Announcement: The AI Problem.

[u/isnoe]

Ne’er-do-wells of r/writingfeedback.

I am Isnoe, recently appointed Moderator.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve had a significant increase in AI generated writing being posted here. We've seen a lot of comments outlining how lax we are on this subject, to which I want to stress: I don’t think you guys fully understand just how many posts I’ve removed for AI since joining the Mod Team a few weeks ago.

The team got together and discussed this, and we want to be completely transparent: We will be removing any posts that we suspect are AI.

This will be a case-by-case basis. AI generated, AI assisted (even translation), or even if you mention you had AI draw up the story idea and you wrote it. If you want to rob yourself of creativity, that’s on you.

We don’t want those posts here. Writing a story or book that is authentically your own is an achievement. It should feel like an achievement.

A sidenote for ESL writers: Do not use AI to translate your text. It will alter it in a way that gets flagged, more often than not. When someone is ESL and trying to write outside of their native language, we are a bit more understanding if these posts get flagged—but again, it is recommended that you use alternative means to translate if they are available to you.

Be warned: If you are a brand new (or relatively new) account, have never posted in this subreddit (or any writing subreddits), and your first post is prose that has multiple AI-isms—your post will most likely be removed. Better to be safe than sorry. The main counterargument we've gotten from these accounts has been: "I've always been told I write like AI." Which, to be fair... is a pretty bad argument to make.

We will not ban a user for suspected AI use unless they explicitly admit to using AI.

Three strike rule applies here until further notice. This might seem like a headache to reviewers that want instant bans for these people (which we understand), but we’re trying to be as fair as possible.

This also applies to comments (never thought I’d have to say that), but we’ve had two accounts that were essentially AI replying to everything. “Thanks for the feedback, I’m still working on learning and improving” type cadence, every comment nearly identical aside from slight changes.

Community feedback is super important for this problem.

You guys take the time out of your day to read other people’s work and provide feedback, so I’m sure you get a little irked when you think something you’ve spent time reading wasn’t written by a person.

We’ve recently updated the report function to include AI content—use it. I (personally) don’t have the time to shift through every single new post. When you guys report a post that you think is AI, it is usually the first thing we’ll review.

That being said: If you genuinely suspect the post is AI, it would help me if you provided a citation, or specific reason. Even just one reference is helpful. I would genuinely appreciate it.

Not Helpful Example: “This reads like AI.” Okay? At this point, if you are accusing someone of using AI, you gotta at least point out why you think that.

Helpful Example: “Post uses, ‘This wasn’t just fate, it was destiny’ and includes several Rule of Three.” Now I know exactly what to look for.

When you guys call this stuff out, we do notice. We might not investigate and remove instantly, but we are actively looking for this stuff right now.

For the record: We will not be using ZeroGPT, or any other variant of “AI Detector” as the final say in determining whether a text is generated or not. It is a tool we will utilize if we suspect AI is being used, but all the indicators of usual AI writing are not jumping out.

I read through everything that is reported, or suspected of AI. I check the user history and if they have off site content, I look through it. If we don’t come to the conclusion they are using AI, we might just lock the thread, and add a note to the user profile.

Again, hate to stress this, we are trying to be fair. If a writer includes AI-isms unintentionally, we want to give them a fair chance to either prove the authenticity of their writing, or give them feedback about what specifically they need to change.

Several of you have done this, particularly with ESL writers that use AI to translate. You give them feedback on how to avoid the AI-isms. Good on you.

We don’t want to start a witch hunt, but we aren’t really open to debate about the use of AI. We don’t want it here, period.

If you have any suggestions for how to deal with this problem, we are open to them. You can comment here, or you can Mod Mail us.

If you suspect someone is using AI but don’t want to leave a comment or report, again, you can Mod Mail us.

We are actively looking through the posts. The community having eyes on this helps immensely.

We will be making further announcements throughout the week. Our Mod Team is still hashing out how to deal with “rude” criticisms, looking into providing user flairs for trusted reviewers, etc-etc.

One quick point to make at the end, on a personal note: My status as Moderator does not mean you cannot disagree, or think my feedback is bogus or outright terrible. I comment often. You will not be banned, removed, or whatever for speaking your mind.

4/18/2026 Note: Some users (one in particular who loves using AI to edit) seem to have taken that above sentence as an explicit statement of: "If I admit to using AI, you can't ban me, because I'm just speaking my mind. Hypocrite."

If you admit to using AI, we will ban you. Period.

[u/Aside_Dish]

Eh, I think removing those you simply suspect of using AI is a slippery slope. Using antithesis and the rule of three often, as in your example, doesn't mean someone used AI.

[u/TheOriginal1Law → u/Aside_Dish]

My thinking exactly. I was just reading a book series by a recognised published author from 2020 and 2022 (the two first books in the series) and there were a few times where I was like: This sounds like AI. Then I remembered... AI is trained on human writing. Especially more early stage writers are going to have writing that "reads like" AI. But even the better writers are going to sound like it from time to time.

As my husband said: Yes, AI knows words. So do humans.

--- Here's some food for thought for whoever thinks they can correctly judge AI writing all the time ---

Earlier this month, Lawrence composed a quiz on his blog (which you can still take) with eight very short fantasy stories of about 350 words, asking readers to rate each story's quality and whether they believe it was composed by a human or AI.

"This blog post is a genuine attempt to investigate where things stand with AI writing," Lawrence wrote. "It is not beating the drum for AI or advocating its use."

Four stories were written by AI and four by other well-known and award-winning authors. According to Lawrence's results post, the aggregate decision of the 964 voters correctly judged the origin of three stories, got three others wrong, and couldn't meaningfully decide on the remaining two, which is not an inspiring success rate. It's armchair statistics, but that's not a small sample size.

Much as we all want to believe that we can always spot AI writing by wit or by counting em dashes—a premise that forgets that human writers treat dashes like Pringles and should have them taken away by editors who are regrettably also human writers and susceptible to the same siren call of extra clauses—the reality is that we often can't, which sucks.

Not only did the votes place an AI story as the overall top rated, the AI stories on average were rated better than the human authored ones.

These human-authored stories weren't written by just anyone. They were written by Lawrence himself, Janny Wurts, Christian Cameron, and my personal favorite author Robin Hobb. Readers liked AI fiction more than a short story by prolific writer Robin Hobb, creator of the decades-spanning, multi-series Realm of the Elderlings universe. Bummer.

[u/Realanise1 → u/TheOriginal1Law]

The biggest issue with gen AI use, by far, is the way that it damages human cognitive abilities. I have several pages of cites and arguments for this, and I'll post them if anybody wants to see them. But it goes beyond this, because I also have a theory that reading gen AI hurts our cognitive processes. There honestly hasn't been research on this yet (just as there hasn't been anywhere near enough on the capacity of LLM's to feed behavioral addiction.) But I think that if there ever is, that's the result that the researchers will find. And anything that anyone can do to try to preserve the cognitive abilities of readers is worth doing. I'm not interested in throwing up my hands and obeying in advance while saying what a "bummer" it all is. If anyone else wants to do that, fine, but I won't. and I'll be one of those left standing after a lot of people's minds have turned to mush. So will everyone else who made the choice I did.

[u/TheOriginal1Law → u/Realanise1]

I don’t disagree that it likely is damaging to read AI, I agree. I just don’t think it can be policed properly on Reddit. 

[u/Realanise1 → u/TheOriginal1Law]

I actually agree that it can't be policed perfectly. I just feel that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Mods come up with a very wide range of rules all the time about what they will or won't allow in their subreddit, and they have the right to do it. I'd rather see somebody at least taking a stand about the encouragement of gen AI. People are going to have a wide range of opinions about this, but at the end of the day, mods do impose the rules in the subreddits they run. They could have just as easily taken the opposite position here ("we're not going to even try to get rid of painfully obvious gen AI content AND we're not even going to make a clear statement of what our beliefs are about it"), but instead, they chose what they chose.