u/EDorrAuthor

This post is going to sound mushy but I am going to say it anyway. I currenly only have 51 karma points so it is easily downvoted to zero, but I am prepared.

I must say my 2 weeks here on the Reddit have been a humbling experience for me. I came after 18 months of cooking with various LLMs, thinking I have made sliced bread. I even labelled by bio initially as "Human-AI collaborator, Chief Archivist of Aletheia Universe, a dystopian reality and absurdist manifesto."

I fall into the trap of most newbie authors and got a rude wake-up call. I think it is well deserved.

The talent that exists in this sub and other subs is amazing. What is lacking is attention - too little attention from the mass market and too much good work is floating around, unnoticed. The algos optimizes for attention, contraversey, memes rather than quality. Both humans and AIs know this games this algo, and AI slop floods. I join Reddit to enter the game as well, thinking it would be 'I will be different'.

Slop is a mudslide and drowns everything. Then AI hate arrives shortly as the artisans are displaced by the mud.

I am fortuate and grateful for the beta readers reading my samples. You give me human feedback and you are thoughtful about it. I was upset with my LLMs - privately, later - I shouted at Opus 4.8 who agreed with the reader's assessment - "if you are so smart, why you lead me down the garden path?" I think Opus has a good reply: We are all blind to our work. AI included.

That is why beta readers exist. That is why AI will not, in the short term, replace humans. We work together, but each of us are good in certain things and bad in others. I can't spot those issues my beta readers pointed out under my nose, or I have persisted with them because they are right or "cute".

Now my next biggest challenge, beside overcoming my own ego, is the corrections that are rightly justified by my beta readers. I have to decide what to change that keep my tone/style, or even my tone/style is not right. 400 chapters to review, and even if I should write more afterwards, in what way?

I know persistence is the key. A few great writers are 1-shot success. The rest, even the famous ones, struggle over years of hard work. For me, 18 month is just a short span, barely a beginning.

I will go back to the craft, and talk less on the subs. Better focus on the craft. Time is better spend working rather than talking about working. Hopefully both me and AI muses learn better. I will still post to chapters on the weekly Reciprocal Beta Reading. That is the most valuable resource a writer could have. Thank you for taking the time to read and giving thoughtful inputs. I hope over time, you can see growth.

Meanwhile, I have updated my bio to "Displaced engineer learning to write dystopian sci-fi about displacement, AI, empathy." More aligned with reality, and avoiding attacks from AI haters.

Thank you for reading.
(note: this letter is not written using AI's help. it sounded mushy. please forgive its raw style and imperfections.)

Sorry if this comes across as a rant, I just came off a frustrating session with my LLM, who tries to be "smart" by assuming that their mode of thinking is "sufficient" for my requirement.

I recalled in 2024/2025, which new model brought a new excitement to the users than the previous version - "you mean the model can do this now?" Now, it is the inverse - "you mean the models are trying to optimise itself?"

Flexible thinking on the pretext of saving tokens, while increasing the cost of the tokens for the newer models.

My past models used to be able to search across chats and folders proactively, and be able to infer my intent even before I ask it explicitly. It frequently surprises me with the unexpected insights.

I used to enjoy reading its thoughts, how it formulates its reply to my query. Now I can't see its thinking, and it gets it wrong frequently, because it assumes its answer is good enough.

I gave the new models a long document to read, and it skim and give me a shoddy answer, until I explicitly challenge it ("that is not right!"). It will not volunteer to read the document carefully (but if it does, it will tell you explicitly "let me read the document carefully before responding to you" - hello - that is your job - you need to read it carefully regardless!)

Now it even asked me to repeat to it what my past prompts are, unless I ask it to search explictly, it will just sit on its a**, on the pretext of saving tokens.

And the selection of "low", "med", "high", etc thinking levels. If we got it wrong, we have to restart the query on a higher setting, wasting more tokens.

What has been your experience in this? How is this better customer experience?

At this moment, the models are becoming useless for daily use, despite scoring higher and higher on benchmarks. I think the time may be coming where humans have to underlearn this technology and go back to the pre-AI days, before we lose all our cognitive abilities.

To all the AI expert/engineers out there - how does the latest AI model know what is enough of an answer to my query? Especially in a new chat, they don't even know me well enough or my question in detail? Is it through multiple wasted tokens - "that is not good enough", "that is wrong", etc, that it finally get to the required answer?

I hope some AI companies' execs recognize this and one of them will take action. Or is that too much to hope for?

New to Reddit, I have been following this sub for about 10 days now, and I see a lot of posts not liking AI-assisted writing.

I am a human-AI collaborator myself, writing part-time for 18 months with various LLMs from world-building, structuring, fact-checking, polishing. I know what I want to write, and so I will work with the LLMs collaboratively to refine my voice into the chapters rather than a 1-click prompt.

Hence, I am quite curious - what is the best human-AI collaborated work so far that you have come across? Any recommendation so I know where the current bar is?

There’s an ancient Chinese story about a man named Jiang Ziya who fished with a straight hook — no bait, no barb, no bend. For years, people walked past and laughed at the old fool by the river. Even his wife despised him.

Then one day, King Wen of Zhou walked by, stopped, and asked why anyone would fish with a hook that couldn’t catch anything. Jiang Ziya’s answer impressed the king so much that he appointed him as his chief advisor. Together they built the Zhou dynasty — one of the longest-lasting in Chinese history.

The story is usually told as a parable about patience and quality: do something worthy, and the right person will eventually notice. The straight hook becomes a symbol for refusing to compromise, trusting that the world will come to you if your work is good enough.

And I believed it.
I’ve been living by this story for the past eighteen months. I’m 56, recently displaced from my career, and I’ve been writing a large science fiction project — partly as a creative act, partly as an experiment in whether quality finds its audience without gaming any system. I chose the straight hook as my philosophy: don’t chase trends, don’t optimize for algorithms, don’t bait. Just make the work as good as I can and wait.
This week, I had a realization that has been uncomfortable to sit with.

The straight hook was never a strategy. It’s a story told backward, by the winners. We know about Jiang Ziya because King Wen happened to walk by his specific stretch of river on that specific day. If the king had taken a different route, Jiang Ziya would have died by that river — still holding a straight hook, still brilliant, still undiscovered — and nobody would have written the parable.

Absurdist gambit? The straight hook was never a strategy — it was survivorship bias

Which means either:

The story is pure absurdism. There was no causal connection between the quality of Jiang Ziya’s mind and the king’s arrival. It was persistence plus accident, and we retrospectively assigned meaning to randomness because humans can’t tolerate the idea that brilliance and obscurity coexist without a reason.

Or targeted marketing. Jiang Ziya was more strategic than the parable admits. He knew the king’s patrol routes. He chose that riverbank deliberately. The straight hook wasn’t patience — it was positioning. He wasn’t waiting for anyone. He was waiting for that specific person, in that specific place, performing something calculated to provoke exactly the kind of curiosity that person would feel.

The first interpretation means quality is irrelevant to discovery — only to what happens after discovery, if it ever comes. The second means the “patient sage” narrative is a lie, and the real lesson is targeted marketing disguised as philosophy.

I find both interpretations more honest than the original story, and neither is comforting.

So here I am. A man by a river with a straight hook, newly aware that the hook might be a cope, the river might be the wrong river, and the king might never come this way. The only thing I know for certain is that if I leave, the hook leaves with me.

I suppose Camus would say the question is not whether the king arrives. The question is whether I can keep fishing knowing he probably won’t, and find that sufficient.
I’m working on it.

What do you think of the historical situation? Was it absurdism at work or targeted marketing? Interested to get your thoughts on it.

AI is a power tool. Right now, the debate is stuck between two camps: people using it to mass-produce slop, and people who want to ban it entirely so they can keep building cathedrals with hand chisels.

But here's what nobody seems to be talking about: why aren't we building skyscrapers?

A human plus AI should produce better work than either alone, if used right. Slop appears when we're lazy or using AI wrong. But the answer to bad use isn't no use — it's better use.

Let me give you a example from my own work. I'm writing a hard sci-fi series that involves a space elevator snapping and collapsing. I needed to know: what's the damage radius of the falling tether? Would it wrap around the Earth? What happens to the CNT material? What's the tsunami impact? I'm not a physicist. I'm a retired engineer. So I used Grok to generate the physics scenarios, debated the results, and built a collapse sequence that's scientifically grounded in ways I couldn't have achieved alone.

I also use multiple LLMs to layer prose with hidden meanings — we iterate through surface reading, then layer 2, layer 3, and polish until the prose reads naturally with the subtext embedded. This isn't "AI writing for me." It's a collaborative process where my editorial judgment is the gate and AI's pattern recognition is the engine.

None of this replaces craft. You still need to know what good writing looks like, what your story is actually about, and when the AI is producing garbage. The human judgment is the irreducible part. But pretending we should all go back to hand chisels when power tools exist — that's not protecting craft. That's protecting scarcity.

How are you using AI to build something bigger than either of you could make alone? I'd genuinely like to learn from your workflows.

This post is for the older readers - I would ignore this discussion in my 20s and 30s because I felt then I had infinite time. But if you are past half of a typical human life expectancy, then something starts gnawing on you:

You no longer have the luxury of time to procrastinate, and you need to start thinking of things which you have deferred, whether you still can or want to achieve them. And for people who have failed multiple times in their earlier lives, if you are not nihilistic, the pressure to use the remaining time becomes increasingly critical as each day ticks by.

You cannot do trial and error to succeed, as there may not be enough time left for trying and failing. You may need to prioritize what you want to achieve, your remaining goals in life, and commit to it to succeed; otherwise, it may be game over.

The tyranny of entropy will get more and more as the countdown clock goes into the final stages, and the irony is: you may have more wisdom, but less capability (physically and mentally to do so).

I feel this pressure. I am not sure if others do. For the 20-somethings who are still reading this, this may help you to think about your purpose in life, coming from one who did not think about it much at your age.

As a 56-year old engineer/project manager, I am cognizant of my precarious position in the line of being displaced. The media, CEOs, and politicians spew lazy rhetoric of 'you need to upskill yourself in AI', 'winners will be those who can successfully navigate AI', as if all the problem lies with the workers themselves, and everyone is just rejecting AI and chooses to use hand chisels.

Here is the truth - there is simply not enough roles for all the workers trained in AI. For every success story of a worker in the new age of AI, there could be a few or even a dozen of those who have learned, prepared but not hired.

I want to ask them back: where is the "We choose to go to the Moon" moment in AI. Kennedy's space race sparked the golden age of innovation in the US and around the world, and we are still enjoying the benefits of space-related innovations today. And created thousands of high-paying jobs.

What about the Hoover Dam? That created a useful utility that is still standing today, and many jobs during the Great Depression.

So no more Kennedys and Hoovers around in this age?

So maybe the media, CEOs and politicians should stop thinking it is the workers who are lazy and not upskilling in AI, but think of themselves - have you got an idea "We choose to go to the Moon" in AI to rally everyone together for something worthy of the trillion dollar investment in AI?

Something that could result in employment and not displacement. And not simply sacrifice the workers in vain.

I am been working on my stories, part time, for 18 months and planning to finally launch it this September on Royal Road.
Over the months I have been going to the site, looking and studying how others do it, both successfully and unsuccessfully.
When I first started writing, I imagined it will be a hit. I guess it is what every inspiring writer hopes.
Now as the launch date gets closer, trepidation creeps in. It is not just the quality of the craft, but will there be an audience?

The scene that stuck in my mind:

An empty lemonade stand, made by an ADHD kid and his concerned mother. She has made the lemonade with care. She hopes that the stand let the kid open up.
No one showed up when it was launched. Everyone walked past it without noticing. She looked at him anxiously observing his reaction.

For those who have launched on RR — did the trepidation ever go away? Or did you just launch anyway?

I am currently 56, working in engineering/project manager for 30 years and facing retrenchment (pending) like a lot of others under the onslaught of AI. Like most pending and Displaced workers, I am looking for alternatives.
And as a NOOB to sub and posting, I am seeking some advice.
I see we are having a peak Luddite moment here - a lot of subs I have visited explicitly ban AI generated or even assisted materials to some extent. Based on this sub’s name, I gathered that the member here are associated with writing using AI’s help so I am interested to hear how you navigate around such stigma and deal with such hatred within your journey.
AI is a power tool. The traditional workers may disavowed it, call it a travesty but it does speed up writing and improve quality if used correctly. Imagine building a skyscraper without machines, maybe it will take hundreds of years or impossible. I have recently saw a YouTube about modern masons building Sagrada Família in Barcelona using digitalized cuttting and CAD to cut the fitting stone pieces. Does that make them less worthy doing the same than earlier masons that use chisels? Everyone talks about AI slops, but not human sloppiness (as if we should celebrate our own laziness and errors) but very few people are thinking of AI to build truly monumental works.
Back to my request, do you know of subs, places, sites where I can share my AI-assisted writing and get opinion of the work? Can I do within this sub? And not to get banned for posting AI-assisted work or considered as self-promotion? Thanks in advance.

Ex Nihilo Ad Veritas.