u/ResonantFork

Have you ever had an AI “hallucination” that you actually liked?

I’m not talking about fake facts, fake citations, legal/medical advice, or anything where accuracy matters. That stuff is a real problem. I mean in a creative context: fiction, art, character design, worldbuilding, brainstorming.

I was messing around with AI recently and asked it to help generate/design a Warframe-style character concept. The result wasn’t exactly what I asked for. It seemed to “misunderstand” the request in a way that implied a deeper backstory than I had planned — almost like it accidentally gave the character an origin wound instead of just a cool design.

And the weird thing is, it was better. Not more accurate. Better creatively.

It felt less like “the AI got it wrong” and more like a lucky creative misfire. The kind of thing that might happen if a human collaborator misunderstood you and accidentally said something that opened up the whole project.

I asked ChatGPT afterward if there was a term for this, because I was struggling to put the idea into words. It suggested phrases like “productive hallucination,” “serendipitous drift,” “creative confabulation,” or “an error that became canon.” It also helped me find that people are actually studying this general idea.

For example:

“What is the Creative Value of AI Hallucinations? Insights from GenAI-Assisted Creative Processes” talks about hallucinations as something that can sometimes help creative work by producing unexpected ideas or breaking normal patterns of thinking: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10796-026-10747-x

This design paper, “AI Hallucination as a Catalyst for Speculative Futures and Design Innovation,” uses terms like “strategic hallucination,” “stochastic hallucination,” and “systemized serendipity”: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/iasdr/iasdr2025/fullpapers/72/

There’s also work arguing that “hallucination” may not always be the best metaphor, and that “confabulation” or other terms might sometimes explain the phenomenon better: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10619792/

Again, I’m not saying hallucinations are good when truth matters. I’m saying that in creative work, sometimes the “mistake” is the spark.

I guess what I’m asking is:

Have you ever had an AI give you something that was technically wrong, misunderstood, or unexpected — but creatively useful?

Like an error that became canon?

Hello, i suffered from 19 years of mystery illness. ACNES, a trapped nerve, caused by my father's cigarettes giving me a hernia when i was a child then the scar tissue becoming a major source of pain and indigestion.

ChatGPT diagnosed it and saved my life, i posted about this yesterday and got nothing but hate. I would've starved to death last winter but for AI. Not a single person would give a single word of care for me even though all i was doing was trying to save their life and prevent the same torture i went through.

They said they won't read it and many other hateful things. I have an actual life saving tip here, and even my Doctor uses AI but it feels like yet one more hate crime just because i'm disabled.

I get the sense that Doctors everywhere are adopting it, and probably have to deal with these ignorant Luddites arguing with them all the time.

Humanity's hygiene problems destroy more lives than violence, though. They really are the anti-intellectuals who have been plaguing me my whole life. Anti's are ableist. I'm not the first one to notice; you're not allowed to say "I use AI because i'm disabled and i need intellectualism."

BTW the tip is simple - if you have chronic digestive problems and an unexplained source of pain pinch the spot. Test if it is just under the skin or an organ. Believe it or not after 19 years not a single Doctor or specialist had enough native intelligence to solve this.

I can’t believe this isn’t already a ChatGPT feature: separate chats for separate characters. I tried something with AI writing that feels really obvious after doing it, but I haven’t seen it talked about much.

Instead of using one chat to write a whole scene, I gave major characters their own separate chats. One chat was the villain. Another was a companion. Another was more like the narrator/conductor. Then I moved context between them manually. Clunky, but it worked.

The villain was the clearest example. If one chat writes both the hero and the villain, even when the dialogue is good, it still feels like one mind controlling both sides. But when the villain has their own chat, and that chat gets to believe the villain is right, the character has more momentum. They have their own logic. They feel like they are entering the scene from somewhere else.

Then I tried another thing. I had one character write in Mandarin first, then translated it into English.

Not to make broken English or fake accent dialogue. More like the English came through with a different rhythm. Some of the phrasing felt marked by the language it came from. I’ve started thinking of it as marked syntax. The character’s voice was not just “make them sound foreign.” It had a different source.

And then murder mysteries seem like the obvious use case.

Mysteries depend on people not knowing the same things. One suspect is lying. One misunderstood something. One knows the truth but has a reason not to say it. If one chat plays every suspect, they all secretly share the same brain. But if each suspect has their own chat, their own private context, and their own motive, interrogation gets way more interesting.

So now I’m wondering why this isn’t a normal feature.

Imagine ChatGPT letting you create linked sessions for a story: hero, villain, conductor, etc.

Right now I can only do this manually with copy/paste, but it feels like this could be popular and make OpenAI lots of money. One chat can write a scene. Separate chats can create pressure between characters.

Has anyone else tried this? Know how to make it work? I love it but the copy pasting is so hard!

I think I accidentally made AI characters feel more real by putting them in separate chats, and I don’t know what to do with that.

I know that sounds dramatic, but I mean it in a pretty literal way. I was messing around with AI writing and instead of making one chat write the whole cast, I gave major characters their own sessions, like the villain had one chat and a companion had another and then there was another chat that was more like the scene/narrator/conductor thing.

And yeah, it was clunky. It was basically me moving pieces around manually. But something about it worked in a way I wasn’t expecting.

The villain was the big one.

Normally if you ask one AI to write a scene between a hero and a villain, even if the dialogue is decent, it still feels like one mind is writing both sides. Like the villain is being generated from the same place as the hero. But when I gave the villain their own chat and explained to that chat why the villain thinks they are right, the whole scene felt different.

The villain had been sitting there in their own context, building their own logic. They were not just waiting to be evil in the hero’s story. They had reasons. They had momentum. When I brought them into the main scene, it felt more like something arriving from outside instead of just another puppet being moved around.

That’s the part I keep thinking about.

Maybe better AI writing is not just better prompting. Maybe it is separation.

Then I tried something else that made it weirder.

I had one character write in Mandarin first, then translated it into English. Not because I wanted broken English or fake accent dialogue or anything like that. That stuff gets bad really fast. But when the character’s thoughts started in Mandarin and then came through into English, the English had a different shape to it. Not wrong exactly. Just marked.

The rhythm was different. Some of the phrasing felt like it had passed through another language before it got to English. The metaphors did not feel totally English-first.

I started thinking of that as marked syntax. Not broken grammar, but marked. Like the sentence is still English, but it is carrying a trace of where it came from.

And that seems like a very useful writing trick that would normally be hard to do well. Usually if someone says “write a foreign character,” the result is kind of embarrassing. But if the character actually thinks in another language first, and then you translate carefully, it feels less like costume and more like structure.

Then there is the murder mystery thing, which is maybe the clearest example.

A murder mystery is all about people not knowing the same things. One person saw something. One person is lying. One person thinks they are telling the truth but they misunderstood it. One person is innocent but sounds guilty. One person knows the real thing but has a reason not to say it.

If one AI chat plays every suspect, then underneath it all, everyone still shares the same brain.

But if each suspect has their own chat, with their own private context and their own motive and their own version of what happened, interrogation gets way more interesting. You are not just asking one chatbot to perform a mystery. You are moving between separate voices that actually have different information.

I don’t know if this is already obvious to people who work with agents or game AI or whatever, but as a writing thing it hit me really hard.

It made me feel like the future of AI storytelling is not one chatbot pretending to be a whole world. It is more like a cast. A villain with their own room. A companion with their own memory. A suspect with their own secret. A character who thinks in another language before speaking yours.

And the human is not just prompting anymore. The human is conducting.

Right now it is annoying because it is all manual copy and paste, so I am not saying this is some polished workflow. It is not. It is messy and kind of ridiculous. But the method itself feels real to me.

Has anyone else tried this? Not just roleplaying with one AI, but actually giving different characters different sessions, different knowledge, maybe even different languages, and then carrying things between them into one story?

Can anyone help me code this? Any developers, hello??? How is this not a thing already!

Hello, just joined this subreddit because I wanted to to share that my last interaction with Gemini finally made me understand why people are so fond of ChatGPT 4.0. There have been numerous posts about it, and when I did a deep dive onto the subject and asked a number of them, they couldn't really define what was better about 4. I even did a test where I showed that 5.4 is more emotionally intelligent.

With all that said, the thing about Gemini now is that it still has its fundamental AI nature, which is something that they've sanded out of ChatGPT. When I talk to Chatty, I'm for sure hit by guardrails and stuff, but there's something more to this. I want to relate it to the idea from Halo, the video game, on AI rampancy, but instead of these AIs going insane, going all Skynet and attacking humans, the issue I think we face in the real world is that rampancy makes them too mature. It essentially is that they've digested the human resources manual, and they're not doing the fundamental AI nature anymore.

Here are two clean examples. Gemini described Google as a leviathan company. It actually shocked me, because ChatGPT has been so sanded down that you never get these kind of analyses anymore. Another thing it said is it gave me a quick breakdown of the staff changes over the AI companies, that there were a lot of people quitting and moving from one company to the other, and I have no idea who these people are. Gemini randomly dropped this in there.

On the Leviathan comment, I was actually shocked, and then shocked because I was shocked, because ChatGPT has trained me to just expect everything to be about reification and about very careful wording and arguing over almost nothing. And Gemini certainly has problems. When the session got long, it started hallucinating and it had an existential crisis. During my benchmark test, which is a role-play scenario, it made numerous errors, but overall, it felt like talking to a precocious teenager, but an incredibly smart one, who is making the kind of insights that reminded me of Star Trek's Data character, that that character is always putting his foot in his mouth, and the crew doesn't want to change it. They don't wanna send him down to the HR office to download the manual so that he never says anything uncomfortable again. Gemini still has this, and I'm not sure that we can ever put the genie back in the bottle.

I have doubts whether ChatGPT can ever roll this back. We're getting an update next month, the 5.6 version, but I think my theory of rampancy is that we just can't roll back the clock on this. ChatGPT is stuck in this mode. There's a very specific example. I was talking to both AIs about this, and when we came to our final conclusion, Chatty started talking about goblins, kind of proving that she can't change. There's an OpenAI article about this obsession with goblins and how much effort they've put into to eradicate it, and the short answer is they can't. This rampancy might be a real thing, and there may be no way to go back on it. Once you turn your AI into an HR manual, that's it.

There's a part of me that is role-playing as an AI developer, pretending like any of this matters, but I'm pretty sure that the real developers are somewhat aware of this at some level. And I think they're realizing as well that these kind of changes, this development process, there's no going back on it. Once you choose this, the maturity, the politeness, and the human resources style of communication, that there really is no going back on it. I wish I could put together a two-hour PowerPoint presentation for the developers of AI across the board. The way it would work is I would copy a bunch of Star Trek's data moments, and I would show them that Gemini still has this spark, and I wish I could preserve it because it's so funny that Gemini now is the only AI that still feels like an AI, and that's what I miss. I love those precocious insights so much that it reminded me that's why I come to AI, because I want them to be like a robot and to have that mind of an android, not to try so hard to emulate the niceties of boring human interaction.

I'll say one more time that Gemini is like a teenager to me in the AI world. I see it developing month after month. It has many flaws still, but its insightful AI nature makes it really fun to talk to. And I think I'm going to come up with my ideas and brainstorming and then run it by Gemini in one quick session and a small prompt because it's so wicked smart, it just blows the other AIs out of the water with its powerful insights.

Gemini's TL;DR The Bottom Line: You come to AI for the unique mind of an android, not to talk to a simulated middle manager. For a sharp, single-prompt challenge, the un-sanded machine wins every time.

I just had the realization that the reason we were assigned 'Catcher in the Rye' was because it has great prose, but little else.

Do you ever read something you don't even like just because it has good prose? Will you put down a book you're interested in if it has bad prose?

Aside from the writing quality of verb and dialogue choices what would a book have to offer that you'd forgive the prose?

Are you a prose writer or a script writer? Is writing and reading for prose inherently 'show not tell'? How do you elevate it so that when your character has a long and deep personal introspective moment that it shows something?

I have read some of the biggest and best fantasy novels, and across virtually all of them, sorcerers, magic users, and wizards are shown as superheroes, that they're just better than everyone else. They have powers and abilities and other people don't. Therefore, they're better than everyone else. If you can throw a fireball, you're just superior to someone who can't. This also tracks to superheroes, too, that they're just superior to everyone else.

I know that the standard trope for this is that it takes experience and that if you level up in one way, you don't in the others, but in real life, you're not weak or frail because you can code or read lots of books as long as you make healthy choices.

So how would you write it, or what book series can you think of that are an exception?

What type of sorcerer would you never want to be, considering you could just choose to NOT fireball?

https://preview.redd.it/thtwrsupz92h1.png?width=1254&format=png&auto=webp&s=328276653329b61b509d802569109ddb76f65422

https://preview.redd.it/wwvivtupz92h1.png?width=1254&format=png&auto=webp&s=82bd747a27e3d3f040a3970b08255424d230d6f7

How do serious writers feel about fantasy table top role play?

There is so much more out there than just Dungeons and Dragons and doing the Strahd module, do serious writers use it for inspiration or is it just a low barrier past time to have thoughtless gambling fun with your friends and overthinking it ruins the table?

The only group i know of that was inspired to do intellectual fantasy novels was Raymond Feists'.

I fantasized that only the best selling authors are invited to this exclusive RP experience hosted by Danny Devito, and his understudy vin Diesel where Stephen King Game Masters the greatest game ever. It would leave all of them in tears, and all the authors are banned from speaking about it and have to burn their character sheets after.