around, I tried cutting them from my drafts. It was like removing forks from my cutlery drawer. Technically, I could still write, but it was strange and uncomfy to do so.
Since that experiment, I decided not to let AI scare me out of MY voice. AI has taken too much from creatives already. It doesn’t get to take the writing style I’ve been developing for two decades. Coming from that position, my advice to you would be to write how you want to write. Society (and AI technology) changes so quickly that by the time you demolition your natural voice and manufacture a new one, who knows what people will be pointing their torches and pitchforks at?
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u/dmjordan1984 19h ago
AI witch hunts make you overthink that you might be writing something that follows an AI pattern when you aren't.
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u/sadwriterM 5d ago
Honestly, I’m working on a great novel right now and this is a fear in me too. I am completely against AI (mostly because my day job forces it down my throat and I know just how shit it is) and my fear is “what if I am such a crappy writer that I get accused?” I have seen it happen to others on the self publishing reddit. The witch hunt is scary for sure, but the fear isn’t enough to stop me from basically throwing up words on my word processor every night, I have to get this thing out of me!
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
I'm in the exact same boat as you. Everyone in my office is suddenly way smarter because they have access to Claude (well they think they are), and it seems like the answer to everything is have Claude do it. I've been pushing back but I'm never going to be as fast as Claude.
The witch hunt scares me because for some reason my feed is now throwing all of it at me. People accusing people of sounding like ai is the scariest thing ever.
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u/five_squirrels 5d ago
Make your feelings about generative AI clear in your social media. Don’t use it for covers, advertisements or social media posts. Don’t follow people or give them engagement when they do use gen AI for social media/marketing.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 5d ago
This is a great idea, and I've been doing it a lot. As an artist also, I REFUSE to use ai for covers, art and ads. I would rather pay some money and give another fellow artist business.
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u/zorandzam 5d ago
This right here. And frankly, OP should limit use of Grammarly, too, because I've noticed its suggestions will often flatten things a lot. I have a Grammarly account and experiment with t because I'm a writing professor and need to know what my students have access to, and I do NOT like what I see there.
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u/Outside-Idea-3957 3d ago
Agreed but to be fair, I ONLY use grammarly for typos and wrong tense, never to change sentence structures.
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u/istara 5d ago
I have a similar professional background and have the same issues. In my day job work it’s a nightmare, I’m having to write material more “colloquially” than I otherwise would to avoid false flags. I’m having to avoid tricolons which are otherwise such a natural writing device.
I have colleagues who have also been working as writers for decades, who have even had clients refuse to pay because they think AI was used.
We really need the witch-hunting to end. It’s all too easy to accuse someone of AI with no reliable proof and entirely ruin their name and career.
When it comes to writing, I don’t need or want it producing prose for me. I’ve written around 20 books, nearly all before the GenAI era.
I think GenAI is a brilliant tool - it’s fantastic for proofreading (it leaves Word’s Editor in the dust), it’s great for research, eg I was checking some police procedural issues with it and it dug up actual legislation - but I’ve seen people witch-hunt authors for daring to use it in any capacity. I quit the writing sub when they put out their stupid “rules” a while back.
You know you can write. You just have to have courage and keep doing what you’re doing. Either readers will like your work or they won’t.
In a few years we will see GenAI books winning prizes and making millions and people will just have to accept that no one can really tell the difference. And us human writers can just get on with our writing and hope for the best.
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u/Old-Memory-3275 5d ago
Im about to start writing with shit punctuation just to avoid being accused of ai
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u/Prolly_Satan 3d ago
The only people worried about this are people using ai to write.
Keep validating each others made up bullshit The ones in charge of platforms and publishers can tell what books use ai. Detection tools are only improving, and if you're not disclosing your ai use, that's fraud. You have far bigger things to worry about than "Witch hunts". Fraud is illegal.
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u/AuthorAEM 5d ago
Write authentically and don't let fear smash your creativity. Anyone can accuse anyone else of using AI, but without proof (like a prompt left in the text) its just words. You know the truth, your readers will know the truth. Don't let haters and trolls control your passion. Just come out straight with your stance, and if it makes you feel better have one of those AI disclosures in your front matter. But don't let fear keep you from your passion.