Forum: Author Hangout

AI is nowadays a vast landscape, so it might take a number of replies from users who tried different tools to get a complete picture, nevertheless, I'll chime in with my experiences:

1. Writing a story in one go isn't something I've gotten AI to do yet, but that may just be a question of budget. I'm running AIs locally with 24GB of GPU RAM. That allows me to use models up to 18 billion parameters with a 5 bit quantization, which seems to be the minimum to get halfway coherent output. I can tune the context size - and that's the most important factor in getting a reliable plot line - up to about 8,000 tokens before I run out of memory. There are tricks to squeeze a few thousand tokens, but it means that the AI gets serious Alzheimer's around 2500 words and often takes a wrong turn even before that. Most AIs available on the internet (ChatGPT & Co.) appear to have a similar cutoff, probably because they have more bits and are therefore more memory hungry. After experimenting with different novel writing AI tools in the cloud and different AIs, about 2k words are the most I could consistently get out of them without moving in circles.

So my experiences very much mirror yours.

2. It takes a lot of time to write a serial, with often a lot of attempts to get a scene right, and feeding back information into the prompt is a pretty involved, manual process. You always have to condense new developments, details, character traits and specific knowledge into a few concise sentences and get the wording right to make new output fit what's already there. Some tools help a little there, e.g. by assigning context information with "timestamps" to only inject it when the story has advanced to that point in time, or by having AI try to extract that kind of information from newly generated text, which didn't work all too well in my tests.

3. Adapting AIs to personal style is still a rabbit hole few people make it back out completely sane (over-exaggerating just a little). Basically, there are different methods of adapting an AI (most prominent one is to train a Lora from personal texts), but it's a very error prone thing and you'd need a lot of training material to train an AI to a certain style without messing up its inner workings. Also, an AI doesn't really distinguish between writing style and story contents. I feel that you'd need a good knowledge about the inner workings of LLMs and train one from scratch with adapted training data to make a personal style work for real.

4. I found that AI is good in suggesting how to rephrase paragraphs and in coming up with plot ideas. More of a writer's block remedy for me than a means to speed up writing.

5. I posted an AI story with little manual adaption under a different pen name just to see what the reactions are, and the low votes didn't disappoint. I'd say it's necessary to rewrite nearly everything to get a decent piece of fiction out of it.

At the moment, it looks like LLMs are pretty much at a point where improvements only come in homeopathic increments since the focus was on chat type and question answering AIs (MoE, mixture of experts, was the last big thing, so instead of a single really well training generic AI, you get a bundle of geeks with limited focus and a propensity to hallucinate wildly).

I'd still enforce tagging. There are probably (formulaic) story types that can be written well by AIs, as all depends on the range of training materials. If somebody follows the classic dime novels, the effort to keep an AI from going off the rails should be a lot less than for other story types. It's only a question of time until somebody finds the correct levers to make an AI spit out that type of story, and with enough memory at hand, context size can be upped to more than 200k tokens, which should be enough to keep coherence in a 30,000 word novelette.

I use AI to edit my writing. I have a stock prompt of "Proof the following for spelling, punctuation, and continuity only, summarizing the corrections individually: insert paragraphs here - . I do not allow it to rewrite what I have written, just basic editing. It works slick but you have to watch for AI hallucinations. I would never use it to create a story or plot. What would be creative in that?

So while AI output from 2023 was crap, the ones in 2025 seem to be much better.

As a reader, I'd like some indication when the claimed author would not have been capable of writing the story all by themselves.

One suggestion would be an AI-free tag (which presumably could automatically be applied to pre-2023 stories). The purism would be like labelling food as 'organic' or sporting records as 'drugs-free'.

Unfortunately I'm sure some authors would try to abuse it, but even James Patterson gives credit to the writers who take his plots and turn them into stories consistent with his style guides, which is pretty much what some 'authors' do with AI.

ETA Using AI to suggest words or sentence restructures that an author couldn't think of for themselves would disqualify a story from my AI-free tag.

AJ

If I were to use AI to write my story, I'd stop writing stories. But that's me.

I use AI to create images for book covers. I once used it to help with a book title and liked the result. I once used it to help with the blurb, but it took a great deal of work and re-write on my part. And I sometimes used it to create a simile.

But that's all.

I do not plan to use it for writing. I don't know how someone can call themselves an author if they use AI to write the story.

The biggest reason that I ask is that if the process is too easy and human involvement is really minimal, I wouldn't want to allow AI without at least tagging it. If the process requires significant human input/involvement, then I may start allowing it without tagging.

I would like to have a tag regardless. I wrote one short story posted here that was written by AI. In the first half, I had discussed a topic with ChatGPT and it offered write a scene. It was pretty good and I asked it to continue, into where the sex happened, and it refused. I switched to SudoWrite and it did the 2nd half, but only after I choreographed the scene in detail then edited afterwards. I posted here but there was no 'AI' tag which I looked for.

ChatGPT usually blanches on intimate content, but I had write a fanfic scene (from SCS) of a brother and sister going down on each other (although with softened language) then of the same girl pining for her father and then them fucking as her mother watched. It can be done with coaching and non-explicit language. Often when I do that, it's for inspiration, and me picking out the parts I like rather than the whole.

I haven't worked with SudoWrite since last year. Their goal was to write full scenes and stories from prompts and were working on 'my voice.' I got it do do explicit stuff (you can choice your AI engine and some will and others won't do explicit) but if hallucinated too much, making it a pain to get even a short story done. I didn't like that the prompts usually had to be highly structured to get the interface to send a good prompt to the AI. I preferred the conversational style of ChatGPT. SW might be better by now.

My experience is you may have a 10% shot at getting a good thousands words or so.

1 - Are there tools that you simply provide a plot or outline, and it writes the whole thing in one shot?

Sudowrite attempts this, and I believe most people on their Discord wanted that.

2 - For those who have used AI tools to write long, long serials, how much time does it take, and how involved in the process do you have to be in guiding the AI to follow your plot?

3 - Are there tools that you can train with your own written text so that it learns your style and uses it to write future content?

I've only used ChatGPT for discussing plot and characters and then copy editing. The conversational style is great (I often use voice mode for input) and over time it becomes very knowledgeable about my story, but it still doesn't quite get my voice. You can leave instructions for a project in the config area or in an uploaded file which helps with consistency over time.

ChatGPT always suggests helping. Sometimes I ask, but I always pick and choose. It has to strike my fancy.

4 - How much work is the AI saving you?

A huge amount on plotting and editing. I get instant feedback for $20/mo. The product is much cleaner.

5 - Do you always do some rewrites of the output to make it your own style? Never?

Always! After copy editing a scene, I'll put it side by side with the original as I read every edited word.

I allegedly might use something claimed to be an AI tool to do grammar checking (ProWritingAid occasionally puts up something about 'AI insights' or the like - I've forgotten the exact phrasing). I don't use any tool to either generate content or automatically edit content, though. All edits are handmade.

My posted story was partially AI generated. I used an AI storywriting app that gave you options for your response (or you could write your own), and then gave you options for the next paragraph. At the time it was written, I ended up either writing a lot of the paragraphs myself, or heavily rewrote things as it was definitely nowhere near perfect at the time. The only reason I feel it doesn't come across as complete trash is because of the extra work I put into it.

I've made no secret of the fact that I used Gemini extensively when both writing and editing "A Healing Love" over the past year or so. I've written about it on multiple blog posts here and on my website, and explained in detail how I used the tool. I've also been quite clear that I haven't used it to "generate" any text. Both "A Healing Love" and the revised version of "A Good Man" have been all "my own words," by which I mean I typed every word of every sentence. So I think I'm qualified to answer your questions with something approaching an open mind.

I can, of course, only draw on my own experience with the tool. For transparency, I upgraded my Google One account to the 2TB tier, which came with what is now Gemini Pro. I have no intention of upgrading further to Gemini Ultra for over $100 a month - that's insanity. I "share" the plan with my family - 4 members in total. The 2TB for full-resolution Google Photos uploads is worth the money alone for my family.

When writing AHL, I used Gemini for feedback, brainstorming and occasionally word choice or sentence structure problems. I would feed the scene I'd written to the AI and ask for it's general impression and feedback. I'd then use that feedback to make changes to the scene, feed it back and make more changes until I was happy with what I'd produced. The feedback was generally constructive (as per my instructions to the AI at the start of the task), and it was 'useful' (by which I mean the suggestions were genuine areas to be improved and the suggestions on how to improve it were pretty good) about 70% of the time, there or thereabouts.

In the editing process, I did the same thing, fed in the story scene by scene, but gave it very different instructions at the start. Its responses were therefore more those of an "editor" than a "collaborator," picking grammar issues, spellings, weak word choice and poor sentence structure.

Overall, I found the tool to be extremely useful and feel that both "A Healing Love" and the revisions to "A Good Man" are far better than they would otherwise have been, while remaining my own work.

Moving on to answer your specific questions:

1 - Are there tools that you simply provide a plot or outline, and it writes the whole thing in one shot?

Yes, there are. Pretty much any of the AI tools can be instructed to do this, but it depends on what you mean by "The Whole Thing." Gemini has a 1 million token context window, which is about 750,000 words, so in theory it could turn out a whole novel in one go, but it would take a long time. Other tools have smaller context windows, so getting a whole book would be difficult, but you could certainly get a short story in one go. You'd need to carefully engineer your prompt, and most of the generally available commercial tools will not do sex scenes, but there are some specialist tools available that will.

2 - For those who have used AI tools to write long, long serials, how much time does it take, and how involved in the process do you have to be in guiding the AI to follow your plot?

For "A Healing Love", Gemini was 'reacting' to the plot as if it were a reader, telling me what it liked and what it didn't. On occasions, I asked it what it "thought" would happen next in a given subplot, and it would give me a long-winded answer, often going through multiple options before making a "decision". So I wasn't using Gemini in the way you're suggesting here.

That said, I have started a new experimental project, which I'll detail at the end of the post, where the AI is an active collaborator, making suggestions on the plot direction.

3 - Are there tools that you can train with your own written text so that it learns your style and uses it to write future content?

Yes, I believe you can do this, but that's not how I've used the tools. During the editing process, I did give Gemini access to the first three novels in the series, but that was more for the context of the characters and plot than my writing style.

4 - How much work is the AI saving you?

I wouldn't say it's "saving" me any work at all. But it is allowing me to work "smarter", and I believe my writing has improved as a result. Even before I feed the scene into the tool, I think I've already got in mind how it has been responding to previous scenes and I'm tailoring my writing accordingly. I genuinely believe that using the tool as I have has made me a better writer.

5 - Do you always do some rewrites of the output to make it your own style? Never?

I can answer this based on the new experimental project I've started. I'm trying to "fully collaborate" on a new project with Gemini. I've given it a rough outline of the plot and an overview of the main characters. I'm then asking it to draft the novel scene by scene. With each scene that's drafted, I'm copying the text to my manuscript and making changes. Those changes are extensive. The AI output is… lacking. It's quite 'functional.' Almost like someone who's just learning to write creatively and they are simply "telling" the story, rather than exploring the motivations, emotions and flaws of the characters. While I haven't re-written every word of what is currently a 20,000 word manuscript, I've probably written or re-written 80% of it. I think if I've just use the AI output, the manuscript would currently be closer to 10,000 - 12,000 words.

Honestly, I probably could just copy and paste each scene and I'd have a publishable novel in a couple of weeks. But it wouldn't be very good. In terms of SoL scores, it'd be in the mid-to-high fives at best. It certainly wouldn't be something I'd want to put my name to.

To further answer the questions posed by @REP

Do you experience any Pride of Authorship?

I am extremely proud of A Healing Love. I think it's the best thing I've ever written by some distance. But, like I said, I typed every single word of that damn thing. It's very much my own work. The new project is a different beast, and like I said above, I would not want to put my name to the text generated by the AI, as I don't think it's good enough. But the text I'm getting after redrafting it myself… It's better, but it's still got some way to go. But it is a first draft, so that's to be expected.

How are you viewed by others in regard to the AI generated portion(s) of the story - author or editor?

As above, it's probably not fair to answer this with the reaction to A Healing Love because I very much consider it my own work and none of the text was AI generated, but… It's currently my highest scoring story on the site.