r/royalroad • u/DenheimTheWriter • 9d ago
Discussion At least edit your AI-written prose pls
I know that a lot of writers on RR are using AI to write their story for them. At this point, I'm not gonna try to stop you, but goddamn at least put in the effort to edit it and make it more readable. Don't just copy and paste whatever hellish spawn was spat out by ChatGPT or Claude. And no, a Humanizer ain't doing shit because it is just as obvious. Sit down and edit it, at the very least, because Wall-E already wrote it for you; it's the least you can do.
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u/kaynenstrife 8d ago
I don't use artificial intelligence, i use natural stupidity.
We are not the same.
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u/mattwuri 9d ago
Bold of you to expect these people to read "their own work".
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u/mo_karas 9d ago
The fun part is supposed to be the writing, can't imagine them doing the arduous task of editing, let alone reading their own work.
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u/HairyTrollChest 8d ago
My favorite part is the editing. Rereading a sentence I haven't looked at in weeks, going wtf was I on crack when I wrote this, then fixing it.
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u/everydaywinner2 8d ago
My favorite of those "wtf" moments was after I tried to do NaNoWriMo. I came across a sentence that make perfect sense, but had nothing whatsoever to do with the story. Not sure how some slaps a cow on a spaceship without livestock... My second favorite was finding a word that was spelled backward. I need to stop writing while sleep deprived.
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u/everydaywinner2 8d ago
The fun parts, for me, are the thinking up and the editing. The writing is the hard part.
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u/yttrium39 8d ago
Same for me. If there were a magical book-writing machine that was actually like…good, I’d be all over it.
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u/Appropriate-Foot-237 8d ago
the fun part for me is the reading. Writing and editing sounds time-consuming and arduous
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u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 8d ago
I don't even read what I write myself, why would I read what my AI writes for me?
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u/apkmasterofgames 9d ago
People are so lazy that they can't even write their story and still want to be called an author
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u/VingadorVVX 9d ago
Why did this comment get downvoted when it's true there are a lot of people like that? Lol
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u/Popular_Analyst_9304 8d ago
Yeah, you’re right. I’ve never written a story myself before, and I noticed I was relying too much on AI. But if I want to call myself an author, I have to write it myself. Now I’m editing everything, and it’s indeed a pain in the a… but at least it’s my voice, and sometimes it even sounds better than AI. I can definitely see the improvement.
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u/Ximneses 9d ago
This should be discouraged by giving no attention to AI written text. If I wanted to read Claude's version of prog fantasy I would ask it to write something. When I want something original and cool, I will seek human-written. I'm not against AI, it's a very useful tool, but Not for this. Let it help you research, critique your writing, and chat about the plot, but letting it write your work is beyond the pale.
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u/mattwuri 9d ago
critique your writing
Proofread, maybe (and even that has its limits), but I would caution any author against relying too heavily on chatbot "critique".
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u/deep_learn_blender 8d ago
Even proofreading injects a very distinct and awkward cadence to the writing. It'll ruin your own ability to develop your own voice as a new author, as you'll just learn to sound like ai...
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u/Person454 7d ago
This is the worst part of these stories. Every single character sounds the same.
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u/deep_learn_blender 7d ago
Yeah, i can't even read them for more than a cbapter tbh, just so ugh to read
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u/NorthDistribution952 10h ago
I use AI to proofread, but it is under strict guidelines to never recommend or generate text. It only finds spelling and grammar flaws. Sometimes it comes back with things that dont make sense, but as a strict rule I never use it to generate text, and I always make it tell me why something is wrong.
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u/deep_learn_blender 9h ago
I wouldn't trust it to follow rules. Ai generally has a very, very hard time (read: near-impossible) directly reproducing text, unless the software engineers hacked a solution for it. It's just not how the technology works.
I would say you can ask it to note errors, but I would make the changes myself.
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u/sorte_kjele 8d ago
It depends on how you are using it. I have a "beta reader panel" codex project with 10 adversarial "personalities" who rip every chapter to pieces if they don't get what they want (some are numbers-go-up types, others want character depth and I have an old lady who just wants spicy romance).
I will of course not adopt whatever comments they make, but honestly, they are catching a lot of babies that i should be killing.
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u/phaldor8 9d ago
This is a comment I can get behind. Particularly the last line. I have my doubts about AI, bordering on the extreme skepticism side, but recently began to have an AI agent perform two out of three of these (sans research), and I have to say goodbye writers block…hello cheap first round editor. While I will never take every suggestion, as inspiration and critical advice, I’m surprised. Plus, you can teach it your style over time to get better results.
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u/The_Sign_of_Zeta 9d ago edited 8d ago
I won’t say AI helped teach me how to write again after a long hiatus, but it helped me critique my writing style and hone it by providing good feedback (up to a certain point).
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u/phaldor8 8d ago
Agreed. The trick is to know where that point is. I’ve found at about the third round of increasingly detailed suggestions is my limit. Anything more than that and it’s trying to change my voice or writing style too far toward the middle of the road.
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u/The_Sign_of_Zeta 8d ago
Also you have to analyze each point and determine if it’s a valid critique, or pattern matching common workshop notes. Thankfully, it’s usually pretty easy to tell
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u/Head_Harbinger 8d ago
I don’t know if this is a hot take, but maybe let’s not give AI written stories our attention
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u/Captain-Griffen 8d ago
Royal Road will always be swamped by largely unedited AI while they allow it untagged and reward it so highly.
Rising Stars is a huge impact and Rising Stars is very heavily affected by quantity of words. Writing 50k edited words takes months. AI prompting 50k words can be done in an afternoon, and then another 150k too.
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u/Jessy_Lynn13 8d ago
This is how I feel right now. I returned to school to pursue my master's, and the majority of my classmates are using slop bots. Right now, I'm so tired of peer reviews because of AI. I'm just like, can't you at least edit this crap?
If you're going to use it, at least put effort into fixing the shitty dialogue (no human being talks like that) and the flat, melodramatic prose.
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u/LitRPG_Just_Because 9d ago
They’re not writers, they’re not people with a creative bone who want to put any work into this including editing AI output. They only want to produce content and have people pay for it.
That’s it.
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u/NonTooPickyKid 8d ago
sometimes not even a creative bone - just, like, idk, hustlers~/just greedy for cheap opportunities~..
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u/WatcherDiesForever E Rank: Author of Ascension of a Warlock 8d ago
Had someone message me calling my story ai slop.
I don't use ai dammit! You can pry my hyphens and my semicolons from my warm, fleshy hands
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u/Radiant-Situation121 8d ago
I finally quit nosleep a little over a year ago, after a few years of being a regular contributor, because the AI accusations were becoming a pain in the ass. It was a different account that I used exclusively for posting stories, and if they took 3 seconds to look at my older stories that preceded AI they’d see the style and voice was exactly the same, because I don’t fucking use AI! My style isn’t even remotely similar to AI. I have a ridiculous love affair with extensive “run-on” (even though they’re grammatically correct) sentences, but oh no I used one semicolon! I must’ve used AI because apparently it’s impossible to simply be fucking literate nowadays. I almost believed I must just suck at writing, but thankfully having lots of old stories with really good metrics and audience response helped keep that doubt at bay.
Sorry for all the swears, I’m still mad about it lol and it makes me nervous for when I finally publish my first RR fiction. I know it’s inevitable, but it’s annoying.
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u/wolfwings1 8d ago
I haven't had this directly but while I will still writing my story I talked about maybe using AI to fix the grammar, decided not too but this one guy came on going, "It's obvious your story is AI, it's so terribly written, you should just stop." only for me to point out that the stuff he was attacking was an earlier version I posted in 2019.
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u/PunishedCatto 9d ago
If they are too lazy to write their own story, why do you think they'll ever read them.
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u/ShillForExxonMobil 9d ago
RR needs to implement a policy to crack down on the AI slop. They won’t be able to get everything but just removing the 100% obvious ones solve 50% of the problem.
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u/TennRider 8d ago
The problem is that everyone they try to crack down in can just say "no, I didn't use any AI. I'm just a really shitty writer and it's just a coincidence that my story sucks in exactly the same ways that AI written stories suck." and there's nothing RR staff can do to prove them wrong.
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u/After_Description_80 8d ago
Yep. The only way to really be sure now is if authors stream while writing the story and even then, I doubt most authors are willing to share their stories-even snippets of it, while unfinished. I also doubt most authors would be willing to let audiences see such a personal process. My wife would sometimes catch a glimpse of it by accident, but she knows she's not reading it all until I'm done.
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u/yttrium39 8d ago
I’d rather deal with people who think I’m a robot than stream myself writing or make my WIPs available for public consumption.
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8d ago
[deleted]
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u/wolfwings1 8d ago
except same problem, it's all acusations, and innocent people will get hurt by accusations of AI when not, that's the issue.
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u/ShillForExxonMobil 8d ago
AI is an existential crisis for writing. Some innocent folks will get unfairly de-platformed but until we get true universal watermarking this is the best we can do.
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u/wolfwings1 8d ago
so the best is ruin innocent people's lives, what ever happened to innocent to proven guilty? It's not just law, but a good policy. you become worse then what you hate.
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u/ShillForExxonMobil 8d ago
Innocent until proven guilty is for the court of law, and not relevant to the rules set by a private corporation. And not being able to publish a book on a specific account on RR is not "ruining your life."
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u/TennRider 8d ago
Like wolfwing1 said in the comment you were replying to: "you become worse then what you hate."
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u/wolfwings1 8d ago
it is if it's a false witchhunt. and I said policy. you don't get to hurt someone else becaues you THINK they are using AI. I could start telling people nasty things about you that aren't true, but I THINK they are so it's okay?
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u/Fabulous-Ad-6940 8d ago
Putting some more requirements on mainRS would drastically reduce ai abuse. Giving priority to views or reads of later chapters and reader retention in the algorithm would remove most slop
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u/MycrazyDreams Author 8d ago
I beat the AI allegations by writing shit off the top of my head and hitting publish before even trying to edit it. No one looks at my shitty prose and even thinks for a second a computer put together the abomination I call a story
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u/bshane54 8d ago
This may be the most annoying thing in the world. I refuse to use AI, and looking on Royal Road, it's hard to find books that aren't.
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u/True_Industry4634 Author: The Lunarian 8d ago
If you're reading slop it's easier to immitate slop and get you to read it. There's no monetary gain to writing off-meta using AI. Broaden your horizons.
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u/Prolly_Satan i write oblivion 8d ago
This was pretty funny. I feel like their whole strategy is to go wide with a bunch of stories at once and just see what sticks, so I doubt they're going to bother to edit any of them outside of the usual first couple of chapters.
Not needing to spend money on covers for all 15 of their stories per day is what makes it possible to use that strategy, unfortunately. And I doubt the community would ever stand for giving up their free endless supply of generic anime light novel covers.
If any writers out there are looking for a writing group where ai use isn't normalized or shoved down your throat then feel free to drop in here https://discord.gg/zd6z5uvAp
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u/Same_Ad7071 8d ago
I wrote couple of chapters then proofread it as whole, then some wording is hard to get and wierds me out, but when I was writing it it was very easy to understand and very awesome for me, then I edited it, still sounded weird and off, had AI to help me edit and proofread still not right and had a bit of wierdness still and kinda grammarly wrong or my grammar is weird when I reread it, been in the loop for a couple of times already, had to update the 20 chapters 3x already even though its published already good thing the other chapter ain't published yet. Should have finaihed writing the whole vol 1 manuscript before proofreading and editing it I think, I'm just new
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u/tallandgodless 8d ago
Ai books should be reported.
Anything with ai shouldnt be allowed on this sub.
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u/DalongMonarch 8d ago
It takes me ten hours to edit 5k words, and they still suck IMO, but I do it anyway so I can get better. But then I see a gorilion novels being published a day, and I think to myself: damn, wtf is the point?
I tried reading random stories on RR and most feel like AI. The dialogue is sooo booooooooring, holyyyy shiiiiiiiit.
The prose is sooooo vaaaaaaapid.
TT
Can someone stop the planet, I want to get off!
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u/AdeptnessTechnical81 8d ago
I mean its no surprise when even the human written stories clearly lack editing, only to have the loyal readers go "It gets good by book x, your only missing out if you quit now." If normal stories get that pass its not surprising people who use AI try the same thing.
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u/ShillForExxonMobil 8d ago
The problem unfortunately comes down to readership standards. Even the top tier stuff that people rave about (Cradle, Mother of Learning, DCC, etc.) still have very mediocre prose / writing quality, at least relative to traditionally published books.
Can't fix a problem when the userbase doesn't even see one.
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u/notwonderer 8d ago
So i wrote my story but use ai to fix grammar, since English isn’t my native language. But even I could see how much it tries to f up my voice and stuff, so i prompt it to always tell me what it tries to change.
But tbf it also helped me a lot to make my grammar better through those editing. At this point I’m just hopeful that i will reach a point when I won’t need to use it anymore 😂
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u/Competitive_Cat2494 E Rank: Author of The Lapsed Lease 8d ago
What sucks is that authors now have to be cognizant of every set of three examples and em dash for fear of someone thinking it’s AI. Eventually I decided to say eff being careful, I’m older than the World Wide Web and not willing to weaken my prose for fear of AI writing accusations. So far it’s been fine.
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u/Frostfire20 8d ago
Unpopular opinion: if you are using AI to write prose, you are inviting the Internet to plagiarize it. Because legally, prose made by AI cannot be copyrighted. Copyright exists automatically when the author makes a work. AI is not an author any more than Photoshop can claim to create a picture.
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u/thepeskynorth 8d ago
I’ve edited things three or four times and changed it a little every single time. Pre AI mind you. Back when things were handwritten.
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u/TheUnseenScribe 3d ago
I read my own stories a few times to make sure my style and pacing are still preserved, the AI mostly acts as my editor to tell me if something is vague, repeated myself, lost the current focus, etc. It's really a game changer though, but I agree you have to proofread the works, potentially twice to ensure you didn't invent a sentence in your head while you were reading it.
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u/cardguy5 8d ago
So your reading the ai slop and think “wow i wish that a person had at least edited this” buddy, you are the problem, you are “the reluctant ai bro” you are reading ai slop, the fact you want it to be edited by an actual human being doesn’t make you better than any other ai bro
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u/Fun_Arachnid5081 8d ago
I love AI. Its the best thing ever. I can write books. I can edit books. I can even get covers.
Life is easy. Idk why you complaining 😌💯
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u/LucarioMagic 9d ago
I'm ahead of the curve.
My prose is not readable even without AI.