u/human_assisted_ai

I see lots of comments like, “You use AI and you call yourself ‘a writer’?”

It makes it sound like my goal is to post Instagram photos with me sitting in front of a laptop with captions like “I’m a writer; be impressed.”

My goal is to make money by self-publishing novels that people want to buy. That’s it.

My goal is not be a poser who struts around trying to convince people to attribute some prestigious label to me.

Does the “writer” label matter to you? Is labeling anything (e.g. AI-assisted vs AI-generated) something you find important enough to spend significant time on?

AI-generated prose doesn't have to be good to be useful.

When an AI-assisted writer brainstorms with AI, not every idea that AI comes up with has to be a gem. The (human) writer cherry-picks the good ideas and ignores the bad ideas and, sometimes, a bad idea leads the writer to a good idea. AI still "assists" even though it isn't an infallible oracle where the writer just sits back and blindly accepts whatever AI says.

It's the same for AI-generated prose. AI writes a lot of mediocre prose but that doesn't mean that it's useless. Like AI-assisted, AI sometimes generates some good prose mixed among the bad. The (human) writer cherry-picks the good prose and replaces the bad prose and, sometimes, some bad prose can be quickly improved to turn it into good prose.

A writer doesn't need to sit back and treat every piece of AI-generated prose as perfect or unusable trash. Writers can be selective. Writers can edit.

This is why the "AI-generated prose is bad" argument doesn't make sense to me from a logical perspective. (It makes sense from an emotional perspective, though.)

I use AI-generated prose because, even though I have to be selective and have to edit, it works well enough that it's faster and better than NOT using AI-generated prose at all.

It's not about laziness or low standards. It's about efficiency. I've figured out a way to make AI-generated prose work well enough for my purposes such that I can work more efficiently with the tool than without it.

In a comment, I said:

The traditional publishing industry is at a bad place. Wait for traditional publishing to get to a better place (or self-publish).

There are (a) no standards, (b) people accuse others of AI use without proof and (c) agents/publishers shoot and ask questions later.

I’m a traditionally published author too and I won’t even consider traditional publishing until they get their act together.

What could the traditional publishing industry do to "get their act together", even if it's an outright ban on using AI in any way?

1. What would the standard be?
2. What would be the mechanism to prove that AI was used or not used?
3. What would be enforcement to prevent agents and publishers from reneging and abandoning authors over unfounded AI accusations?

For example (just a junk example to demonstrate, this is an intentionally stupid proposal):

1. No AI prose generation
2. Authors must use certified software with full audit tracking (or not eligible traditional publishing)
3. Standard contracts in which agent or publishers pay a fee for reneging or abandoning authors; agents and publishers must register with an industry-wide association that publicly lists their reneges/abandonments and the penalties they've paid

Let me try this again.

When I posted “Writing with AI isn’t going away… ever”, several anti-AI writers commented that AI writes badly, nobody buys it, is unethical, has no soul, should be disclosed, rots your brain, isn’t copyrightable, won’t get an agent, proves you are a bad writer and so on.

Even if that’s all true, writing with AI still won’t go away… ever. AI will part of the writing landscape, there will always be people who write with AI and some of those AI books will get some sales.

AI will get better ($100B+ in AI model research each year) and more writers will use it (if only to find synonyms). Also, anti-AI forces will get tired, will be slow to market and be progressively outcompeted.

As an AI-using writer, how to you foresee AI being deeper woven into writing, how to you see writing with AI getting greater acceptance and how will you leverage early adoption of this technology to gain a competitive advantage over writers who don’t use AI? Do you expect that to be forever or is there a limited window?

NOTE: As usual, anti-AI and other junk comments will be removed and their authors may be subject to bans.

You have 2 strategies you can use to write with AI:

1. Search for and use the best AI model

2. Develop generic AI prompts that work on most AI models

Both are time-consuming so it’s hard to do both. An hour that you spend on one (researching a new AI model) is an hour that you can’t spend on another (making a better prompt).

Which do you favor? Why?

I favor the second.

Do you consider yourself a strong or weak prompt engineer?

Note: As usual, anti-AI and non-AI comments will be removed and their authors may receive 3-day bans.

Lots of anti-AI writers hope that AI is a fad that every writer (literally every single one) will give up on it eventually.

They hope that there will be an AI bubble stock market crash and that will cause big tech to shut down their AI technology or, at least, raise prices by huge amounts so it will be unaffordable to most writers.

As near as I can tell, that’s not going to happen.

AI will always be in writing from now until forever.

They can’t even really expect AI to stagnate. It will get better all the time, a little in some years, a lot in other years.

I genuinely feel bad for anti-AI writers who are looking for some relief from the “AI wars”.

AI will always be antagonizing them. People will be using AI to write novels forever. AI will be mixing it up (or mixed in) with the publishing industry.

EDIT (from the comments): The purpose of this post is to try to understand if, when and how the writing with AI debate will be resolved from the POV of people who write with AI. It is not an invitation to anti-AI POVs or content.

EDIT: I unremoved and approved the low-effort, off-topic and anti-AI junk comments so we could all enjoy them.

Note: As usual, anti-AI comments will result in a 3-day ban.

About 1.5 years ago, I learned AI from a guy who always said: "I love anti-AI people! More opportunities for me!"

Over on r/writers in their Monthly AI Discussion Thread, most of the writers don't use AI much (maybe for research or some such) and are mostly anti-AI.

I like to go over there periodically to take their temperature and see what they are saying, see what they know and don't know about AI, see what their level of AI knowledge and AI skill is and, frankly, see just how far behind they are.

They've been particularly anti-AI over the past few months and that always reassures me: more opportunities for me (or us).

They always think that rants about ethics, being a "real writer", downvotes, agents, "soulless", "intention", "flat", "I tried AI once and it sucked" and witch hunts make a speck of difference when they don't.

They seem to think that the anti-AI resistance will go on forever and, in 10 years, AI will be no better than it is today. They think that, in 10 years, traditional publishers won't be publishing AI books (if you ask me, AI-generated books even) and that the witch hunts and "they used AI" scandals will still be as strong as ever.

But, as near as I can tell, traditional publishers will eventually and inevitably publish AI books (novels). Big Tech does a ton of AI research every year, AI gets better every year, the novels written with AI get better and, well, anti-AI doesn't. Nobody can fight that kind of curve and win: if AI writing is improving by leaps and bounds and non-AI writing is essentially flat, AI wins eventually and inevitably. AI will just tear down anti-AI a brick at a time.

I really wonder where all these anti-AI and non-AI writers will be. How far behind will they be? Will the elusive "one prompt novel" eventually arrive such that they can easily catch up? Or will writing with AI become more and more techie until traditional writers are out of business?

That would be a shame but, since I use AI (even generate prose), it doesn't really affect me personally. But, still, I really wonder what will happen to all these writers.

FYI: As usual, anti-AI comments on this post will result in a 3-day ban. Take them to r/writers .

I’ve gotten more experience generating the same scene with Claude (Sonnet), ChatGPT and Grok (and integrating them into a single scene).

I switched to Grok Expert from Grok Auto which always seemed to choose Grok Fast. This has made a huge difference. Grok Fast forgets things from the beginning of a long prompt! Grok Expert is competitive with Claude, though, so that minor change solves everything.

It’s rare that any of them produce a good scene. Even Claude which I’d rate as slightly better than the others usually produces a scene with some weak writing in it. So, Claude being “the best for writing” doesn’t mean that it usually writes well.

In fact, Claude’s harsh session limits (except on the most expensive plans) make Claude’s very slight advantage over ChatGPT and Grok Expert not worth it. I canceled Claude Pro (use free Claude instead) and I don’t mind being limited to ChatGPT and Grok Expert for some scenes. I’d even say that “Claude being the best for writing” is technically true but misleading and a lie in practice.

I’ve been impressed by Grok Expert and am trying to make it my “Master Control Program” (instead of ChatGPT). That’s been working well though I’ve been using ChatGPT for so long and Grok Expert is new to me so it’s not easy to change that habit.

Some writers say that AI can’t write emotion while others say it can. Some writers say that AI can’t generate a good novel while others say it can. “AI can’t replace me!” It goes on and on.

When people say, “AI can’t…” I always wonder, “Which AI? What AI provider? What model?” But they seem to imply all of them. And models change all the time. “So what time period? Currently or for the foreseeable future?”

Is there some unstated “I wish…” phrase before all these statements? “I wish AI can’t write emotion” or “I wish AI can’t generate a good novel” and “I wish AI can’t replace me”?

I had an interesting discussion on r/WritingWithAI today:

https://reddit.com/r/WritingWithAI/s/siCCL69fDZ

I commented (this is a paraphrase):

I think what these conversations always miss is that $100B+ is spent on AI research alone in order to guarantee that next year’s AI is much, much better than what you are using right now.

Nobody can really say what AI is capable of today in the right hands, let alone 3 months from now or for the foreseeable future (and ignoring that some people can get better output out of AI than others).

I feel that AI-assisted proponents are describing what they wish to be true (and what is true for them) rather than what actually is true for everyone and for all time.

Coral Hart from the NYT has her AuthorRythm ( https://authorythm.ai ) service coming up to speed and it can create a first draft of a 5-book romance series overnight. And, guess what? She benefits from that $100B+ instantly (including Claude’s new Fable model).

What do AI-assisted writers get? They are still stuck spending 3+ months brainstorming with AI just to get 1 book.

What about next year? AuthorRthym will be writing better books even if they change nothing because that $100B+ pretty much guarantees better plots and prose and she gets that automatically.

AI-assisted writers? Nope.

AI-assisted writers are backwards facing: always focused on what AI couldn’t do in the past and essentially betting (and loudly proclaiming) that that $100B will yield zero every single year.

How do they justify that claim?

By saying that AI has no soul, “AI can’t write like me”, etc, etc. The argument is essentially, “AI can’t write good prose because, if it could, that would threaten my identity as a good prose writer.” I mean, if AI can or eventually can write prose just like an AI-assisted writer, then why should a human take a month to the same thing that AI can do in 12 hours? But this has nothing to do with AI technology and everything to do with the AI-assisted writer’s identity as a “real writer”.

When Fred Graver had Coral Hart on the WritingWithAI podcast, Fred said that AI can’t write emotion and Coral Hart contradicted and dismissed him immediately saying AI can write emotion.

Why did Fred say this? Because he’s an AI expert? Because he had done a through study of all available AI models and come to this conclusion?

No. Well, we can’t say for sure but, to me, it looked like Fred, representing the AI-assisted writer camp (and Coral representing the AI-generated camp), Fred said this because his identity hinged on AI not being able to write emotion. Fred needed to preserve his identity as an AI-assisted writer where one of his unique and necessary contributions to the writing process was being able to write with emotion. So, he concluded first that AI can’t write emotion.

That’s not the way that logic works. You don’t make up a “fact” first and then cherry-pick evidence to try to make it true. Especially with $100B+ every year fighting to prove you wrong.

Which is all to say that AI-assisted is doomed in the long run. AI-generated will get faster and better and AI-assisted will fall further and further behind as its manufactured justifications are proved more and more decisively untrue.

Ask Anything THREAD! 1 is here:

https://reddit.com/r/AIWritingHub/s/yCTOaMt94n

Ask anything and let the members answer your question!

Any issues with this sub's new moderation?

I became this sub's moderator almost 6 weeks ago. Anything that you want to see more of or less of?

I’ve been super busy with building a full time AI novel writing business (details on other subs) so I have been slow to mod.

Sorry about the anti-AI comments not being removed promptly. I took action yesterday and today. Yesterday, I added new content removal reasons and today I handed out a 3-day ban for anti-AI comments (to the exactly the user that you’d expect).

I will continue to issue warnings to new anti-AI users who get into the long tit-for-tat exchanges but I’m now issuing bans. Send me ModMail if you want me to add a user to my anti-AI watchlist.

If you want to tell me anything, you can either comment publicly on this post or send ModMail privately.

Since January 2026, I've paid for and taken several non-AI writing courses. When I found some in March, I paid for and took several AI writing courses. It's been interesting.

Both types of courses have outlining, then writing, then editing.

At first, the non-AI writing courses were really great because, as it turns out, outlining is really important and translates really well from the non-AI realm to the AI realm. Outlining is somewhat easier with AI but it's pretty much the same process.

Then, I went into the writing portion of the non-AI classes and it was a nightmare. All the stuff about self-discipline, daily word count and taking months to write a first draft is totally irrelevant with AI. I saw people painfully struggle to write without AI, exhausted, depressed, put out of commission by family issues, day job issues and health issues. All that trauma is unnecessary. I despised the writing portion of the courses. Write your first draft with AI in 1 - 2 weeks, instead.

Editing has been okay. It's kind of in between: not as useful as outlining but not as irrelevant as writing.

Overall, non-AI courses: outlining = B+, writing = F, editing = C.

Now, the AI writing courses.

I loved the AI writing courses at first. They were a breath of fresh air, they moved quickly and they were directly applicable compared to the non-AI writing courses.

I had my own way of writing with AI but it was great to compare and contrast how I did it with a completely different AI writing technique and figure out the pros and cons. The courses also showed me a lot of writing software which I had heard of but procrastinated on. It was great to look over someone's shoulder and be compelled to learn it myself.

But the bloom is coming off the rose. The AI writing courses have some problems as well.

The AI writing courses are combative, not collaborative. I can ask questions but I'm treated dismissively. I feel disrespected.

The AI writing techniques in the AI writing courses generally are stronger artistically and weaker technologically. They show strong writing skill but show a weak understanding of AI and tech. This results in more expense (in money, time and effort) for weaker first drafts.

The AI writing courses make several major business errors. They could permanently 3x their sales and profits instantly if they took a day to fix these 2 - 3 obvious business blunders. By comparison, non-AI writing courses make only minor business errors.

Overall, AI courses: outlining = A, writing = B, editing = C.

I feel like I'm fast approaching the point of diminishing returns with my current batch of both non-AI and AI writing courses. I'm not entirely there yet but I feel like I'll leave all of them behind later this year.

For non-AI writing courses, it's their obsolescence and lack of AI, really: it's a lot of friction to apply their non-AI knowledge to AI. For AI writing courses, my AI writing artistic and tech skill is outpacing and surpassing theirs; they also have no community to grow with.

I honestly don’t think that there’s a significant Human Premium. I know lots of people think that many readers will pay €10 (or even €2) when the AI equivalent is €1. But I think that this is false and there’s no reason to think that it’s true.

I think that nearly all publishers will say, “AI may have been used in the writing or publishing of this work” in the fine print. They’ll CYA so they won’t get caught if AI slips into the process without them being aware. They’ll just give up on trying to capture the imaginary Human Premium and use that “AI may have been used in the writing or publishing of this work” phrase to save the time, trouble and risk of picky auditing.

They’ll still get copyright and still easily defend copyright because any infringer will have to prove that AI was used enough and in such a way as to void copyright. Which will be expensive and risky for the infringer.

Any other visions for how the EU AI regulations will play out? Am I misunderstanding the AI regulations?

From your POV, of course.

I’m also interested in any significant news that indicates that anti-AI is gaining ground, though I doubt that there is any.

I became this sub's moderator 2 weeks ago. Anything that you want to see more of or less of? Too much tools spam? Not enough tools spam? ;)

FYI:

Believe it or not, auto-mod (Reddit's moderation robot) was moderating regularly and there was a 9-month backlog in the moderation queue. I cleared out the queue a week ago and approved almost everything. Auto-modded content was random and probably just trolls abusing the "report abuse" option.

There are no banned users.

The previous mod got in touch with me and was cool. They said that they didn't really know how to moderate so they just left it. We came to informal agreement that I'd approve any posts or comments that they wanted which I think was among their biggest concerns about me becoming a moderator.

I've been approving almost everything (even posts and comments that are flagged to be removed) except posts that are just profanity. Is this the right policy? Let me know.

I've debated replacing the sub icon but I think that we're all used to the purple blob so I'll leave it for now. If you don't like the purple blob, let me know. I recently updated my other subs, r/BetaReadersForAI and r/selfpublishForAI , was cutesy icons so you can take a look over at those and see if you'd prefer something like that. (Probably nobody cares.)

If you want to tell me anything, you can either comment publicly on this post or send ModMail privately.

Here's a link to a description: https://authors.ai/marlowe/

There are 2 kinds of reports: Basic (which is free) and Pro ($20/month for 4 reports).

I signed up for free Basic reports and, 1 - 2 weeks later, I was offered 2 months of Marlowe Pro (4 reports a month) for $10/month.

The Basic report is manuscript statistics on steroids. It's not AI but it offers convenient info like word count, repeated phrases, cliches, possible profanity, dialogue to narrative ratio and more. It's all numbers, charts and graphs.

The Pro report is the Basic report plus AI analysis of characters, settings, themes and more. Unlike the Basic report, it's subjective essays evaluating and analyzing your novel to generate recommendations to improve it.

My review of Marlowe Pro reports:

You'll probably pay $1,000+ for a human dev editor so $2.50 - $5 for an AI dev edit report is a good deal.

I have mixed feelings about the reports themselves. They correctly identified some weaknesses in my sci fi and romance novels, though I felt that they missed one or two others.

Over time, I imagine the reports becoming more useful as I get more familiar with them and know better how to leverage the report. You can just dump the report into AI with your novel and have AI do its best to apply the recommendations. You can also use it, not only to fix this novel, but, by knowing what to look out for, you can write future novels to avoid things that you know that Marlowe will flag. (No promises that that actually results in a better novel.)

There's several shortcomings in my opinion:

1. Marlowe is unnecessarily picky. It only accepts .docx and .epub. You have to strip out all the front and back matter, images, tables, pretty much every kind of formatting so that it's essentially just plain text with headings and fonts. This is annoying and, if you miss something, Marlowe isn't smart enough to skip it.
2. Marlowe shows its reports either on a website or a PDF. That's pretty limiting, too. Furthermore, my PDF included a "press this button to see more" image (which of course didn't work) which shows that their PDF generation is pretty sloppy.
3. The report is static. Unlike a human dev editor (and unlike other chatbot AIs), Marlowe Pro does not allow you to ask followup questions and dive deeper into the feedback. That's a real shortcoming because, if you want to dig deeper, you're stuck. There's no way to get more detail.
4. For a 6 year old company, I feel that the site experience is too basic, buggy and rickety. They seem to know a lot more about AI and dev editing than they do about how to code a website.

Still, I recommend paying for the Marlowe Pro reports. I think that their value will grow over time as you learn better what to expect, how to interpret the report and how to mitigate common issues that it flags while you are writing (or generating with AI).

It's been forever that I've been meaning to check it out.

Their website that's been around since Q4 2024! (Maybe they'll ship someday.)

https://trythoughtly.com

Their YouTube channel with exactly 1 video and 1 subscriber.

https://www.youtube.com/@TryThoughtly

That 1 YouTube video: https://youtu.be/UcSzBJ0dnS8

Any opinions?

u/George-Smith-Patton:

I saw that your post with the image about 1 - 15 Acceptable AI Uses image was removed from r/WritingWithAI . I encourage you to post it here on r/BetaReadersForAI and I'll approve it. Thank you.