An AI Witch Hunt.

[u/The_Deranged_Hermit]

I had gone through and deleted all my posts on Reddit but this one and had no intention of checking in on it when I noticed my notifications and this had more replies than anything I've every written here. I want to thank you all for the support you've shown. Ill try to answer everyone and my apologies if I miss anyone.

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This will be my last post here. But I guess I wanted to share something so others don't get hit with the same issues.

I've used AI now for the last year to learn how to write. This includes everything from how to find sources for research to how to do a chapter outline, a scene outline, and edit those thoroughly before anything is written to save time in the editing process. It taught me how to line edit, how to check pacing, and all of the old methods used to write some of the greatest lines. I've been researching all of the modern rules of writing, what is expected from a publisher, and so much more.

I am grateful for AI because it is an absolutely amazing tool for learning this skill. I have noticed massive leaps in my craft because of it.

But it was always meant to be a means to an end, where one day I could write my own story entirely without AI. Well, I wrote the prologue to it, but like so many others, I felt imposter syndrome. I looked at what I wrote and thought it was still crap.

Don't get me wrong, it was still the best I've ever written, but it needed massive amounts of work. It was my first time writing in an omniscient narrative voice, and the first time I tried imitating a Russian author. Hell, I was breaking rules like "don't start your book with a morning routine" because I needed to use the normalcy of everyday life to later cause a juxtaposition against the horrors of what was going to happen. The pacing was almost certainly too long to keep people's attention.

It took me a month to research for the book, several more weeks to create the outline, and keep revising it until I had something I think I was mostly happy with. Finally, I drafted that first chapter. It took a week and ended up being only 3.6K words, which took—ugh—9 drafts plus the cuts I did today.

But I wanted to know if it was good enough. What issues was I not seeing, as I've never shown anyone a serious piece of writing before? So, I posted it to the DestructiveReaders subreddit. Part of the rules there is that you have to critique other people's work before you can post your own.

I fell in love with this. The amount of invaluable lessons you learn by going through other people's work is insane. You start to see tense shifts, head-hopping, spelling and grammar mistakes, throat-clearing, repetitive sentence structures, pacing issues, and so much more.

Now, I have an autoimmune disease that they can't diagnose—basically, I have a 1:320 ANA, small fiber neuropathy, and pernicious anemia, but the underlying cause has not been found. Part of the symptoms, though, is that every hour or two I will fall asleep without meaning to for about 15 minutes. It's something they can't figure out. But when I was doing the critiques, this didn't happen. I wouldn't call it a miracle by any means, but it is kind of amazing. And so, I wrote far more critiques than I needed to and planned to spend at least an hour a day on that subreddit going through other people's work and applying what I learned to my own.

Well, I finally posted my work and I was banned.

I can't express how much this sucks. The reasoning for it was because I supposedly broke the rules and used AI assistance in my piece. I did not. And the proof they showed me was a post from this subreddit—one in which I showed people how to create a process that removes the watermarks from current AIs.

So, I ran my piece through AI de-tectors (I apologize but it was trying to redirect this due to just the previous word) and all but one came back as 0%. The one came back as 15%, and this was just the first two paragraphs...

Now the decision has been made, and while I hate it, it is what it is. I won't rail against the mods for making what I think is a wrong decision.

What I really wanted to address is for those who, like me, use AI in some pieces and write by hand in others. If you do this, I would suggest having two accounts and keeping the account you post anything handwritten from completely separate from anything even remotely AI-related. Hell, I would go so far as to suggest even maybe writing about how bad AI is.

I guess I never expected a witch hunt this early, and for such a silly reason.

As far as why I won't be writing here anymore, many things were said in the DMs. But chief amongst them is simply that despite everything I've learned, and despite all the effort, my writing still looks like AI. That is to say, soulless and without a human component to it.

I had long railed against King's idea that a writer is born, not created out of hard work. But it looks like perhaps I was wrong on this. Despite my best efforts, I cannot move a human to care about a character or to feel emotion in the way others can.

I can blame autism, perhaps, or alexithymia. Hell, enough people say that autistic writing is often indistinguishable from AI, but the truth is doing so would feel pathetic and like a lack of accountability. I have to face the fact that maybe I'm just not good enough. And so I come to the end of a 40-year-old dream. I don't know what to do with my time now without writing, but I suppose something will come along.

I wish everyone here the best of luck and hope none of this ever happens to you. May your pens never run out of ink.

And yes I used AI here to clean up spelling and grammar since it no longer matters.

[u/TrappedOnDirt]

You start to see tense shifts, head-hopping, spelling and grammar mistakes, throat-clearing, repetitive sentence structures, pacing issues, and so much more.

Those are some really good things to look out for. The most annoying things I see in amateur fiction, in fact. I HATE to see tense shifts and head-hopping within a scene. (And the more I rail at it in others' work, the more I saw it in my old work from 25+ years ago, too. It's hard not to do it; we just need to catch it and fix it!)

That said... if you trained yourself to write using AI, I'm not surprised that your writing is hard to tell from AI. People learn how to write by reading a lot, and by writing a lot, and if what you were learning from was AI-based you might have picked up some of the AI's bad habits and tells.

Sorry this happened to you, especially on a piece that you didn't use AI for, but it's still feedback, no matter how much you may not like it. You could accept it and move on, or quit entirely. Nobody can make that choice for you. But if that one piece of feedback that you didn't like is going to make you quit writing, maybe posting on a group intended for critique (and by the name probably harsh critique) might have been a mistake. Posting/publishing AT ALL if you don't like negative feedback is a bad idea, because if any published work is liked by even 10% of readers that's a pretty strong success.

[u/The_Deranged_Hermit → u/TrappedOnDirt]

There is the possibility which I mentioned in another reply so I won't repeat it here, but I also read a lot and try to vary it a great deal.

I have a weird ability to listen to a voice or read one and then imitate it. If I listen to a cowboy (I almost always think Sam Elliot) I will start talking like a cowboy unconsciously. But its not just verbally its my inner monologue changes to match his voice. I suppose I can give an example.

Well, I can't say I ever gave death much thought. Not till my daddys heart quit on him the first time. He was laid up in that bed near on a month and I reckon one nurse or another just plain forgot to turn him over often as they shoulda. Got himself a sore on his big toe. Hell its such a little thing, nothin much to look at. But wouldn't ya know it, the damn thing wouldn't heal on account of the diabeties.

So they took the toe, and then they took the foot. They spent the better part of the next year comin into that house takin the man apart, piece by piece, thill there wasn't nothin left of him below the waist. And hell by then he'd had three more heart attacks and a stroke to boot. by the tail end of 93 he couldn't even talk no more.

I tried. Lord knows I tried. Sat with him. Read him books. Told him about my day, talked religion, talked politics, whatever came to mind. But Ill tell you what. Caryin a conversation all by your lonesome is about the hardest work a man can do. Harder then I ever could have imagined. Wasn't long before he was just another piece of furniture in that room. And thats what got me thinkin bout death. Cause if it was me trapped in that chair with nothin I'd wanted someone to put a pillow over my face.

I also have a Hitchens voice.

Libraries are perhaps humanity’s second greatest invention, the first being the book itself. They were not erected as monuments to the learned few, but as open gardens, designed by minds far greater than ours, who believed that knowledge, like sunlight, should fall freely on every soul who sought it. Not to flatter the masses, but because they trusted, with almost divine optimism, that someone out there might take what they found and carry it further.

I can't do every voice like this but I do have a library of them. Douglas Adams, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, King, a weird Shakespear/Poe combination though I don't know why that one is the way it is.

As far as feedback... I thought I knew what I was getting into. I had reviewed the feedback from others and had written several myself that spanned pages. Its mostly pacing, more detail, cut this, here is up to 20 line edits, you head hopped here, you swapped point of view, you changed the voice, the voice of the character doesn't match the age, your dialogue tags are wrong here, your math for ages doesn't make sense but I think its because you mixed up the character names. That was the kind of critique I was looking for.

Don't get me wrong I think like many writers sharing their first work you hope to hear holy crap thats amazing but considering I can see flaws in my own work I wasn't expecting that. Hell I'd cut 1600 words from the piece earlier that day to pick up the pacing.

It was the fact I didn't get that. I got well about the worst kind of critique you can get. One that doesn't even acknowledge that it was written.

I don't know if I'll quit writing even if that might be the best thing for me. But all of my work is now gone, deleted more then a dozen novels tonight so as to make a more clear decision. Well all but the last piece which my wife wouldn't let me delete. If I'm going to go back to writing again at some point it will be because I want to I suppose. Or at least thats the idea.

[u/AccidentalFolklore]

What was your book about? I got a lot of stuff from COVID and one was undifferentiated connective tissue disease (because I have no specific antibodies). My ANA was 1:2560 and they were still acting like it was in my head. A rheumatologist finality put me on hydroxychloroquine and said he would rather treat symptoms and prevent it from worsening than wait for it to become so bad it finally gets a label. I also have MCAS. Definitely check that. I didn't believe I had it for the longest time and it will wreck havoc. Other stuff I got from COVID is craniocervical instability and acquired hypermobility

[u/The_Deranged_Hermit → u/AccidentalFolklore]

It was a historical/Literary Grimdark novel about the 1933 Nazino tragedy. Its mostly unknown in the West and it shouldn't be. It was horrific almost beyond belief. Almost 7K people where set on a small island with no tools, no food or water. People drank the water from the Ob river and ended up dying from dysentery, many starved before the Russian gov finally shipped flour. But the only shipped flour and nothing else so fights broke out and more people were killed and several more died from asphyxiating on flour while trying to eat it uncooked. Within three weeks only about 1K people had survived and by that point the only ones who did had to resort to cannibalism, before they were finally shipped to what amounted to work camps. In the end only 175 people survived.

As far as the auto immune that sucks. I hope you at least feel better now. I was put on a nerve blocker because the pain was to intense to move and the muscles just sat and twitched permanently. I've lost the ability to move without a walker and my left hand is almost paralyzed but at least the pain is mostly gone. From what I understand it can take almost 3 years to diagnose some of the auto immune disorders. At least its not the big ones. The worst part this last year has actually been the shingles. If I have a flair up I get that and it makes the pain even worse....

[u/Caledric]

Fuck them, keep writing. Write for yourself and no one else. People are going to witch hunt and They claim anything they either don't like or are jealous of as AI. And if you mention you used AI even just to brain storm and organize they will claim everything you do in life is AI. They are just sad desperate people who are pissed off because you are doing something that makes you happy, and they can't find that spark of joy in life.

Don't worry about AI detectors, or someone saying your writing sounds AI or has no emotion. Most of those people would make the same claims of Tolkien, Stephen King, and Michael Critchon if they were starting out today. They don't know dick all, and you should just ignore them.

[u/bookgeek210 → u/Caledric]

If I wrote for everyone else, I would’ve never started writing at all.

[u/Hads84]

Put your work on Royal Road, or Scribblehub, some people care, some don't. Reddit mods can be renowned for being a bit difficult sometimes. Don't give up due to one setback.

[u/Aethericseraphim → u/Hads84]

A great example of that is the mods of the opensource subreddit.

banned linux because some recent code incorporates AI, as well as banning every non English speaker because translators use AI.

[u/Hads84 → u/Hads84]

Oh, also if you want tips on how to grow your reader base, I can point you to some good resources.

[u/Diylion]

I never used AI quite as heavily but something very similar happened to me. When I first started writing, my first three chaptersI had used it to help me with pacing. It never wrote any prose. I made a reddit post asking about the ethics of it. I didn't like the chapters so I stopped using it and i ended up deleting everything I had written with it. I talked about it on my social media that I tried it, I didn't like it so I stopped. I thought it was done. I was posting my book and art on the romantasy forum for promotion. I was getting a lot of attention because I also do all my own art. Witch hunters saw my cover, were absolutely certain it was AI. I blocked the aggressive ones and that only made them angrier. They actually made an alt account and deep dived into my reddit history and found that post and got me banned from the forum. I showed the mods my social media post where I talked about it and my art process videos and my cover broken down by layer and it didn't fix the ban. I got several bad reviews accusing me of AI the week after my debut book launched. It literally felt like the worst case scenario just happened in sequence. I thought my book was doomed and I had poured literally thousands of hours into the book and art. Most of my sales had come from that forum. I got majorly depressed and sick for like a week. But it's fine now. My book gets great reviews all the time. I actually got a white knight review from someone basically telling people to fuck off and that the book is good. My Amazon reviews are great overall. I'm still writing and painting my characters. I love my story. My book is still selling well. But seriously witch hunters are the most scum of the earth people man. They suck.

[u/Ruh_Roh-]

Fuck those dipshits. Too bad you couldn't cash in all the work to get your own critique but at least you got a lot of knowledge out of it.

[u/Lindsiria]

Hey, if you want someone to review your work, I'd be willing. I'm pretty good at picking up tells from AI, so I could give you some feedback to see if it sounds like AI at all. 

[u/sinsielawinskie]

Honestly, most writing subs are full of witch hunters. I like to write. I love creating stories. What I don't like is grammar so I have AI help me get over the hump by adding the right tags, placing commas where they need to be, etc etc. This will get you banned from most writing subreddits. It doesn't matter that the words written are all me, that my writing doesn't set off the ai detectors, as soon as any ai is used I have committed the greatest crime against humanity and should be crucified for my transgressions.

It's dumb. To be frank, I'm on this sub because sometimes I like having Claude write me fanfiction to read during my bogus long flights for work. I have learned a lot here to help me get him to write better. But people in that subreddit likely have AI bots (hypocrisy?) to slueth all posts for users who posted/commented in impure and bad subs. If I posted there I would likely be auto banned too. Mods are honestly the scourge of reddit. As someone said in this thread already, fuck em.

[u/FaceDeer]

You said it yourself, it's a witch hunt. Witch hunts are not rational. If someone's saying your writing "looks like AI" they might as well be saying your writing "looks like you cast a spell on it."

[u/SpiritualSimple108]

Read. Read. Read. Anything you can get your hands on in your niche/genre and also books on writing. But not online, only books. One thing I have noticed is that AI-speak (think: the way writes certain ways) has seeped into online writing whether the writer uses it or not. That’s because we read so much online these days and we are all indirectly and unconsciously picking it up. And I bet with your focus on writing better, you picked up a lot and it’s come out in your writing. All is not lost.

[u/Rickleskilly]

I had something similar happen only they didn't even bother explaining why my post was deleted. I posted to the beta readers sub and they deleted my post because of AI, but with no explanation as to why they thought I used AI. The only possibility is they looked at my other posts to see that I am AI friendly. It's absurd.

I also learned an incredible amount with assistance from AI. I was finally able to complete a book I'd abandoned nearly eight years ago. I learned how to write a book as if I had a full time, on demand teacher, coach, feedback partner, editor, beta reader and even someone to chat with about ideas. Its been great.

Now that I'm on my second in the series I am much faster and more confident in everything. I have a distinctive voice. I know how I like to write and what I want it to sound like.

[u/5thhorseman_]

I had long railed against King's idea that a writer is born, not created out of hard work. But it looks like perhaps I was wrong on this.

Wrong. I would maybe concede insofar that curiosity and imagination have an innate component, but that component still has to be nurtured to develop. And even so, you were not born knowledgeable or even literate, nor with any understanding of storytelling or writing process. Neither did you have your current life experience and reference pool. Those are the things that turn a curious guy with an imagination into a writer, and they are trainable.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot move a human to care about a character or to feel emotion in the way others can.

Also wrong. Your experience in that other subreddit was not with a normal human audience, but a bunch of acutely paranoid, hateful, insecure bullies who pretend their abuses make them virtuous.

If it's any consolation, published writers and artists faced the same shit more than once.

As far as why I won't be writing here anymore, many things were said in the DMs. But chief amongst them is simply that despite everything I've learned, and despite all the effort, my writing still looks like AI. That is to say, soulless and without a human component to it.

Or, because they saw your post over here, it was a case of confirmation bias on their part. They knew you've used AI in the past, so assumed you were doing it still. It's very easy to take common rhetoric devices as an AI signal, especially when someone doesn't have extensive reading experience. Which is the case for a lot of the haters.

Never the less, if there is any unnatural prose in your writing, you can use AI as a red pen editor to help you identify the issues and consider how you can tackle them.

I can blame autism, perhaps, or alexithymia. Hell, enough people say that autistic writing is often indistinguishable from AI, but the truth is doing so would feel pathetic and like a lack of accountability. I have to face the fact that maybe I'm just not good enough. And so I come to the end of a 40-year-old dream. I don't know what to do with my time now without writing, but I suppose something will come along.

The fuck you're talking about, man? A bunch of basement dwellers does not get to tell you who you're supposed to be. The only dignity they deserve in response is a silent middle finger.

Keep going, or as we say in Poland - let the dogs bark, the caravan goes on.

[u/VIP-Fluffer]

Soulless and without a human component is bullshit the anti-ai crowd spout in nearly every sub about any activity where AI was used. Art, writing, game development, coding, music... Don't take it to heart. As soon as they decided you were pro-ai, they stopped looking at you as a person and started looking at you as a problem. They either didn't read your writing or cherry-picked.

Most of them don't understand how AI works and how it must be guided by the person using it to actually do something useful. They also can't be objective about the subject, and can't accept that pro-ai doesn't mean you do everything using AI.

What they should have done is provided feedback on where they thought the story went wrong and why, if they felt it was truly that terrible. But they were immature, stalked your account and judged you instead.

I'd say ignore them and keep going.

[u/AliceFanfictioning]

Hey hey. Witch hunters are in every corner. I write Fanfiction and im not allowed to post in the subs and servers Of my ship cause I use the help of AI to translate. Sucks. Bur rhat doesnt mean your work is bad or that everyone thinks the same way. Please keep writing. You can get an editor later ans they’ll help you change stuff. No one really publishes a book without the help of an editor. Don’t leave your passion for a bunch of narrow minded people.

From another autistic fellow.

[u/dutchiesweets]

Developing a voice can be a long process!

If readers thought you write too much like AI but you didn’t use it, there’s still some pretty actionable feedback there.

The more you write without AI the more you’ll develop a voice. If this is the first 3,000 words you’ve written without AI, take solace in the fact that many of us have written 100,000s of words without AI and still aren’t satisfied with where we’re at.

It sucks if people were mean to you, try not to take it too personally. If writing gets fun for you again I’d say give it another shot, and remember the ultimate goal isn’t any one piece of writing but developing more as an artist

[u/SGdude90]

It's because of witch hunts that I created 2 different AO3 accounts, one for self written works and one for AI

Because antis would denounce my self-written works even if no AI was used. Hell they even admitted they would go after that AO3 account even if they knew it didn't use AI

[u/Aernus]

AI detection does not work.

I have seen works from decades before AI being flagged as AI generated, and someone’s 95% AI chapter come out as 100% human.

At the end of the day, keep in writing. If you think AI can help you write the best possible stories you can, then do it. Don’t let anyone make you feel bad or inadequate because you used the best tools at your disposal.

[u/HoarderCollector]

It's some sort of Witch... Pursuit... Thing.

[u/CaspinLange]

Not only keep writing, but keep editing. It’s good to whittle everything down to the bare essentials.

[u/Afgad]

You can always use our reciprocal beta reading thread or join our Discord and do the critique swap with us. We won't ban you, and your experience is precisely why I made the thread.

As a sidenote, you don't need to use AI in your workflow to post here. We have a Writing Craft flair for the writing side of the sub; you can use it.