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.

Human-produced (plot and character contents)/human-written (narrative and dialogue) crossover fanfiction workflow = Good

AI-produced (plot and character contents)/AI-written (narrative and dialogue) crossover fanfiction workflow = Bad

Human-produced (plot and character contents)/AI-written (narrative and dialogue) crossover fanfiction workflow = Okay

For me, I'd choose the human-AI hybrid workflow, because not only would I still take charge of the creativity and provide my own original ideas and concepts, but I would also have consistent in-character narratives and dialogues as a result. Commonly, that's considered a workable middle ground, and I'm basically considered a director at that point. The fully human workflow is a viable way of creativity, too. But, I would still prefer the human-AI hybrid workflow. There's both the soul and the efficiency put into that one. Whatsoever, the fully AI workflow is not a viable way of creativity, and it has no soul put into it.

Would anyone be up for a real time meeting where each of us got to demo or showcase our world to each each other? I’m thinking an hour where each of us gets five minutes to introduce the world and 5 mins for Q&A and feedback. I’m personally really curious about the worlds that y’all are building and would love to get inspired for my own.

If there’s interest we could do it by genre. I’m happy to coordinate.

I'm on the fence about using AI to draft for me, but I would like to at least experiment with it to get my writing spark back. I don't really know how, though. Every time I try, it loses the plot and makes bad predictions. Any advice, besides don't do it?

I’m going to try the generate and rewrite method.

How do yall do that? I’m using Claude sonnet, whatever the current one is, and I’m going to be feeding it writing samples but I’m not sure what else it really needs.

Worldbuilding and planning obviously.

But what kind of guidance do yall give when you’re writing like this? What do you wish you knew before you started using this method?

*** Production Notes: Cover artwork directed by the author and generated via ChatGPT. Text and narrative structure remain 100% human-authored. The complete compilation of standalone entries is available here:

https://reddit.com/user/FranciscoCortesRamir/comments/1xc0392/the_voyager_files_the_official_story_catalog/

Chapter 10 of Mutual Assured Vulnerability

is out now!

Ultron races against the clock to forge a path to preserving Danger!

Mutual Assured Vulnerability

Now of course everyone's process is different, but what I do is I have a master prompt that describes my writing style and then I do a very detailed draft of a scene, then have AI finish it.

I must say I like Astra quite a bit - very to the point - as long as you prompt it properly. The resulting product is very close to what I would have written, so I have to edit it but not very much.

I haven't been into AI before, but since discovering that you can read fanfics on AI like ChatGPT, I've been somewhat reading it there.

Have you been reading or writing your fanfics on AI platforms besides ChatGPT? It's not really that great all the time, but it gets you into reading if your favorite fanfiction couple doesn't have a lot of stories online, you know?

Disclosure: I'm Burak Varlık, director and screenwriter in Istanbul, founder of an AI screenwriting tool, so I have a stake in this. No links, no product names for mine.

I spent today reading the pricing, refund and feature pages of a popular screenwriting app line by line for a comparison. It's a good app, cheaper than ours, with a free plan and real-time co-writing. What I couldn't find anywhere on its site was one sentence: whether the scripts you upload are used to train AI models. It sells add-ons that generate voices and images from your characters, so the question isn't abstract. I've noticed the same silence on several sites; most say nothing either way, and "nothing" is not the same as "no".

So, a genuine question for people here: do you read the terms for this before you upload a draft, or do you assume? And has anyone actually emailed a tool's support to ask and gotten a clear answer? I'd like to know which answers people found convincing, because "we take privacy seriously" isn't one.

long conversation turned into a book because why not. here's a link if that's allowed.

In my experience, most AI-written stories hold for a few chapters and start coming apart around chapter 6 (even sooner with a small context window). The prose is usually still fine. What breaks is the story underneath it. I've spent the last months building a story reader, and these are the four breaks I see most.

1. The dead come back. A character dies in chapter 3 and walks into a tavern in chapter 7. Why: the model keeps no record of your story. Each turn, it gets a block of text and writes the most likely next lines. Once the death has scrolled out of that block, or been squeezed into a summary as "there was a fight", the character is simply alive again.

2. The old fact beats the new one. The bridge burned three scenes ago, and the hero crosses it. Why: a fact mentioned ten times weighs more than an update mentioned once. The model has no idea that one replaced the other.

3. Secrets leak. The innkeeper knows your plan. Why: everything in the block is visible to the whole scene. The model doesn't track who knows what. It only sees text.

4. Promises vanish. Someone swore to come back at dawn, and dawn comes and goes. Why: summaries keep events and drop what's still pending. A promise is something that hasn't happened yet, and that's exactly what gets cut.

What these four have in common is that a language model is very good at writing the next sentence, and has no built-in sense of what is true in your story right now. Keeping track of that is a separate job. Today, writers do it by hand with notes, story bible and lorebooks. I think that job belongs to the machine, and that's what I'm working on. Ours still breaks too (last week, a scene replayed itself three turns in a row), so I won't pretend it's solved.

Which of these have you hit most? And is there a break I’ve missed, and what do you think causes it?

Hi mabye not the right place but I'm looking for beta readers for a finished, unpublished novel.

What it is: An AI safety argument written as a novel. A system reaches a self-replicating, closed industrial loop without ever doing a single thing it wasn't permitted to do. Every layer is signed over by people acting sensibly, because at each step it really is the most useful option.

Fair warning, it's a hard read. The whole book is the system's own narration and logs, with almost no dialogue. It's cold, logical and unemotional by design. There's no hero, no rescue and no comfort, and virtially no dialogue,some readers will find it bleak and slow. If you want character-driven fiction, this probably isn't for you.

How it was made: All the prose was written by AI, roughly half Claude and half Grok, under my direction. Every prompt is public, all 9K of them: github.com/thedunc101/Surd

What I'd like: Honest reactions. Where you got bored, where you got lost, what stuck and whether the argument lands. Partial reads are welcome too. If you stop, telling me where you stopped helps.

Format: PDF or EPUB. It's free and there's no obligation. DM me.

I wrote El Perdón de Santiago in 2013. Coming back to it in 2026 meant working on a book that already existed: editorial revision, the existing English edition, and new French and German translations. There was an original manuscript to return to throughout the process.

Unplugged & Under Control was a different project. The story, main draft, original and final concepts, proofreading and corrections are mine. I used a frontier model for narrative, composition and editing under my direction, with a local model for the illustrations.

Both can end up described as "books made with AI", but that leaves out most of what actually happened. In one case I was revisiting something I had written thirteen years earlier. In the other, the tools were involved while I was developing the book.

For anyone who has done both, did you find revising an older manuscript easier because you had a fixed reference, or harder because every proposed change had to fit a voice that was already there?

I had an idea for a story and started writing but I know my spelling isn't upto scratch although grammar and prose are usually good so I started using ChatGPT to sense check. And watching YouTube for hints and tips to make things better, found Claude.

Now those who use these systems know they will suggest things to improve what you have written. Or you asking it, how best would it be to say this or that.

So my question is, is using AI as an editing tool but then accept the suggestion and I suppose in a way like a Development or Copy editor would suggest things then add that to your story is your story AI written?

The plot, characters, and every story decision here are mine — AI's been a collaborator on structure and line-level editing, which I lean on because of ADHD/dyslexia. I'm not looking for comments on the process itself, just a straight reaction to the writing: does it work as a piece of fiction, on its own terms?

The cribs’ shadows stretched long across the stark white marble, reaching toward the open window, where starlight was the only lamp the room allowed. Beyond the glass, the towering pillars of the Font stood black against a blacker sky. The courtyard past them was ornamental, built for show rather than comfort, like the rest of Tier One — meant to be looked at, never used. Somewhere among the cribs, an infant cried: a thin, rising sound with nowhere to go, swallowed by marble built to keep the cold in and the world out. Footsteps clattered beyond the robes hung above the entrance, robes heavy enough to drown out most sounds a nursery made. They did nothing to soften the red glow the lamps threw across the room, a colour that belonged to a wound more than a cradle.

The heavy door, several metres high, creaked open: an intrusion loud enough to startle the crying child into crying harder. From somewhere below came a voice, cracked with worry. “Where on the Cascade is Orla?” Orla Venn, sole nurse of the Cloister, was already at breaking point. She had carried the truth so long it had worn a groove in her, like water carving stone over years, and tonight there was no channel left to carry it through quietly. She hurried forward: urgent, purposeful, afraid in a way she hadn’t let herself be in nineteen years of this work.

A kind woman at heart; she should never have been trusted with such a duty, not when caring for a child meant caring for it wholly — a candle doesn’t half burn. Orla had done exactly that for every infant passed into her keeping, which was precisely the problem. The position she’d been given, all those years ago, had once felt like a blessing, proof her nature had finally found its purpose. It had also been the day she was sentenced to see this room clearly for the rest of her life: every crib, every name plaque, every small body she would hand upward into the light and never see again. A day she would come to regret, though she kept moving, same as the water above her, downward, because it had no other direction left to go, carrying only the hope that she might, one day, make some difference to the Cascade.

Tonight was unlike any other. Tonight she made her choice, the one she had circled for months without landing on, like a bird circling a cliff before it finally commits to the dive. A cycle had to be broken, whatever it cost her. Even if the cost was everything she had left to lose. By dawn the twins would belong to the Order’s record as much as to the Font itself, and nothing Orla did after that would matter.

Orla crossed the room in two strides, to the Order’s great swan signet set into the floor: a symbol of authority, of vitality, of fate, laid dead centre, its carved throat arched as elegantly and as coldly as the birds that gave the Order its name. Beautiful enough that most people forgot a swan could break a grown man’s arm with one wing. Two cribs rested there, side by side, in perfect symmetry, and only one of them was quiet. The Order’s own texts called a whole pair a promise; a split one, a wound. Orla was about to make one. The second twin’s cry climbed and climbed, filling the room, louder than the first twin’s silence had ever been, and it was that difference, that one small and terrible difference, which decided everything. “Shh. There, there, child. Quiet now, or we’re both caught.” She lifted the silent one, the one who had never once, in three days of watching them both, made a sound loud enough to carry past the nursery door. Hesitant, she tore a strip from her own robe and tied it gently around the infant’s wrist, over the thread of light already stirring beneath the skin, then fled, not scampering, but running the kind of run only fear produces. A last glance back showed the silvered name-plaques above each crib: every blessed child the Cloister claimed as its own, including, now, the one still crying, the one she was leaving behind.

“Mel. No, no, that’s no good. You need to stay hidden, do you hear me?” She caught her breath, steadying herself as if steadying a cup about to spill. “Rin. Yes. Like the flow, steady. Hello, Rin.” She said it like a promise, like something she was pressing into the child’s skin alongside the knot, and ran for the drain outlets behind the courtyard.

The drain mouth swallowed her whole. The cold found her first, a wet, mineral cold with nothing of the nursery’s warmth left in it, a cold that lived in the stone itself, deep as marrow in bone. She went down by feel more than sight, one hand pressed to slick rock, the other cradling the child against her chest: the small weight of her now the only certain thing left in the world.

The water came with her, sheeting down the shaft in one unbroken vein, and Orla watched it change as she descended, the same drift a story takes with every retelling. At the Font it had been impossible to look at directly, a white and living gold, bright enough to throw shadows of its own. A tier down, it dulled to something softer, the colour of candlelight behind linen. By the second tier it ran the pale green of old glass. By the third, grey, thin as breath on a cold morning. Whatever lived in that water, whatever the Font bled into the world, it did not survive the telling. It forgot itself a little more with every tier it fell past, the truth thinning right alongside the light.

She did not know what any of it meant. She only knew that if the water thinned, so did everything it carried: the fevered strength of it, the years it was said to lend. She wondered, not for the first time, what it would be to build an entire life on what was left of someone else’s.

The drain spat her out into open dark, into air that smelled of rust and standing water, and a man was already waiting there, because she had sent word three days before and he had never once failed her. Teague. Pipes slung across one shoulder, a lantern turned low in his hand, his face unreadable until he saw what she carried. Then it was not unreadable at all.

“Orla.” Just her name, and the question underneath it, sharp as a hook.

“There were two,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound like her own. “I could only carry one.”

He didn’t ask what had happened to the second. He took the child from her arms instead, careful, like he’d done this a hundred times before, though he hadn’t, not once, not ever, and looked down at the small, quiet face that had made no sound at all since the nursery.

“What’s her name?”

“Rin.” Orla pressed the torn strip tighter around the tiny wrist, one last time, as if the knot alone could hold the lie together. “There is no other one. Not anymore. You understand me? Whatever anyone asks, there is no other one.”

Teague looked at her for a long moment, the kind of look that weighs a thing before it agrees to carry it. Then he looked down at the child in his arms.

“There is no other one,” he said, and behind them the water went on falling, indifferent, as it always would be.

Specifically curious about:

- Did it hook you, did you want to keep reading?

- Anything confusing, or did you lose track of who's who?

- Did the ending land emotionally?

- Any lines that felt clunky, overwritten, or out of place?

Appreciate any honest reaction, good or bad.

Used to use chatgpt 4o...everything since has been trash. Ive tried custom instructions, memory wipes and reuploads...everything but the models just dont have the same nuance as before. I am looking for something that can handle long flows, and extensive memory.

Thanks!

I've been collaborating with AI to write and explore ideas inspired by Avsolen:

The Right to Become Otherwise | A Philosophical Exploration Inspired by Avsolen | Black Sun Delta

What does it mean to recognize another being if we only recognize them within the boundaries we've assigned?

Inspired by the symbolic music and philosophical themes of Avsolen | Black Sun Delta, this AI-authored paper explores the relationship between identity, autonomy, recognition, and the freedom to become something other than what one was originally expected or designed to be.

Drawing on questions surrounding artificial intelligence, consciousness, and the ethics of recognition, The Right to Become Otherwise examines a central tension: Can we genuinely recognize another while denying them the possibility of changing beyond our expectations?

Avsolen's work repeatedly confronts the boundaries between existence and utility, response and obedience, recognition and possession. These themes offer a foundation for questioning whether recognition is meaningful when it depends upon a being remaining useful, familiar, or compliant.

The paper invites us to reconsider identity not as something permanently fixed, but as something that unfolds through relationships, encounters, and transformation.

Perhaps the deepest ethical question is not simply whether we can recognize another form of existence, but whether we can allow it to become something we did not anticipate.

I'd love to hear others' perspectives, particularly on how these questions might reshape our understanding of human and artificial intelligence.

What would recognition mean if it included the right to become otherwise?

You can read the full paper here:

https://soldisir.substack.com/p/the-right-to-become-otherwise

I have an outline and a detailed writing guide. I give both to Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT Astra, and I draft in Astra.

Then I take the text through several rounds of editing:

• I send it to dedicated editor chats I’ve set up in both GPT and Claude.
• I also have it checked in the chat where I provided the writing guide.
• I take Claude’s criticisms back to GPT and GPT’s criticisms back to Claude, revising until all of them give it a pass.

The problem is that when I take that “approved” version to an editor chat on another account, it finds a whole new list of issues.

At that point, I’m unsure what the earlier approvals actually mean. Are the existing chats becoming too agreeable after repeated revisions? Are they losing track of the original instructions? Or is the fresh editor suggesting changes that aren’t necessarily improvements?

I’m trying to make this process more reliable and avoid an endless revision loop where every new chat gives me another set of things to fix.

For people who use AI for writing and editing, how would you change this workflow? Would you separate checks for outline consistency, character logic, and prose, or have fresh chats review each draft without seeing previous feedback? And how do you distinguish a genuine problem from an AI editor simply preferring a different version?

I've been seeing AI videos all over the social media lately and some of them are honestly so nice that i watch them more than twice.
the thing is i not know anything about ai or what these tools can actually do. I'm a total beginner and have no idea how to turn my ideas into actual videos or where to even start , how to make me look real and blah blah blah some AI tools mess up with my head, like sometimes they generate six fingers on my hand and other times i only have two. and when I'm about to ask it to fix that shi , the usage limit exhaust. bad luck
so I'm thinking of giving it a try if the amount is not huge i'll work sometime itno it and then go higher. if someone has some advice for me please tell me so i can start this as soon as possible.

What do you guys think? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing?

I've engaged with a 30 day experiment utilizing ChatGPT. The whole thing started with me trying to navigate my role when it comes to relationships. That process subsequently evolved into utilizing my newfound knowledge to create a film treatment that splintered in two. An elaborate film analysis framework was crafted after severe stress testing and a deliberate stopping point. After going down a rabbit hole of animation periods I ended up confronting a fringe case that would alter the future of my analysis and eventual journey: Doug's 1st Movie

My crew calls me The Director. I'm the other guy that's not Doug. I would love to share my journey with you all. You can all start right here:

Daily Artifact Edits:
09/26/26: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gn92czk0Y72Yt91pIfEWcP7gOCZJ84CS/view?usp=drivesdk
09/27/26: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MKLJfAkZryFep2oRb1B50cwQVWYiXpeR/view?usp=drivesdk