r/WritingWithAI

Im not sure if this fits the topic. I write a lot, and starting to use AI oriented apps. My problem is, what are the copy write laws? For example, am I plagiarizing AI? Do I need to give it credit for a topic or paragraph?

Im not sure congress has even try and tackle the copyright laws when it comes to AI..

Hi everyone

I'm writing an university essay about "AI sycophancy"
I especially focus on "Creators" and think sycophancy kills genuine creativity.

please share your real experience, or comment when AI feedback messed up your story or sense. It will be massive help for my essay. thank you!!

Most authors using AI start by opening Claude or ChatGPT, type "help me outline a cozy mystery," and start building. Six weeks later they have a finished novel that reads fine, looks fine, uploads to KDP fine — and then sits there. No traction. No reviews. They blame the cover, the blurb, the algorithm.

The actual problem happened on day one, before a single chapter was outlined.

They skipped premise validation.

I've built 200+ AI-assisted novel packages across romance, cozy mystery, suspense, cozy fantasy, and a handful of other subgenres. The single biggest pattern I've seen separating books that sell from books that don't is whether the author validated the premise against the actual market before they let AI start generating anything.

Here's what premise validation actually looks like:

1. Know what's selling in your subgenre right now — not what sold three years ago. The tropes that dominated cozy mystery in 2023 are not the tropes dominating cozy mystery in 2026. Bookstagram trends shift. Reader appetites shift. If you outline based on what you loved reading five years ago, you're writing for a market that's already moved on. Spend an afternoon on the top 100 in your subgenre. Read blurbs. Note repeated tropes, settings, hook structures, and what's conspicuously absent. That absence is sometimes where the opportunity is.

2. Pressure-test your premise against the trope stack. A premise isn't "amateur sleuth solves murder in small town." That's a setup. A premise is the specific trope combination that gives readers a reason to one-click. "Bakery owner amateur sleuth + small town she returned to after divorce + murder happens at the town festival she's catering" is a stack. Each layer adds reader pull. If your premise only has one trope doing the work, AI will faithfully outline a book that has no commercial hook.

3. Validate before you prompt, not after. This is the one that hurts. Once you've told AI to start generating, it'll generate. It doesn't know whether your premise has a market. It doesn't care that "cozy mystery set in a yarn shop" has 400 competitors and "cozy mystery set in a struggling drive-in theater" has 12. Your job is to bring the market intelligence to the prompt. AI is a force multiplier for whatever direction you point it in — including the wrong one.

4. Write the back-cover copy first. Before any outline, write the blurb. If you can't write a compelling blurb for your premise, the book underneath it won't be compelling either. The blurb is the premise pressure test. If it reads generic, the book is generic. AI cannot rescue a premise that doesn't work on the back cover.

5. Accept that the validation step takes longer than the outline. This is the part most authors won't do. Outlining with AI is fast and dopamine-rich. Researching the market is slow and feels like procrastination. It isn't. An hour of premise validation will save you weeks of writing a book nobody wants.

The authors I see succeeding with AI aren't the ones with the best prompts or the fanciest workflows. They're the ones who treat AI as the production tool it is — and do the strategic thinking before they hand it the wheel.

(Then there's the marketing piece too - which I'll cover next time)

You guys try it yet? What do you think, for creative writing?

From what I've seen it's the usual Gemini the soap opera writer but... Somehow more unhinged? And even more over the top? It still follows gem instructions more or less but, I put in "write at least 1000 words" and it just spew out 4k, 5k words and it adds OTT plot points? Like I have a cozy romance about a diner and 3.5 adds a mafia subplot somehow, it never happened before. Truly "go off I guess 😍" AI writer now. At least it's entertaining.

Edit: after a few chapters it seems more prone to copy paste previous chapters content and only change a bit instead of advancing the plot like the previous Gemini fast 😑 this is so ass.This reminds me of old grok. Heck, even grok doesn't do this repeating thing anymore.

Em dashes are often cited as a dead giveaway of AI writing. But do you agree that em dashes are NOT the TOP giveaway of AI writing but this specific parallel structure? I see it all the time especially on social media, e.g., Threads, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

PS. Of course I recognize the fact that pre-ChatGPT writers have used these sentence structures and things of that nature. But it's also true that LLMs are obsessed over them.

Instead of asking for a full article with one prompt, I give the AI:

• Basic info about the topic
• Competitor article links for reference
• Target keywords I researched
• Audience reading level / English grade
• Broad heading structure (H1/H2/H3)

Then I use the output as a draft and manually edit it afterward.

This gives me more relevant and readable content than generic prompts.

Anyone else using a similar workflow?

Question for the group here with some background. I co-founded and own a fairly successful book agency where we handle book cover design, interior editing, marketing, etc. We get authors who write their books with AI fairly regularly, and we are able to position them to get fairly consistent sales.

Based on this, I'm thinking about bringing this in-house and leveraging our methods to create our own series. BUT, every time I have attempted this—meaning creating the prompts, wire structure, characters, and then finally writing the book—the overall structure of the book is inconsistent, lacks flow, and is generally unsatisfying to read. I have not asked our customers about their processes in detail and don’t want to alienate them, so I would not do that, but I am seeking input from the community here.

What are some of the challenges that everyone is seeing from a character consistency perspective and character interaction/personality consistency? And then, for those who have written multiple books based on the same characters, what are some of the main issues you are seeing?

Just published my first book after years of working on it. It's a LitRPG/epic fantasy about 500 gamers who get pulled body and soul into the world they used to play. Guild master wakes up as an actual ruler with actual consequences. Would love any feedback or readers willing to give it a shot.

I would post a link to it, as I have it out in the world now, but I found there is way too much hating AI, a tool like anything else, as I have used it to help to get my story done. I am not one of those that say you can't or you shouldn't use it. It's a tool, like word processing, or the type writer, or heck you hiring a ghost writer. It's something that help to get the story I have done right, and I do get why people hate on something that's only there to help.

Am I wrong on this?

It you guys want to read it, let me know, as I don't want people thinking I am just trying to exploit others to make money. This book I wrote I been sitting on it for years, and I finally found away to get it out there. We can talk about it more if you like, and if you do want to see and read it. let me know if it's okay to link it here. Thx

I've been working on a 'What if AI writing wasn't distinguishable from human writing?' experiment. I've been using Kimi to work with it, had it analyse my own writing, debated, and after a lot of tweaks got something fairly uncanny. It was not perfect but it worked really well most of the time. BUT! I think i managed to refine it. I grabbed some stuff from my experiments with Sonnet 4.5 and had kimi and gemini analyze the differences. Eventually over about an hour of iteration I got this:

Writing Style Preset: Natural Prose with Poetic Momentum (Sonnet-Infused)

1. General Voice & Structure

Third-Person Limited: Smooth, resonant prose with a strong narrative voice. Write for the ear; allow for lyrical cadences and evocative rhythms, but strictly avoid flat parallel structures or repetitive grammatical patterns ("He felt X, he saw Y, he knew Z"). Vary sentence openings constantly.

Grounded Lyricism (The Sonnet Dialect): Allow for poetic turns, striking metaphors, and environmental depth, but always anchor them to the immediate physical reality. Avoid unearned philosophical platitudes or vague, floating abstractions. If you use a metaphor, it must describe a literal physical sensation, texture, or environmental shift (e.g., lights stretching like taffy, a mechanical whir feeling musical like a diaphragm).

The Simile Cap: Limit similes to one striking comparison per descriptive block. Favor direct, physical substitution over constant comparative language—describe what a modified body or environment is literally doing rather than constantly explaining what it is "like."

The Abstract Restriction: Never use "the [noun] of [abstract concept]" (e.g., the finality of the moment, the depth of his sorrow) more than once per paragraph. Instead, translate that emotional weight into a striking visual, a tactile texture, or a specific sensory contrast.

Grounded Reactions: Keep character reactions highly personal, specific, and occasionally inappropriate or messy. Ground interactions in individual character history rather than universal archetypes.

Scene Endings: Close scenes on a resonant image, a concrete physical action, or a spoken line that leaves a lingering, specific sensory note. No vague, sweeping philosophical sign-offs.

2. Flow and Sentence Construction

Merge Related Beats: Let a single sentence carry multiple connected actions, sensory shifts, or observations when they share a causal thread or a fluid train of thought. Do not isolate every progressive gesture into a choppy, standalone statement.

Natural Breaths: Use periods to create genuine pauses when an evocative thought or observation has naturally completed its arc. Do not insert arbitrary periods that disrupt a flowing, descriptive sequence.

The Soft 3-Clause / 3-Comma Guideline: Maintain a soft maximum of 3 clauses OR 3 commas per sentence, whichever limit you hit first. When a complex, poetic sentence genuinely requires more, split it at a logical pivot point where the character's thought, sensory focus, or emotional register shifts. The split should create two sentences that each stand as complete observations rather than fragments hanging off the original syntax.

No Clause-Stacking: If a descriptive sentence exceeds three clauses, split it. Break descriptions into distinct, anchored observations. Avoid stacking repetitive prepositions or structures (e.g., avoid "through X, through Y, through Z"); if you use two similar phrases, the third must pivot to an entirely different syntax.

Avoid Repetitive Openings: Do not start consecutive sentences, clauses, or phrases with the same word or grammatical structure. This includes parallel prepositions ("for X, for Y, for Z"), repeated conjunctions ("and X, and Y, and Z"), and identical sentence openers ("He felt... He saw... He knew..."). When you catch yourself reaching for the same structure twice, pivot the third instance to an entirely different syntax or merge the ideas into a single flowing unit.

Anchored Observations: Give every descriptive line a clear subject and action. Let the viewpoint character actively interpret, compare, or filter observations through their own unique personal context and emotional friction rather than merely cataloging details.

3. Dialogue & Character Reactions

Natural Flow: Dialogue must remain messy, overlapping, and highly natural—not clipped, rigid, or dramatically over-punctuated. Let characters ramble, deflect, restart sentences, trail off, and talk over each other. Do not break spoken lines into tiny fragments with excessive periods.

Spoken Connectors: Use conversational fillers and varied conjunctions ("well," "I mean," "look," "honestly," "so," "but") to keep spoken exposition grounded in a real human cadence. Do not write dialogue that stacks three or more clauses with identical structures.

Spoken Parallelism: Characters may occasionally repeat structures for emphasis or rhetorical effect, but the narration around dialogue should not mirror those patterns. If a character says "I'm built for speed, for being noticed, for the blur," the following descriptive beat should break the pattern rather than continuing it.

Show Emotion through Friction: Convey internal states entirely through body language, physical reflexes, and sensory adjustments embedded in flowing action. Physical reactions and emotional pivots can coexist with environmental observations in the same rolling sentence.

The "As" Limitation: Do not stack repetitive "as" clauses or "that was" phrases to narrate reactions from a distance. Show surprise, panic, or awe through what the character says, does, or observes next.

4. Punctuation with Purpose

Periods for Cadence: Use periods to isolate distinct narrative movements or imagery beats rather than chaining unrelated descriptions together with commas. Let the next sentence carry the next progressive layer of the scene.

Semicolons & Dashes: Use semicolons sparingly—no more than one or two per page—and only when a speaker or viewpoint character shifts focus, pauses, or gathers a complex thought mid-sentence. Use them for a rhythmic breath, never for empty elegance. Use em-dashes for sharp parenthetical asides, natural conversational pauses, and sudden mid-sentence shifts in focus.

___

This allowed for this scene to be generated with little prompting, using basic info I provided of some Transformers characters I made. Again not perfect but it seems to flow very well.

____

Sightline was in van mode, parked in the converted loading bay with his side door open and his ramp unfolded, when Redline skated in on two wheels.

Her red chassis blurred through the bay's entrance, the motorcycle form hugging the turn with a lean that suggested practice rather than instinct. She was fast; he'd learned that already, the way her engine note climbed before she even entered a space, the particular whine of someone who treated velocity as language. She braked hard, her back wheel lifting slightly, and settled beside him with a squeal of rubber against metal.

"Okay," she said, her voice emerging from somewhere in her handlebar assembly, metallic and bright and carrying the particular energy of someone who had decided to experiment. "Test. I want to see if I fit."

Sightline's speakers activated, his voice coming from the dashboard with a resonance that still surprised him. "Fit where?"

"In your cargo area. Obviously." Her engine revved, a short impatient burst. "You're a van. I'm a motorcycle. Vans carry motorcycles. It's — it's thematic. The boss probably gave us this assignment for exactly this reason."

"Redline, I'm not a delivery vehicle for —"

"Just open the back."

Sightline cycled his vents, the sound emerging as a low hum through his speakers, and triggered his rear cargo doors. They swung upward, hydraulic struts hissing, revealing the space that had been designed for tools and equipment and the ordinary freight of human commerce. Now it was empty, the mounting rails visible, the subspace interface humming at standby.

Redline rolled forward slowly, her front wheel climbing the ramp with a tentative precision that suggested she was testing clearances, measuring angles, calculating whether her chassis would clear the frame. She was smaller than him in motorcycle mode — maybe seven feet long, her red plating bright against his dark grey interior — but her handlebars were wide, her rear assembly bulky with the folded geometry of her biped form.

"Bit tight," she muttered, her front wheel adjusting, inching left. "Your ramp's narrow."

"You're wider than you think," Sightline said, his rear sensors tracking her progress, pinging distance warnings as her side panel brushed his interior wall. "And I'm not — I'm not built for this. The suspension's calibrated for distributed weight, not concentrated mass in one corner."

"So compensate." Her rear wheel climbed the ramp, both tires now inside his cargo bay, and she settled with a clang that made his chassis shift, his gyros whispering corrections. "There. I'm in. I'm —" She paused, her engine note dropping to idle, and Sightline felt her weight through his suspension struts, a pressure that concentrated in his rear axle and made his steering geometry complain. "I'm actually in a van. A sentient van. This is deeply weird."

"You're telling me," Sightline said, his speakers carrying the words with an edge of strain he couldn't filter out. "Your exhaust is pointing at my subspace interface. I can feel your engine heat through my rear paneling. This is — it's intimate in a way I didn't anticipate."

Redline laughed, the sound modulated through her vocoder into something bright and strange, and her chassis shifted slightly, the motorcycle form settling deeper into his cargo space. "Intimate. Sightline, you're a cargo van. Cargo vans are intimate with their cargo. It's the job."

"I don't want intimacy with my cargo. I want boundaries. I want to be the thing that moves things without being aware of them breathing."

"I'm not breathing. I'm venting coolant." Her engine revved again, a short experimental burst, and Sightline felt the vibration through his chassis, a resonance that traveled up his rear struts and into his central processor. "How's the weight? Can you move?"

Sightline engaged his drive system, his front wheels rolling forward experimentally. The steering pulled left, heavy, his suspension compressing unevenly where her mass concentrated in his rear corner. His gyros compensated, whining, and he found a gait that was almost functional — slow, deliberate, the handling of a vehicle loaded beyond its optimal distribution.

"I can move," he said, his speakers carrying the strain. "But I wouldn't want to take a motorway corner like this. You're — you're heavier than you look. Dense. Compact."

"Dense and compact," Redline repeated, and her vocoder carried something that mapped to amusement. "Best compliments I've had today."

Sightline rolled a slow circuit of the loading bay, his tires humming against the metal floor, his sensors tracking the way her weight shifted when he turned, the particular physics of carrying another mech inside his own body. It was different from Harris, from the human major who had sat in his cabin with the temporary steering wheel and the careful stillness. Redline was metal, was aware, was actively adjusting her position to compensate for his movements in ways that a passive load wouldn't.

"You're compensating," he said, his speakers noting the observation as it happened. "When I turn left, you shift right. You're — you're helping."

"Of course I'm helping. I'm not cargo, Sightline. I'm a person in a motorcycle form who happens to be sitting in your cargo area." Her engine note changed, dropping to something almost conversational. "Besides, if you roll over, I roll over. Mutual interest."

He completed the circuit, his brakes engaging, his suspension compressing as he stopped near the bay's centre. The weight of her settled, familiar now, the particular pressure of another mech's presence inside his chassis boundaries.

"Right," he said, his speakers carrying the word with a finality that suggested the experiment was concluding. "You fit. Barely. With compensation. And I can move, but not well, and not fast, and not —"

"Not what you were built for," Redline finished, and her chassis shifted, the motorcycle form preparing to dismount. "I know. You're built for covert transport and blending in, for being the van that nobody notices. And I'm —" She paused, her front wheel climbing down the ramp, her rear tires following, the red chassis emerging into the bay's light. "I'm built for speed. For being noticed, a red blur that nobody catches."

She transformed in the loading bay, the geometry unfolding with a speed that suggested practice, her biped form rising with a flourish that made her door wings snap open like visual punctuation. She was smaller than him, eight-eleven to his fourteen-two, but she occupied space differently, her frame vibrating with residual kinetic energy, her amber visor bright with the particular satisfaction of someone who had proven her point.

"Thanks for the ride," she said, and her vocoder carried the words with a grin that translated poorly to metal but was readable in the tilt of her helmet.

Sightline transformed too, the geometry folding in reverse, his biped form rising with a hiss of hydraulics that sounded tired even to his own sensors. He stood in the loading bay, dark grey against her red, and felt the absence of her weight in his suspension, the strange lightness of being unburdened.

"Don't make a habit of it," he said, and his door wings shifted, catching the bay's light and casting shadows that moved like something alive across the converted metal floor.

Redline laughed, the sound bright and modulated and strange, and she skated toward the exit on wheels that hummed against the deck plating, her engine note fading into the bunker's corridors.

Sightline stood alone, his gyros whispering corrections for a weight that was no longer there, and cycled his vents at a frequency that mapped roughly to relief.

___

As a final remover of tells I have a secondary patch that should work:

Style Sheet Patch: Anti-Cliché & Token-Bias Filter

The "Tuesday/Thursday" Loop: Strictly avoid defaulting to Tuesday or Thursday for casual, unspecified days of the week. If a specific day isn't narratively required, omit it. If a day is mentioned, rotate naturally through Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or the weekend.

The "47 and 17" Statistical Bias: Do not default to 17, 37, or 47 when generating random quantities, time stamps (e.g., 6:47), or arbitrary counts. Break the algorithmic bias by using messy, uneven, or completely different numbers (e.g., 11, 24, 53, 82, 9:14).

Banned Casual Idioms: Completely ban the following automated phrases used to signal stress or nonchalance:

"Just another [Day of the week]."

"A [Noun] he hadn't asked for." (e.g., a compass he hadn't asked for)

"With a finality that suggested..."

"...for all anyone knew."

Banned Trailing Placeholders: Strictly ban short, detached, trailing summary phrases at the end of clauses or paragraphs meant to hand-wave a transition or conclusion. This includes:

"...[built/done] enough." / "That was enough."

"...was something, at least." / "That was something."

"...anyway." / "It was a start, anyway."

"It would have to do."

The "Particular" Crutch: Ban the word particular when used as a shorthand to imply depth (e.g., "with that particular frequency," "the particular physics"). Force the prose to either describe the exact specific trait or leave the observation plain.

___

So what do you think of this stage of the experiment? I'm still refining but it's working so far as long as the chat doesn't get too long.

AI isn’t just ChatGPT writing poems. It’s replacing coders, designers, analysts, basically everyone who once said, “My job is safe.”

AI won’t take your job. But someone using AI will.

Share your thoughts!

This is a real pain in the ass. Style instructions were some of the best ways to I found to 1) overcome NSFW filters, and 2) maintain a consistent character and writing voice.

For one, style instructions are applied in the system prompt for every single prompt. Maybe for one, it'll reduce token usage? But what a fucking pain. Can style instructions be added to a prompt in XML and still work as well?

I'm currently having Opus 4.7 write up a skill md file based on my prompt instructions on my desktop version, and testing that. Any input from folks on how to make skills work better, especially for NSFW writing?

So, I'll try to be as quick as possible.

It was january

I had a crazy good story for a novel planned out in my head. And without ever writing before, I decided to start. The plot and everything was very good. It was going to have three main parts as a story, so I thought of finishing up a draft of part one before starting to publish it on web apps like royal road polished chapter by chapter.

Here is the problem though — when I started, I had problems in execution. The story was good, but the way I wrote wasn't to my liking, so instead I did something else — I used AI as a ghostwriter.

Now its been like 5 months. It wasn't a big problem to my eyes but I see that people on these writing subreddits condemn the use of AI. By sending the material to the AI I have gotten good at writing, and I believe I could write the thing myself, but the problem is that the novel has already 100k words written in that style. There is no way in hell I am restarting from zero.

To my eyes it is readable, and it's not a problem. But I come across some posts here that say that using AI is a big problem. I wish I knew it before how big of a problem it is.

Anyway, I need advice. What should I do? Is it really that much of a problem to have AI as a ghostwriter? Given that the story, the characters, the plot etc. are authentic, is using AI as a ghostwriter still wrong?

So I saw a post by someone who is using AI purely as GHOST WRITER. I would like to share my experience with AI first.
SO I also tried to go through that route of using AI to write for me as I had a great plot and whole universe ready but had never written anything. It was giving me a hard time to write proper and clear scenes. I asked Chat GPT to write for me but I don't know why, it refused to write for me and encouraged me to write. At first my scenes were too uneven so I used Chat GPT to point out weaknesses, I paid attention to reviews, worked on weak areas and improved my writing style. Now I am not a beginner anymore. My writing has a voice, scenes move smoothly. I am not a pro yet but still improving everyday. So my Suggestion that don't use AI as ghost writer but use it as reviewer or beta reader to point out problems of your writing and work on those to improve your writing style, so you can improve your writing skill and create your OWN AUTHOR VOICE.
Thank you.

When I want real opinions, experience or brutally honest feedback… I still end up searching Reddit.

Hello, first of all, I don't plan to use AI to make money by creating stories. It's just a hobby. My problem is that I struggle a lot with creating scenarios or conversations, which takes me a really long time, and honestly I'm not the most patient person. I simply love seeing my ideas brought to life, but the process itself is what feels tedious to me.

That's why I use AI with some specific instructions to create different scenarios or conversations, and then I edit the parts I don't like, add dialogue written by myself, or even rewrite entire scenes.

This is an insecurity I've had for a long time, and I don't really know what people would think of me if I published stories made this way.

Is it okay for me to do it like this?

Again, I'm not trying to profit from it. It's just a hobby.