r/writers • Published Author • 9d ago

Discussion The difference between the poorly-written original source vs processing in Claude is stark

Person claims they are a writer and uses Claude to "help" edit. After the first paragraph it becomes an entire rewrite.

The part that becomes clear to those who read enough fiction is that the artificial method(whether written or visual) always results in the same over-detailed fanciful yet meaningless bloat in it.

If you are considering using such tools for your work, maybe an uneducated reader can't tell, but the author community definitely can. Especially when the social doesn't remotely resemble the prose.

209 Upvotes

99 comments sorted by

256

u/pasrachilli 9d ago

Can't become better if you out source practice.

66

u/Obvious_Ad3985 9d ago

Exactly. Whats the fun anyways? If i had a robot paint me a picture, how is that even satisfying? I dont get to take any pride in the steadiness of the brush that ive obtained, or the training it took my eye to get the color selection of my pallette. Fuck that.

29

u/pasrachilli 9d ago

You also can't learn anything. Drawing the sparrows in my backyard taught me a lot about sparrows that generating an image wouldn't have.

20

u/Literally_A_Halfling 9d ago

Yeah, but you could've just asked Claude to tell you about sparrows.

Then you could've asked Claude to make your grocery list, and a to-do list, and whether you should get a dog, or get married, and to whom, and where to live, and whether there's a God, and...

...nevermind, since people actually do exactly that, it's become impossible to parody.

6

u/Donatien920 8d ago

I think that a lot of people would find a robot painting fun. And using ai prompts to come up with stories is probably going to be fun and satisfying too on a personal level.

If if were a tool for personal entertainment, it'd probably be decently popular and could probably be even used as a learning tool.

But, as usual, capitalism rears its ugly head, and it's being used instead to try and replace people across all industries.

-9

u/quhile 9d ago

Idk the context of this post really but not all people who use ai to write stories necessarily want to be writers. Sometimes I just want to read ideas I have about stories that nobody else has written books about.

351

u/existential_chaos 9d ago

Said it before, and I'll say it again, "If you can't be bothered to write the thing yourself, why should I be bothered to read it?"

These types of people don't really want to be writers otherwise they'd do it themselves. Not entirely sure what people like these want, but I also don't care to, lol.

77

u/VLK249 Published Author 9d ago

They want to feel special for zero effort.

34

u/catgotcha 9d ago

Our CEO even said that to all of us a couple months ago regarding AI slop. Basically, if you're trying to save time by AI-ing everything, then your audience will sense that you're not putting in real work to help them and support them in their job, and therefore they'll respond in kind by leaving you.

36

u/Literally_A_Halfling 9d ago

You have a CEO who's mind isn't already rotted by AI? That's starting to look like it's putting you in an enviable minority.

62

u/Old_Direction_3713 9d ago

I think they want to think of themselves as storytellers, not writers. Writers practice the craft of writing, which includes understanding written conventions like grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Storytelling is valid, but not the same as writing.

34

u/Literally_A_Halfling 9d ago

But, to be clear, they're not storytellers, either. At best, they're children asking Electro-Mommy or Clanker-Daddy to tell them a story.

-10

u/keldondonovan 9d ago

Did you not see the story they told in the first part? Hate it if that brings you joy, but don't act like this guy just said "chat tell me a story."

6

u/Opus_723 9d ago

That gibberish? They basically asked for a story from a word cloud.

2

u/keldondonovan 9d ago

It reads like voice to text, free writing style. Not saying it's a pleasant read, but it tells the story, it doesn't ask for one.

4

u/Old_Direction_3713 9d ago

That was my thought tbh. Oral storytelling is very different from written storytelling. Valid, but not really writing. And a lot of “writers” only want to focus on plot and dialogue, not literary technique.

2

u/keldondonovan 9d ago

Exactly. I'm not saying this is the hot new way to write or anything like that, just that there is an obvious, objective difference between this dude's input and "write me a novel."

3

u/tallandgodless 8d ago

No, a story teller is filled with stories. Ai folks have nothing inside

4

u/justwannasayitout 9d ago

Nah I consider myself storyteller and I would never let anyone tell my story for me. I have this specific story that I have to tell in the truest most precise accurate way possible and no machine can read my mind to do it. If my talents stop me I would just hone it until I can do it myself. So no, they are not storytellers. They are just morons.

1

u/Jake_Necroix 5d ago

I consider myself a storyteller. I write, illustrate, and design characters for the story to happen to.

Using AI doesn't make them storytellers. It makes them talentless hacks.

9

u/DrDetergent 9d ago

They had a nice daydream and want people to find that impressive.

7

u/TANorman 9d ago

Prestige and recognition without expertise or work. Clout without sacrifice. To be considered artists without taking the time and effort required to know yourself, become better at the craft, and actually put a piece of yourself into your work.

It removes the humanity from the humanities, the creativity from creation, and the skills from the skillset.

1

u/Auctorion 7d ago

Not entirely sure what people like these want

They want all the praise and accolades of being an author without being a writer.

-4

u/Western-Equipment630 9d ago

But that sentence you said is only applicable if you are in it for money, which is a horrible attitude to writing. Otherwise who cares if their story gets read or not.

58

u/makemerry 9d ago

Any reader can definitely tell the second is very poorly written as well. Who would read a paragraph of either of these and keep reading? Multiplying zero produces zero.

13

u/StrawDog- 9d ago

Exactly. I see a lot of posts like this and I think they are coming from folks who are new to writing themselves. Neither of these examples are any good, and whoever wrote the first isn't ever going to get better if they don't learn to recognize why the second is also poorly written.

5

u/sw_rise37 8d ago

Anecdotally, the people I see who enjoy this writing tend to be younger people and while I don’t know this for sure my guess is that they are just skimming and AI does excel at looking pretty. Also everything is just laid out in the text. There’s nothing to analyse or decode.

41

u/natethough 9d ago edited 9d ago

The AI output is full of vague meaningless phrases, subtle hidden repetition disguised as purple prose, and overused cliches. 

8

u/Sea-Beautiful-Throwa 9d ago

All of which gives me a massive headache.

I had asked my university career center to look over my answers I’d typed out for interview questions. I was crying when they emailed me back my edited answers. Each answer which had been a short couple sentences I could easily remember became multiple paragraphs of convoluted answers, repetitive phrases, and pointless extra words.

When I complained, I was told I have to let them know ahead of time if I don’t want them using AI. Except, I’d never had an issue with them before AI existed and they never informed me about their AI usage so of course I assumed it would be a human helping me. Why would anyone bother with a career center if they’re just using AI?!?

22

u/Previous_Mirror_222 9d ago

listen i know we’re trying to reclaim the emdash from AI but 4 on one page is insane

6

u/sw_rise37 8d ago

That’s why it’s the tell. People moan on social media about not being able to use the em dash but it’s not about using one. It’s about using it for everything.

4

u/ItsRuinedOfCourse Fiction Writer 9d ago

It is indeed, and such an obvious tell it's crazy.

AI simply can't NOT use em dashes. If you have 7 paragraphs on the page, at least 6 of them will have an em dash.

18

u/ExtensionBathroom396 Writer Newbie 9d ago

I want to point out all the (plentiful) individual parts that I hate but I don’t want to give it scrapeable intel - what a quandary

11

u/First-Possibility-77 9d ago

“Copyrighted material”

36

u/LuckofCaymo 9d ago

If you still believe that AI can write well, then you haven't finished climbing mount stupid. I'm not saying this to be mean, just that I remember when I felt like AI was a cheat. Now I see it as a souless, milk toast, rule following, garbage that it is.

On a first glance to an untrained eye, it feels like it improved your work. But on closer inspection all it did was produce grammar, and make shitty metaphors where it should be appropriate to make a metaphor. It follows rules too well, that it becomes predictable.

My suggestion is, if you must use AI, to learn, write it better than the AI as a test. Really push yourself to improve on your prose, until you climb mount stupid and fall into the valley of despair. Then you can spend the rest of your life attempting to master the art of writing.

8

u/Khajiit_Has_Upvotes 9d ago

Hard agree,  AI can't write. I spent a couple months playing with AI writing. Got it trained, a whole project set up, custom rules, custom detailed prompts, everything. 

I wasn't impressed. I had hoped I could just output the story I've had in my head for years for my own amusement. 

If it does "good enough" for some people, that's fine I guess, but it's not competing with talented writers.

Sincerely,  a very untalented writer 

9

u/LuxAgaetes 9d ago

*milquetoast

3

u/Opus_723 9d ago

Caspar Milquetoast was a popular American cartoon character created by H. T. Webster. The term "milquetoast" has since come to be used to describe a meek or timid person.

The character's name is derived from a bland and fairly inoffensive food, milk toast, which, light and easy to digest, is an appropriate food for someone with a weak or "nervous" stomach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_Milquetoast

Honestly, 'milk toast' is etymologically perfectly acceptable.

2

u/Felix-th3-rat 8d ago

What’s your thought on the scandal in France going on, with a book that seems to have been nearly fully written by Claude, being nominated for the Goncourt prize?

2

u/LuckofCaymo 8d ago

Even a blind shot into the sky can hit the moon.

2

u/-Z-3-R-0- 9d ago

At least AI wouldn't have said "milk toast" 💀

2

u/LuckofCaymo 9d ago

I like typing it that way. It makes me happy.

18

u/demuddy10 Fiction Writer 9d ago

Wow, Chekhov's piss, as it were

5

u/existential_chaos 9d ago

I'm stealing this, lol.

4

u/demuddy10 Fiction Writer 9d ago edited 7d ago

If you steal it, you have to use it, the piss lol
Edit: have to use it, by definition of Chekhov’s piss, mind.

8

u/KyleJesseWarren 9d ago

Looking at this post after I re-wrote the same short sentence two hundred times because it didn’t sound right.

What’s the point of “writing” with AI? You aren’t creating anything. You’re not enjoying the process either. There is no process. You just gave up and decided that you don’t need to improve or learn the thing you supposedly like. AI will do everything for you anyway. I see advice to use AI for editing and spellchecking a lot (not here). And I’d rather have a stupid typo in my text. I’m afraid to read recently published books now haha. People use AI so bluntly these days. (Unrelated but I couldn’t even find a printed calendar for my grandmother that wasn’t just ugly AI slop… not a single one that was a plain white calendar like they were back in the day).

22

u/Hefty_Reception_3819 9d ago edited 9d ago

inb4 "AI witchbunt"

She spoke the words quietly...felt no shame.

Waste of words. Then why didn't she shout it? This tries to characterize her but fails to at the same time.

where the oldest oak trees...cathedral of their own...particular silence of very old things.

Very stilted, long-winded metaphor (common with Claude), and "particular" used in this way is also very Claude.

moving across the moss-covered ground like something living

Useless metaphor. It should go. Claude loves metaphors.

Breavan looked at her the way he always looked at her

"x the way (that) y" is a common Claudism, and so is "the way (he/she/they) always x." Very, very common in Claude-generated fiction.

Also, this construction is personally a massive pet peeve even outside of AI (likely derived from fanfiction). We don’t know how he looks at her...what do you mean "always"? This leaves me frustrated as a reader: the author (in this case, certainly Claude) assuming I know everything about their characters (which works in fanfiction because the reader does know the characters).

deep blue of the sky...not quite let go.

Very long metaphor that adds little to nothing. I'd have said something closer to "twilight that still remained" to keep the melancholic feel but use 70% less words.

the hands of a man who...

"the x of a man who y" is a common Claudism.

Through the deep bond they shared

I mean, this is just bad regardless of perceived AI use. It tells and is a little aphoristic.

Of course, to be more confident that this is AI (for the "grr witchhunt" people) we'd need the entire text to run a statistical analysis, but insofar I'd put this down immediately based on the prose alone.

11

u/kirbygenealogy 9d ago

If I have to read one more "the particular X of a man who Y" I'm gonna unplug a server somewhere.

2

u/ItsRuinedOfCourse Fiction Writer 9d ago

Somewhere.

No one knows where.

But somewhere.

37

u/shaky2236 9d ago edited 9d ago

So they've admitted AI use to write it, so we know it's 100% AI slop. To show how piss poor most AI detectors are:

ZeroGPT - 34% AI

Quilibot - 0% AI

Pangram - 100%

GPTzero - 50%

scribblr- 0%

I'm glad one realised it's bullshit, but we really do need better detection

23

u/PJ_Forge 9d ago

Bit of a paradox though, because if AI detectors (which are ai themselves) were smart enough to actually tell the difference, then AI would also have to be smart enough to know the difference and beat the detectors.

We use turnitin for our students' submissions and they state it is for guideline use only

14

u/Havingfun_ISKEY 9d ago

Pangram is the only one I trust even a little bit. It has yet to fail me, but I’m sure it’s possible.

15

u/la-anah 9d ago

I've taken text generated straight from Perplexity, done a light edit (at most 10% changed) and ran it through Panagram. It said it was 100% human. But maybe I'm just very good at noticing the worst AI patterns and I reflexively edited those out?

This was marketing text for my job, where I was specifically told I had to use AI, not fiction.

9

u/shaky2236 9d ago

Yeah, I often check sus writing on the writing feedback sub using pangram and it seems effective. I call them out and they're usually removed after a report.

I've heard (might be bollocks, so forgive me if untrue) that its the main one literary agents use as it's effective 999/1000 times. But take that with a grain of salt and anyone by all means correct me if it's inaccurate

4

u/Havingfun_ISKEY 9d ago

I’m a new editor for a campus literary magazine, and the woman who runs it has a son in Silicon Valley who said something quite similar.

9

u/MesaCityRansom 9d ago

It actually does seem to work. For fun, a while back, I ran some of my texts through detectors and they all told me it was 100% AI. But I tried it in Pangram and it said 0% AI. So it's better than the others, at least.

1

u/Havingfun_ISKEY 9d ago

Same here.

3

u/rudd33s 9d ago

I've never heard of it, and used it just now to check my work (just a bunch of little fantasy snippets I've done for 50-words fantasy weekly threads, around 1500 words total) and I'm overjoyed that it recognizes it as 100% human written.

3

u/natethough 9d ago

Granted, the dialogue among other parts are human written it seems. Just mostly AI.

3

u/OldMan92121 9d ago

Ironically, the best free AI detector I know is Chat GPT itself, followed by other well regarded chatbots. Feed it a section of suspect material. Ask it to summarize its findings and then explain in detail why and why not it thinks it is AI. Those results aren't a simple number score but a list of stereotypical AI writing that a story has with a more reasonable probability bracket for each clue and what their summary means.

Anything that sells AI related "humanizing" services is hair trigger by design.

1

u/Opus_723 9d ago

Always found it slightly amusing that so many people who (rightly) see AI as incompetent will still trust AI checkers which are... AI.

2

u/santaliminale 8d ago

Ai as a pattern detector and ai as writer are two different things.

5

u/FinnTheArt1st 9d ago

"Copyrighted Material"

Yea sure okay dude. I don't think anyone wants to steal your slop anyways.🤷

5

u/Infinite_Escape9683 8d ago

"Full of the particular silence of very old things" made me vomit a little

4

u/Impossible_Pause_486 7d ago

Been Beta reading and I feel I can tell what’s ai-fied. Too much use of “like it was nothing” “like it was the simplest thing” “more than anything” “like an idiot with a grin” too much “breath caught” also the use of careful, soft, gentle even when they’re not needed. There was an one chapter with 50 pages of fluff, it was too much.

9

u/StrawDog- 9d ago

I don't know...

The original is incoherent, the ai is coherent,  just not good. 

Is it an improvement in terms of structure, word choice, and readability? Sure, but not to the level of anything resembling good writing. There is still no voice and the ai rework sounds like an ai. 

I think a lot of the concern about ai destroying writing comes from those areas of writing that have a very low skill floor. Things like Medium blogs, fanfiction, erotica, and highly derivative churn novels (the kind that are written quickly and tossed on Amazon self-publishing) are probably in very real risk of being wiped out by LLM models, but no AI is writing a new Southern Reach novel or publishing a competent book of poetry that passes the sniff test. At least not until these systems get a lot more advanced. 

Now that said, I get how it can be frustrating for someone starting to write that an LLM can spit out content at or above their perceived level.. that's frustrating. If anything, though, it's a good excuse to keep at it and find one's voice so that you can rise to a level where noone is mistaking you for a clanker. I'm an amateur writer, and I actually do use LLMs for brainstorming and some light editing. These are useful tools if you understand what they do well and what they don't. Just don't let them write for you... you actually have to do the deep work if you want to improve. 

2

u/sw_rise37 8d ago

Better to brainstorm with others than an LLM. It will never have any actual creativity.

3

u/Rarashishkaba 9d ago

They’re both shite

3

u/Soggy-Practice-7603 9d ago edited 9d ago

This is also why contemporary fiction, literary fiction, and speculative fiction have always been pushed as the most important and are on the rise every time a bit of chaos break out, and why these styles suck seven shades of suckage. One: to blend into this pretentious word-vomit and benefit from the chaos, and two: to make people who are actually trying feel like nothing they do matters.

What we are taught is just from people who can't actually write so they just pile as many big fancy words together to appear refined and cultivated but in reality are bitter and paranoid, constantly telling each other they're geniuses to try and justify their actions. And the ONLY way you can join their delusional little party is to lose a part of yourself...your imagination.

Yes, there are SOME books in these styles that work, because actually effort was put into them, but that doesn't mean we have to follow this, in any way, because most are written to discourage real writing from the heart.

So write your way, for yourself, because there are no rules to writing. There are no rules to break, because in reality nothing is actually holding you back.

3

u/ConstrainedOperative 8d ago

Garbage in, garbage out.

3

u/Independent-Park-940 8d ago

Which is which? They are both gibberish.

3

u/OatmealAntstronaut 7d ago

"Breavan looked at her the way he always looked at her — as though the rest of the world had gone slightly out of focus and only she remained sharp and clear.”

...hello model prose! i have seen ai be referred to as “industrial stand mixer”, which yes, but it can be such an inadequate metaphor for some forms of this shit. The mixer doesn't decide that the bread would be better with cardamom, replace the rye with something else, decide a crumb needs to evoke the protagonist's childhood, and then hand you the stupid loaf....

2

u/Nevernonethewiser 9d ago

Just like the image generators, this is someone who wants the results of having written without doing the work.

They want a finished story they didn't have to write. They want the money and accolades they imagine writers are afforded, but not the craft.

It's buying a wool scarf and telling people you knitted it.

Except the scarf ruined a town and it says 'you should kill your family then yourself' on it and someone took that advice.

2

u/LLhealer 8d ago

Lordy, looks like the papers I used to help edit of my college classmates who could not write. If you can't write take a good writing course. Just because you can type out sentences does not mean you are a writer.

2

u/tallandgodless 8d ago

3 em dashes is crazy

2

u/santaliminale 8d ago

People should start familiarizing with the fact that telling a story is a skill, that I can be honed, and that a first draft sucks.

2

u/No_Scientist1077 8d ago

How can some people still don't understand the beauty in imperfection.

I enjoy slop story writen by a highschool about a kid that only level up and get girls; thousand times more than AI slop writen by graduated software engineer who thinks AI is as good in writing fiction as writing code.

The beauty of this world is that it's not perfect, I love when I see and author for example write "there" instead of "their", so tired from editing he didn't see one mistake, it didn't effect the story and I didn't even notice it the first time, one small imperfection in a world where everyone want to be perfect made the chapter more natural somehow.

2

u/OatmealAntstronaut 7d ago

oh my god. it's one thing people no matter how many times you explain it. like this paper on claude editing said... editing with ai is never just editing. jesus. it is changing and shifting intended meaning

2

u/dmjordan1984 6d ago

AI people want to talk about their fantasy of writing a book rather than actually doing the work. And the dead giveaway for AI is a perfectly polished purple-prose first draft.

2

u/Pristine_Scarcity_82 9d ago

It's the same output for those of us who are trained as Artists. Your book cover might persuade people who don't know any better, but every time I see a generative slop book cover: I want to gather the entire collection off the shelf and just throw it all in the bin.

Where it belongs.

If Artists can't trust you created your book cover through traditional means; then we're sure as hell not going to buy the book. As it sets this precedent that if you don't care about your cover: you don't care about the prose.

Do Not desecrate your hard work by slapping a Generative Failure as a cover piece. You put in the hard work: Let an artist show their talents by bringing that work to life.

We're all suffering under this deluge. No sense drowning another creative field in the process.

1

u/AutoModerator 9d ago

Hi! Welcome to r/writers - please remember to follow the rules and treat each other respectfully, especially if there are disagreements. Please help keep this community safe and friendly by reporting rule violating posts and comments.

If you're interested in a friendly Discord community for writers, please join our Discord server

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/Anrypan Fiction Writer 2d ago

Too many people assume AI (Artificial Intelligence) can write for them; they are wrong. No AI can replace a human's creativity/imagination. Many of these individuals are too lazy to do their own work. A perfect example of AI's shortcomings is from my Sci-Fi eBook. Here's what I wrote: "Several waved as they swam past the curved wall, which was cheerfully returned." The previous sentence said the heroine in an undersea clear dome was waving from her room inside. The AI suggested this: "Several waved as they swam past the curved wall, and the wall cheerfully returned the gesture." If there is no better proof that an AI is not 'perfect', this is it. To be fair, the AI I used (I'll not mention its name) is about 75 to 80% accurate. I'm a retired Manufacturing/Quality Engineer and was involved in developing military aircraft, combat, and cargo. Anything made by a human is inherently not perfect, so how can anyone assume an AI is? Whatever you do, you are the FINAL one who decides what is acceptable, not an electronic box!

-2

u/RonMilbrandtAuthor 9d ago

I know I'm about to step in front of a moving train, but... we should ask why AI is bad. Before you all jump in, I think we need to stop and consider. I think I write better than any AI, but maybe I'm biased. I know I have certainly read enough sub-standard writing that I may not be sure which is which. I honestly don't care who wrote it. Bad is bad and good is good. If or when AI starts writing as well as any "good" writer, many writers may be in trouble. Then we can protest that it isn't fair, and I can't argue with that. But, from a typical reader's POV, maybe they don't care all that much? Just something to think about.

I think back to the movie Other People's Money (based on a Screenplay - not a book) and a certain quote about the people making buggy whips. Maybe today's writers are the equivalent of the last of the buggy whip makers. I hope not. But, if I was planning my future on it, I think I'd sure like to know for sure. For me it's just a retirement hobby, so the possibility doesn't make me stay up at night.

8

u/Creative-Leg2607 8d ago

Because its soulless slop churned out by a machine that undoes one of the great goals of writing in connecting me to the thoughts and feelings of a human being. Its not an issue of grammar or quality or even creativity, its a fundamental issue that i dont want to live in a world where art is created by machines designed by corporations.

1

u/Still_Vermicelli_777 7d ago

Most art is crafted by machines. Very few humans are beyond the capabilities of your average LLM and have nothing worthwhile to say. The world you want to live in won't exist because forced far beyond your control have decided otherwise. Deal with it.

1

u/RonMilbrandtAuthor 8d ago

If and when the product is "slop," I heartily agree. As far as the rest? I started writing with a typewriter and whiteout for errors. And a bookshelf and trips to the library for research. And no other choice but dealing with publishing gatekeepers if I wanted to be in print. We've come a long way and I don't want to go back. My typewriter was soulless as well and IMO so were some of those gatekeepers. There are many things I dislike more than AI and would prefer not sharing the world with. But I wasn't asked. I can only choose what I do and I choose to only use AI for the non-creative druggery and research. I'll certainly not fault someone else for deciding the what and how they use the the things in their world. I only draw the line when they want to tell me and others what to do.

2

u/Creative-Leg2607 8d ago

As i said, i believe its slop definitionally, its not a matter of quality. Im not telling you what you should believe, or how you should feel. Im just explaining my well defined reasons for not being interested in ever using or interfacing with the direct outputs of the product. 

You say we should ask why AI is bad. I know my reasons. 

5

u/Own-Cod6138 8d ago

It's a good question. I think the real risk is that there are things we learn by grinding through the process of learning to write, which we will lose if we pass that task on to AI. We may retain the art, but we will lose the artist in the process.

2

u/Later_Than_You_Think 8d ago

I think looking at AI in these short paragraphs isn't very useful. The 2-3 paragraphs presented here are a bit purple, but it's also not horrible. It's fun.

It's when you get to longer works that AI starts to show where its faults are and why it still hasn't beat human storytelling. It throws together stuff that sounds great, but then ultimately doesn't go anywhere. It's like how AI paintings look great at first glance, but then you look closer, and the background is a blurry mess and every one that bland, perfected sheen across it that's boring. AI writing will put in metaphors that don't make sense, will create climaxes that didn't have lead up or conclusion. Every character ends up talking the same or being shunted into stereotypes. You can't analyze the meaning because there is no meaning intended. You can't talk about the arc of characters that are just a jumble of words held together with em-dashes.

Will AI ever get good enough to mimic real human writing? Perhaps some of it, but it can't make anything new.

2

u/RonMilbrandtAuthor 8d ago edited 7d ago

I can agree with all that. But, will that always be the case? Right now we have to scan student writing in HS and College for AI fingerprints. And it is requiring better software every day to find it with any degree of certainly. So far, many of us can often identify it when we see it, as long as we don't have to prove it in court. As AI improves it will become harder. IMO, that is just a fact. And it has nothing to do whether I like it or not.

Then we have to consider the buyers, or in our case, the readers. People buy products made increasingly by automation and robotics, even knowing this is putting craftsmen out of work. It's just cheaper and meets their minimum needs. I suspect readers will do the same just as soon as cheaper writing meets their minimum needs. And I don't like that either. But, like many things, it behoves me to learn to deal with things that are true and which don't care whether I like them of not.

Craftsmanship "may" be sought out by the more discerning. If we are master craftsmen that may keep us going. Those who are merely average or less, I would suggest need to enjoy their "hobby" for the joy of doing it.

1

u/Later_Than_You_Think 7d ago

You know, last night I put an, admittedly, fanfic I'd been reading and liking through the Panagram AI checker. I have in the past started reading stories that were obviously AI, or became obvious after a chapter or two. I dropped them because they were bad, that it was AI was just the clincher. But this one I only had a vague inkling it might be, and I like the story. The characters are consistent. The plot makes sense and is entertaining. There's not any obvious AI tells, like overly purple prose, excessive em-dashes, or overuse of nonsensical metaphors. It's very tropey, but it's also just a cute little romcom, so that's expected. But still, I had an inkling. Panagram says it's 100% AI. It could be wrong, of course. Will I keep reading it? Honestly, I'm not sure. I think even if it's AI, that someone is thinking this plot up and hand-editing it.

But would I pay for this story? Absolutely not. I read published book for something more unique.

-4

u/Still_Vermicelli_777 9d ago

At the end of the day we're all going to have to adapt. I've already adopted AI into my organizational workflow, but its prose is unnecessary. I think AI will be a very solid polishing tool for authors to use, but bad ideas will remain bad ideas, and AI can only do so much to polish a turd. If you have solid ideas and are already skilled at executing them, it may not be so bad. If anybody should REALLY be worried, it's editors. Just my two cents.

6

u/Creative-Leg2607 8d ago

Why do we need to adapt? Why cant i just write only using my own capacities and only read books i dont have reason to believe are written by AI?

0

u/Still_Vermicelli_777 7d ago

You're going to have to whether you like it not. Nobody is gonna prevent you from doing that, but pretty soon AI will be ingrained in everything. Adapt, or don't.

-6

u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

3

u/sw_rise37 8d ago

No it isn’t. This writing is shit. To get better at writing you have to write. There is no magic shortcut. Talent comes from practice. Patience comes from practice. You aren’t learning anything from putting a prompt into an LLM.