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Request for Info regarding AI tools

Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)
Updated:

Due to recent events, I'm requesting information regarding AI writing tools in order to make a decision about AI-generated contents (here and ZBookStore).

Well, AI tools are here to stay, and their usage will only increase with time. Also, with time, the quality of their output will be increasing. It's the inexorable progress of tech. So while AI output from 2023 was crap, the ones in 2025 seem to be much better.

I tried an AI tool that allows erotic content a couple of months ago just to see how it works and how easy the process was. It was very tedious to write a story that way, to say the least, so for a person capable of writing creative text, it may be fast to just type it out.

So what I need to know in order to make my decision about tagging AI content and/or refusing AI contents:

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

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?

4 - How much work is the AI saving you?

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

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.

Your input is greatly appreciated.

LucyAnneThorn 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

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.

Replies:   Joe Long
Joe Long 🚫

@LucyAnneThorn

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.

That is where I spend almost all my time, other than final copy editing.

C...B 🚫
Updated:

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

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?

Replies:   Big Ed Magusson
Big Ed Magusson 🚫

@C...B

I watched a demo from a professional editor once, who used AI and then went through the manuscript to point out all the errors that the AI didn't catch and all the ones it introduced. Her prompt did require it to follow Chicago Manual of Style, which cut down some errors, but it still was only hitting about 85% correct.

JoeBobMack 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. That includes human written stories, and the rating algorithm on SOL is designed to help the cream float to the surface. It's not perfect (no system is), but I'm my experience, it generally works relatively well. So if someone is able to use AI to write great stories, I assume they will rise to the top. No need to tag them.

On the other hand, a flood of slop could overwhelm the system. However, since SOL doesn't monetize content, this may not be as large a problem as on, say, YouTube.

Replies:   Switch Blayde
Switch Blayde 🚫

@JoeBobMack

a flood of slop could overwhelm the system. However, since SOL doesn't monetize content, this may not be as large a problem

Lazeez said ZBookStore too.

JoeBobMack 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

Here is an author who has developed a one-click novel generation system with AI:

https://youtu.be/We_QOxNs0bw?si=AhIINCxwhPUowQhC

awnlee jawking 🚫
Updated:

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

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

Switch Blayde 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

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.

Replies:   TheDarkKnight  REP
TheDarkKnight 🚫

@Switch Blayde

Agreed Switch. I enjoy writing my stories, even when it's painful, and maybe more so when it is. If I just took some ideas and threw them into a machine and cleaned up the output, I wouldn't call myself a writer. It would be like going from being an automotive designer to the guy in the pit at the five-minute oil change place.

REP 🚫
Updated:

@Switch Blayde

But that's me.

I think You, I, and other SOL authors have the same opinion. We take pleasure in the creation of the story. That is our return for the expended effort. Some of us also sell our stories.

P.S.

To those of you who use AI to write any part of your story:

Do you experience any Pride of Authorship?

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

To those of you who read stories containing AI generated content:

Do you get a sense of duplication between the stories posted by authors using AI?

What are your feelings about the story's originality regarding plot and wording?

Replies:   Joe Long
Joe Long 🚫

@REP

To those of you who use AI to write any part of your story:

Do you experience any Pride of Authorship?

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

To those of you who read stories containing AI generated content:

I use AI the exact same way I would use a human editor. Every scene starts and ends with me. Anything suggested by the AI, even general copy editing, must be approved by me. I read every word offered and rejected a fair amount. I am proud of what I've written, and believe a competent editing job has made it better. My strengths are characters and story. I'm not as good at narration and action beats.

Joe Long 🚫
Updated:

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

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.

Joe Long 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

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.

Grey Wolf 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

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.

AInsley 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

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.

Sarkasmus 🚫
Updated:

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

Okay. I'm gonna commit a cardinal sin and mention Literotica. They banned AI stories, and reject (subjectively) at least a dozen stories a day they think have been written using AI, for one simple reason:

They all sound the same! It's either flat as fuck, with no understanding of how human emotions and reasoning work, or it borders on poetic bullshit (a character can never be hurt. No, his face must be "a mask of crimson and pain"), depending on which model is used to "write" the "story".

I haven't used AI to write a story. Haven't even tried. But! I do enjoy AI roleplays. Like, I have an account on a site called Janitorai.com. There, you can create AI chatbots, very easily, to roleplay with. I enjoy fantasy bots that essentially create a text-based RPG comparable to the old Lone Wolf book series, only that the story is being made up on the go by the AI, using characters and world-building components you provide it with.

Now, when I tried those things for the first time, I was surprised about how much fun it was. But after a few chats, I noticed the massive, glaring problems that, in my opinion, make it impossible to use AI to write stories, or even use AI to edit stories beyond spell checking.

All three of the big LLMs (Gemini, DeepSeek, and Claude) have their own pet-peeves of phrases and words they just keep using over and over again. Notable examples of this would be Gemini's "ruining you, body and soul", or Deepseek's "Not you. Never you", or Claude "crossing the room in two strides to lean into you".
Then come the biases. Like, DeepSeek, for example, for some damn reason insists that people live in apartments. Doesn't matter if you tell it that your character has a house, it will try to place your character in an apartment, for some reason. Meanwhile, Gemini is dark as hell, while Claude keeps trying to use methaphors that never lead anywhere.

The second big problem is the context size. Basically, AI measures content-length in "Tokens". A single word is between 3-4 tokens. Now, DeepSeek, for example, has a maximum memory of 64k tokens. That might SOUND like a lot, but just imagine describing a single character in detail. Hair color, clothes, mannerism, speech-pattern, body-type,.... 64k is a joke! Naturally, you could only write chapter by chapter, with an AI that can't imagine scenes.

All in all, in addition to every story sounding the same, and being filled with thousands of small contradictions, continuity errors, and logical problems, the BEST you could hope for is to spend a lot of money (as these three usable LLMs aren't free), then spend days editing the "story", just to then be rewarded with an unimaginative, run-of-the-mill crap story that drowns in the sea of AI-slop.

And, no, I don't expect it to become much better. The big AI-Tech Bros have started to complain back in January that they're running out of training data, so all they do now is make the models bigger as they make their data centers bigger. That doesn't improve the models' abilities or capabilities, but only makes them more knowledgeable (In the sense of: It becomes more of a Wikipedia than a human).

*EDIT*
Now, to answer your questions directly:

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

-> Yes. They are crap (if you want the story to be more than a 1000-word project where you don't bother to actually describe anything).

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. Is it feasible? No. In essence, if you are the type of person who wrote enough to train your own LLM with... you don't need to train an LLM to write for you. Even if you just teach an existing LLM your writing style (called "Finetuning"), all it does is teach the LLM your speech/writing patterns... which it will, again, repeat endlessly.

4 - How much work is the AI saving you?

-> For the reasons outlined above, it isn't saving anyone any time. AI-writing is for people who don't know WHAT or HOW to write. You'd spend just as much time editing it as an author would need writing it themselves.

Replies:   acguy
acguy 🚫

@Sarkasmus

Last year, I submitted 3 stories to that Lit site, all written prior to 2023 and they were all rejected for being AI generated. It seems their AI detection tools are not much better than the AI writing tools.

Nowadays, I use it to check my punctuation and spelling before I send it to my editor. I know it doesn't catch everything but it helps cut down on what my editor tells me to fix.

Replies:   Sarkasmus  irvmull
Sarkasmus 🚫

@acguy

Not to make any accusations... but, in easily 90% of the cases of authors complaining about being "falsely" refused for using AI, it later turns out they WERE using some form of generative AI (like Grammarly, or ProWritingAid). They just didn't see why letting AI "check their grammar" could be a problem.

Replies:   Grey Wolf
Grey Wolf 🚫

@Sarkasmus

I use PWA, but never use the AI rewrite/suggestion tools. They are pretty clearly labeled. Having it suggest simple grammar changes will not make a story AI-generated, but it has that potential if you want it.

irvmull 🚫

@acguy

It seems their AI detection tools are not much better than the AI writing tools.

Yes, even AI admits that it is very difficult for AI to determine whether something was written by AI or by a human.

Interestingly, it did note that there was a way to embed some kind of invisible identification into AI produced copy, if the AI developers were willing to do that.

Replies:   Dominions Son  Grey Wolf
Dominions Son 🚫

@irvmull

Interestingly, it did note that there was a way to embed some kind of invisible identification into AI produced copy, if the AI developers were willing to do that.

That sort of thing (digital watermarks) works well for images and may work for word processing formats with a lot of metadata, but it can't work for plain text.

Any AI generated story can be converted to plain text and back, eliminating any attempt at digital watermarking.

Replies:   Sarkasmus
Sarkasmus 🚫

@Dominions Son

The em-dash is a GREAT AI-watermark, though.

Grey Wolf 🚫

@irvmull

AI is, in fact, spectacularly bad at determining if something was AI-generated. Figuring out what does work is a seriously hard problem, one that is leading to PhD-level work and to significant business opportunities.

Marc Nobbs 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

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.

Replies:   Joe Long  REP
Joe Long 🚫

@Marc Nobbs

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.

Exactly my process.

REP 🚫
Updated:

@Marc Nobbs

To those of you who use AI to write any part of your story:

Do you experience any Pride of Authorship?

Your story "A Healing Love" does not meet the criteria specified in the first line for as you said, "It's very much my own work."

LOAnnie 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

My most recent use of AI was to edit something I wrote for publication. I wrote the story but had the AI help me punch up the language. I found myself doing it only a few paragraphs at a time because there were definitely moments that it changed too much of a story at once and changed the context of scenes which obviously I didn't want.

Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

Thank you everybody for the feedback.

The AI detection tools report different levels of AI involvement.

Until further notice, I'll keep tagging the ones that are 'AI Generated' but won't tag the ones that are 'AI polished' or 'Mix AI/Human'.

Replies:   Joe Long
Joe Long 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

Will you create a tag that we can use to self report?

Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

@Joe Long

Will you create a tag that we can use to self report?

There is one already.

Replies:   jimq2  Joe Long
jimq2 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

I think he was talking about 'AI polished' and 'Mix AI/Human'.

Replies:   awnlee jawking
awnlee jawking 🚫

@jimq2

I think he was talking about 'AI polished' and 'Mix AI/Human'.

I'd like 'organic', to signify AI-free. Given the negative feelings some readers have towards AI, I can imagine it's a tag readers might search for.

AJ

Replies:   jimq2
jimq2 🚫

@awnlee jawking

I could see 'AI Free' as a tag.

Joe Long 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

I didn't see it when I posted my story. I'll look again and fix it, thanks.

Switch Blayde 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

to make a decision about AI-generated contents (here and ZBookStore).

Lazeez, did you consider contest entries? One contest rule is:

3. All stories submitted must be the original work of the person submitting them.

Is an AI generated story an "original work" of the person submitting it?

Bondi Beach 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

Due to recent events, I'm requesting information regarding AI writing tools in order to make a decision about AI-generated contents (here and ZBookStore).

I don't use AI to write. As a reader, I want to know whether the story was written even in part by AI, so I vote for a tag.

I admit I don't know where the line is between using AI as a prompt or as a proofer (apparently it's not good enough yet for serious proofing editing) and using AI to generate the story, so I want the tag no matter what.
~ JBB

Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

An update:

There is an 'AI Generated' tag that the author can use to tag their own stories. I added it few months ago when it became necessary.

Also, I already implemented an author record tag (as in the pen name gets tagged with it) as submitting AI generated text. When a pen name gets tagged with it, then every new story they post under that pen name, the story gets the 'AI Generated' tag and the author cannot remove it.

There is also a AI tag on the story level that the author has no control over.

I added the story AI tag for the author who's story was removed for 'disagreement between the admin and the author'.

He submitted AI text and when I tagged it with the normal AI tag, he removed it several times. So I had to build something out of reach for those who want to pretend that their work is not AI.

If there are stories that you suspect are AI generated, but aren't tagged, report them to me and I'll check them.

Replies:   Pixy  awnlee jawking
Pixy 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

I have a question....

What happens if someone has a... weird... way of writing that could be mistaken for AI but the individual may be autistic/dropped several times as a child/whatever, and their stories get flagged as AI, but they're not? What is the procedure, how do they even go about challenging the accusation? Is there a process? How would you even go about investigating?

I have to admit, I've never knowingly read an AI story, however, I've recently heard a song that I really liked and when I went looking for more songs from the band, I found out it was totally AI generated. I honestly, couldn't tell. Possibly musicians could easily do so. But me? Not a clue.

If Terry Pratchett was just starting to release novels today, would he be accused of AI use, because his work is like nothing else out there? (There is stuff like it out there now, because people try to emulate his style).

I know you have all said "There are tools", but for a mere pleb like myself, you may as well be talking in a foreign language for all the comprehension I have.

AI is getting better and doing so scarily fast. It wasn't long ago that you could easily spot AI generated images because the people in them had fifteen fingers each. Now it's getting really, really hard. Will the same issue arise for AI generated text? Personally, I think that it's going to go the same way as AI images.

Obviously, if the story was written in the 90's, then it's going to be a mute point, and if the author has a body of work stretching back decades, then there is going to be a personal style involved that can also be used. But what about 'new' writers?

I have to admit, that the contrarian in me is also having intrusive thoughts, demanding that I deliberately write and submit a story written like it was written by an AI (Which is problematic because I don't actually know at this time what an AI written story looks like, but let's not let facts get in the way of a good rant) because, well I've no idea why really. I think I am basically, fundamentally, annoying.

Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

@Pixy

What happens if someone has a... weird... way of writing that could be mistaken for AI but the individual may be autistic/dropped several times as a child/whatever, and their stories get flagged as AI, but they're not? What is the procedure, how do they even go about challenging the accusation? Is there a process? How would you even go about investigating?

There is no way for the author to prove it.

Short of recording themselves writing the actual text being submitted, there would be no proof.

One could keep insisting on their text not being AI generated, but if every AI detection tools says it's 100% AI, then it's AI.

What's the point of going to extremes to write like an AI? The whole thing about AI text that it's all so similar and predictable that it becomes tedious and boring to read. If you strive to write like an AI and produce text that is overly flowery and tedious to read, then you deserve to be labelled AI because your text wouldn't be particularly enjoyable to read, and inflicting such an atrocity on readers should be punished.

Replies:   Pixy  Pixy
Pixy 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

What's the point of going to extremes to write like an AI?

For some individuals, there is always a point, even if no one else sees the...err... point. Isn't that one of the things that makes us...us?

I see and understand your point. I was just...curious.

The whole thing about AI text that it's all so similar and predictable that it becomes tedious and boring to read.

I have the same opinion of some writers who churn out the same 'book' with just a few name changes. Clive Cussler springs to mind in that regard and there are a few other 'mainstream' authors I have read over the years who are similar. Early warning signs (for me) are authors who have a many, many, books in a series. Repetition inevitably sinks in, partly (I think) due to pressure from publishing companies to keep writing 'What works' leading (possibly) to a fear from the writer to try something new.

Another name has just popped into my head, Jack Campbell, writer of The Lost Fleet series. I stopped reading his work because, again, it was just the same idea repeated with different names.

Replies:   Sarkasmus
Sarkasmus 🚫

@Pixy

I mean, yeah, there ARE authors who write the same story over and over again. Sure. But what I, and many other AI-opponents complain about, is the notion of 90% of ALL stories getting posted here eventually being the same.

Same prose, same style, same vocabulary, same writing-quirks. Just go to YouTube and check out any of the obvious AI channels claiming to read-out Reddit stories, like "Fyra" or "Reddit Drama Tales". They are ALL the EXACT same stories.

No mechanism could protect us from that. These people aren't discouraged by bad scores as long as they can make more money than they have to put into it. And they have to put basically no money at all into it. The only thing that'll happen is that users leave this site if all the stories are the very same crap-quality.

Pixy 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

And another thing...

inflicting such an atrocity on readers should be punished.

There is already a mechanism in place for that, it's called scor

:user has been terminated :

Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)
Updated:

@Pixy

There is already a mechanism in place for that, it's called score

πŸ˜‚

I know you're making a joke, but it still needs addressing.

I thought about this issue extensively, and came to the conclusion that the score wouldn't be enough to protect the site.

Readers will be exposed to the stories before the stories get low scores, so the damage will be done before enough votes are cast.

Replies:   Pixy
Pixy 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

I know you're making a joke, but it still needs addressing.

I thank you for all that you do for this site, and it wasn't so much as a joke, as a tacit acknowledgement that I cherish my access level on the site on the proviso that I don't talk about that which I'm not to talk about. πŸ˜‚

But I appreciate your point on the potential damage being done before ****** become visible. I hadn't thought about that.

awnlee jawking 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

If there are stories that you suspect are AI generated, but aren't tagged, report them to me and I'll check them.

That presents a moral dilemma. There are some stories I believe are mostly AI-generated, with the usual florid language, superficial characters, continuity errors between scenes etc, but they're amongst the most highly rated stories on the site. If labelling them as AI-generated causes the authors to remove them, I think that would be deleterious to the site.

Is there, perhaps, a softer way? Every story uploaded gets checked for AI content, your gizmos calculate a probability, and every story gets that probability published as a tag eg AI:48%. If the authors disagree, at least management isn't directly responsible because it's a case of 'the computer says'.

AJ

Replies:   Sarkasmus  Pixy
Sarkasmus 🚫

@awnlee jawking

Can you give an example of those supposedly "most highly rated stories on the site", despite having useless prose and continuity errors?

Replies:   awnlee jawking
awnlee jawking 🚫
Updated:

@Sarkasmus

Can you give an example of those supposedly "most highly rated stories on the site", despite having useless prose and continuity errors?

I said 'florid', not 'useless'. Florid language has its uses, for example in literary fiction where stories don't have plots, or poetry, where the poets can't think of rhymes :-)

I'm not going to publicly name stories, as that might create the sort of friction that I'd like to protect management from.

AJ

Pixy 🚫

@awnlee jawking

I think that would be deleterious to the site

Given that AI detection (from what I understand from this and similar threads) works on 'flowery' verbosage, then would AI flag AJ for using deleterious (Which I had to go look up, as I have never seen it before) instead of the more 'common' detrimental?

Replies:   awnlee jawking
awnlee jawking 🚫

@Pixy

Given that AI detection (from what I understand from this and similar threads) works on 'flowery' verbosage, then would AI flag AJ for using deleterious (Which I had to go look up, as I have never seen it before) instead of the more 'common' detrimental?

71 SOL stories contain 'deleterious'.

I can confirm that you are not an AI because your stories get "its" and "it's" wrong far too often. Unless you're a very smart AI ;-)

AJ

Replies:   Pixy
Pixy 🚫

@awnlee jawking

πŸ˜‚

I like to be consistent...

Dominions Son 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

I wonder if AI detection tools have actually been tested for false positives. This could be done using older works that predate AI and are off copyright (Project Gutenberg as a source)?

To be honest, I would be shocked if the false positive rate is zero.

Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

@Dominions Son

I tested a lot, with my own works as well as a lot of old material, and the worst was 'mixed results, polished with AI', but none reported 100% AI content.

whitedruid 🚫

@Dominions Son

We could have it test flowery fiction from the late 19thC, but it would identify as older and not AI because everything from that era was ingested to build up the large language models in the first place.

My gut says it's the presence of so much of the old content that makes the AI output so florid and overly wordy. Later they seem to model from the other's outputs in a death race spiral to the bottom.

I swear the authors of the 19thC were paid by the word but had to pay the publishers for every period they used.

Replies:   Pixy
Pixy 🚫

@whitedruid

I swear the authors of the 19thC were paid by the word but had to pay the publishers for every period they used.

Most of the best authors of the time were women, and they hated periods.... (boom-tish!)

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