@dookieOver the last little while I've come to realize that "AI-generated" means completely different things to different people. Some of that understanding has been the postings in this forum, and some of it's been private mail from curious people. So maybe it's worth explaining what it means in my case.
Truthfully, I don't spend much time thinking about AI anymore. I spend my time thinking about stories.
Every story starts with a story bible, and AI is involved right from the beginning—not writing the story, but helping me explore it. I use it to brainstorm concepts, challenge assumptions, develop characters, map relationships, and work out who these people are before anyone writes a line of dialogue. I'm fascinated by how people change, and how they change one another. To me, plot is just the machinery. Story is what happens inside the characters.
Short stories go through the same process as novellas, but everything is compressed. There's less room for deep characterization, fewer moving parts, and simpler plots. The process is the same; the scale is different.
Only once the story bible feels solid do I start drafting. By then, most of the important creative decisions have already been made. The first draft is largely AI-generated, but it's generated from a story that's already been carefully designed.
Now, I haven't always done this. When I started in March 2025, my prompt for Absolution in Ecstasy was literally, "Write me a story that begins with the line, 'Fuck me 'till I reach absolution.'" 😄 The result was… okay. But I was hooked. Every story since then has taught me something. Over the last year and a half I've gradually built a writing system with 10's of thousands (maybe a hundred thousand!) lines of prompts, instructions, workflows, editorial passes, critics, and supporting tools. If you go back and read my earliest stories, I you can see the progression. They're much simpler than what I'm producing now.
One thing that's changed over that time is the role AI plays. People tend to think of it as a drafting tool. I increasingly use it as a panel of editors.
One of my favorite techniques is an adversarial review. I'll ask an AI to assume the story doesn't work and tell me exactly why. Is a character behaving implausibly? Does the emotional arc fall flat? Is the pacing off? Is the symbolism too obvious? Then I'll ask a completely different model to do the same thing.
They rarely agree completely, and I like it that way. It forces me to defend my own decisions instead of accepting the first criticism I hear. Sometimes they convince me a scene needs rewriting. Sometimes they convince me to leave it alone. Either way, the manuscript is usually stronger because it's survived being torn apart before anyone has read it.
Everything gets revised repeatedly. Dialogue. Characterization. Emotional arcs. Symbolism. Rhythm. Voice. Sometimes I even build new tools for a specific story. She Answered, for example, required a lot of work just to produce believable Québécois English, and even then I still spent a lot of time editing it by hand. The first results were more a caricature than what I wanted.
None of that means the AI gets the final say. It proposes. I choose. Sometimes its suggestions are terrific. Sometimes they're complete garbage. Part of the craft is learning to tell the difference.
So when someone asks whether my work is AI-generated, I think it's a simplistic question. AI is involved in almost every step, but not just as a drafting tool. It's become part of how I explore ideas, solve problems, and revise my work.
Maybe that's where writing is headed. Maybe it isn't.
What I think, however, is that readers care most about the story itself.
That's the part I'm trying to get better at.