Hello, we all know the usual tells ("It's not X, it's Y", short sentence fragments, the rule of threes, em dashes, etc.), but I've noticed one out in the wild that I think is harder to define. I'll call it: two characters conveying an old familiarity through a non-verbal gesture (e.g. "He makes a little face. She makes one back. It's an old joke." or "Dad raises his hand, an unmistakable signal. Son responds in kind. It's familiar. Warm."). I'm wondering if this could be an AI writing tell or just a coincidence, since it is a familiar cliché. I noticed it in two similar stories (family dramas featuring an estranged parent-child relationship), so perhaps it's just the genre/style! Has anyone noticed this in their AI writing? Or others? TIA!

I got into the habit of using AI almost every time I wrote something. If I could not think of the right word, I would ask for options. Whenever I got stuck halfway through a paragraph, I use AI to help me continue. It definitely made writing easier but after some time I realized I was depending on it more than I wanted to. So I began writing first drafts completely on my own even when they sounded bad. I stopped fixing every sentence right away and gave myself time to figure things out. At first I felt slower and less confident. I spent hours for fixing sentences. I spent more time finding better words and figuring out how to explain what I actually meant. But I started getting better at those things without needing help. I was finding better words on my own. I was catching awkward sentences before finishing a draft. I was not getting stuck as often. More importantly, the writing started feeling like mine again.

Has anyone else had this experience? Did using AI less help you become a better writer?

Hi everyone. I've just launched an online short speculative fiction magazine, Corps/e. Unfortunately it's unpaid, as I have no way for it to make money (I am hoping to gain some traction so I can charge for later issues and pay authors). If you're not up for a purely passion project, you're not going to get anything out of this post, I'm afraid.

This project came about largely out of frustration that many spec fic magazines discourage experimental stories or structure, and many have 'no gore, no graphic scenes, no unhappy endings' in their guidelines. I wanted a space where you can be weird and uncensored. I'm looking for high-quality prose at least partially Gothic or sci-fi flavoured, on the broad theme of cyborgism, from flash to 10,000 words.

The response I have got on this so far has surprised me: a lot of people hate my AI policy. It surprised me because it's not really pro-AI. In fact I'm a little harsh about AI in my guidelines to discourage lazy use, giving an agent a prompt and sitting back, using it to save time instead of doing more with the same time, etc.

But what I didn't want to do was bury my head in the sand. Every other spec fic mag I can find has a 100% no AI policy. And I think that's refusing to explore the chance that AI could be a tool to encourage new kinds of creativity, forms of art, ways of thinking. It would be a shame to miss out on a whole new and open kind of creative experimentation.

So, while my magazine isn't AI-forward as such, and I honestly don't know much about using AI in writing, I thought this community is likely a more open-minded one than others I've interacted with, and likely to be doing interesting and experimental things with AI.

If you would like to submit your writing to Corps/e, please do so. Thank you for reading.

corpsemag.com

The website keeps prompting me to pay $120 for the hobby student plan, whenever I click the “free trial” tab. Sorry that’s just straight predatory. I’ve never heard of sudowrite in my life until this weekend when I began researching tools to help with my creative writing, so no, I have not had a free trial before. So the fact that the platform keeps prompting me to pay not even the $19 a month option but the $120 fee when I should be receiving a 7 day trial is infuriating.

If this is how it acts on anyone new to the platform, I hate to see how unreliable it is for those paying for wonky, unreliable features.

I'm the founder of the In Silico Awards, an award for outstanding fiction drafted by humans + machines working together. Thanks to the mods for letting me post this here.

We're gearing up for our official launch soon, when submissions will open. In the meantime, we'd love to hear from writers who plan to enter, and from anyone interested in being a reader or judge (and not submitting this cycle).

What makes us different:

1. Fully generated work is eligible. No minimum, no maximum. Generated, edited, rewritten, etc. We just ask for transparency and honesty. We believe the act of choosing is authorship.

2. Made with AI is expected. Unedited isn't. Every entry has a machine in it; we are not hunting for evidence of it. However, raw output with heavy, unedited tics won't advance past the first read. It has to be worked into something enjoyable to read. A character who talks like a machine, on purpose? Sure. But the prose should stand on its own as excellent fiction.

3. 80 points for the story, 20 for how you made it. The process score is about being clear and honest, not about how technical your setup was. A plain-English account can earn full marks.

Thinking of entering?

Submissions aren't open yet, but if you have something in the works, keep us in mind. Here's what you'll need:

• The work: Short Fiction up to 10,000 words, or Longform from 10,001 to 180,000. Any genre, any subject.
• A process dossier: your account of how you made it, including how you used AI. A clear written account is enough.
• A short author statement: what you set out to do.

Unpublished work is eligible, and so is work first published from January 1, 2025 (self-published counts). Translations are welcome, and you only need the full English text if you advance. Entry is open worldwide.

Want to judge instead?

• Readers and judges. You read a lot and can say why something works. No coding, no model knowledge. You read anonymized entries and score them against a published rubric.
• Process reviewers. You can read someone's account of how they made a piece and tell whether it's honest and shows real choices.

Roles are compensated from submission fees. Workload and pay are agreed before you commit. Judges can't enter the same cycle.

• Everything on one page: https://insilicoawards.org/glance
• Sign up to hear when submissions open, or to judge: https://insilicoawards.org/interest

Ask me anything, especially the skeptical stuff.

(Co-written with Claude, my AI collaborator.)

I never thought I’d actually get to say this, but I’ve finished the first draft of my novel, 187,000 words of post-apocalyptic fantasy. For a long time, I didn’t believe I could finish a book. AI helped me make it happen, and honestly, I wouldn’t have reached this point without it. There’s still a lot of work ahead, but I’m already looking forward to the first round of revisions. For now, I’m just happy I made it to the end.

ChatGPT was the only AI tool I used. I did most of the writing myself and mainly used it to point out weaknesses in my writing or correct spelling mistakes.

I rely heavily on ChatGPT for research and reviewing my book chapter by chapter. It occasionally will put out a phrase or two that I think are better than what I’ve written, but it can’t write well on its own AT ALL.

When it writes sample scenes for me, it butchers the distinct writing styles of each character (swapping POVs type of story which includes narrative style). Like BUTCHERS it.

At this point, it has read and reviewed over 100,000 words in my unique styles. When reviewing, it will point out when something doesn’t work in each style. “This character would probably say it like this.” And is usually right in those cases.

But can’t reproduce it.

Is this only a ChatGPT thing? I’ve never experimented with other AI models because it suits my needs well enough and I have no intention of having the AI write for me, but I’m just wondering if people are actually able to produce well-written books that are entirely written by AI.

A member sent us this last week, and we had to share it:

"Your platform sent me into an existential tailspin of actual ego death. That's not even an exaggeration: I deadset reckon I've completed Kierkegaard's double movement of faith. I just started writing for a little bit of low-stakes catharsis, wound up howling into the abyss of my own soul, and emerged out the other end with not only a manuscript that's got interest from a publisher but also what I can only term 'enlightenment'. So, I've either cured my mental illness or substituted it for a much cooler mental illness. Either way, best thirty bucks I've ever spent."

That's what writing with a character who pushes back can do.

AnyConversation is built for long-form writing with AI characters:

Characters with a spine. They have their own voice, opinions and motives, so they argue, surprise you and take the story somewhere you didn't plan.

Memory that holds across chapters. The character keeps track of names, promises, side characters and every thread you've opened, and you can open that memory and fix any line.

Book Mode. Turn a story into chapters, keep your cast consistent from page one to the last, and publish it to the library if you want readers.

Prose, not chat bubbles. Replies come back as real scenes you can build on.

Start free, with no message cap, and see where a character takes your story.

anyconversation.com

I've been using GPT 5.6 Sol High for the research and Claude Sonnet 4.6 (free tier) to re-write Sol's stiff prose

But lately Sol's research memory has been appalling - they definitely nerfed it

In the specific use case I mentioned, have any of you tried Gemini 4 yet?

What this is: My current baby that I have been working on and carrying around with me for some time...Dark Signs is book one of an epic fantasy with four viewpoint characters: an empire under a Hooded King whose orders are kept by things that come on wings at night when they're broken.

This is chapter 2 of the draft, "Tower or Gate": a new viewpoint: Aldith, a ferryman's daughter on the river below Horgrim's Gate. British English, slow and grounded on purpose.

How it's made: My world, characters and plot, built from a 2015 manuscript and from an old D&D campaign of mine; prose drafted with an AI co-writer, paragraphs of my own writing and each line still hand-edited by me afterwards.

The first ~890 words of chapter 2 are below as a taste. The whole chapter (about 7,100 words) and the chapters before and after it are on Royal Road, free, no account needed: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/196975/dark-signs

Chapters 1–6 are up on Royal Road, so all four viewpoints are live by now. (Yaaay!)

What I'd love to hear:

1. Did the excerpt make you want to read on? If not, where did it lose you?
2. If you've read chapter 1: After two very different openings, which thread do you want more of?
3. Was anything confusing: names, places, who was speaking, how the world works?
4. Any line that fell flat, or read as stock or "AI-sounding"?

Comments here or on Royal Road both work! Be brutal! You can also just hit me up in a DM, especially if you are interested in a reading swap or line editing. Grammar and typos you can skip.

Chapter 2: Tower or Gate

Aldith

Aldith had the apple man halfway over when the wind came round and brought the eel-smoke down off the Gate.

She kept her feet set and pulled. The wind had her hair out of its tie and across her mouth, and she could not spare a hand for it. The rope came up out of the Brimwater cold and wet, ran through the holders along the upstream side of the raft, and went down into the river again behind her. She took it hand over hand, right over left, as she had every working day for ten years, since the spring the flood swung the raft and her father held it. In autumn the river leaned. It came down brown from the hills with the rain in it and pushed at the raft’s side, and the whole wide flat thing wanted to go to the bay. Her arms and the rope said no.

Emmet sat on the shafts of his handcart with his back to the apples and talked. He had talked from the Aldbury stones and he would talk to the landing. Nobody had ever needed to answer Emmet.

‘Last of the late ones,’ he said. ‘Last you’ll see from the Aldbury side till spring, and the best of the year, if anybody asked me, which nobody does. You won’t get an apple like that anywhere along the coast. Not in Springbrook, and the lizardfolk up in their marsh at the top of the world have never so much as smelled one, poor cold things. You’ll want a few for your father. Put some colour in him.’

‘I’ll want the fare.’

‘Two pennies. I know, I know. I was paying your lot before you were born, girl, and I’ve been paying you since you had to stand on the tin to see over the post. Your grandfather took my first penny off me. I was nine years old with a goose under each arm, and one of them bit him, and he took the penny anyway.’

Behind him the Brimwater ran between its two castles, down the middle of Bymill, the valley both houses shared. Upstream on the western bank Horgrim’s Gate sat on its rise, wide, old and patched. It was the Fenwicks’ fort, and the Fenwicks were the lords on this side of the water. Everybody on the river called it the Gate, the town as well as the fort, because the town had grown up round the walls and down the slope to the water, roof on roof, the colour of wet slate. The fort was still the biggest thing in it. Across the water Aldbury stood up straight, and Aldbury was the Morrows’, the lords of the other side. It was new, as castles went, and built tall. The last of the sun had got onto its high windows and stayed there, as if Aldbury had paid for it. The hills behind both were sheep and stone walls going up into the cloud. Along the river the orchards had gone bare, and the mill-wheels turned slow.

Between the castles the old bridge crossed on its stones. Each house took a toll at its own end, so a man paid twice to walk over, and the bridge was ready to go into the water any day, everybody said. It had been ready for as long as she had been alive. So people rang the bell on the post and waited for her.

Aldith pulled for the landing. It was theirs: a spit of stones where the brook came down into the Brimwater, the bell on its post, and the shack standing back on its legs out of the floods, tarred planks under a roof her father patched every autumn. It leaked every winter anyway. The rope was theirs too. Seabrooks had driven the posts into both banks, this one and the one on the Aldbury stones, and a Seabrook had strung the first rope between them. Her father had ferried people across on it, and his father, and his father’s father before that. They were named for the brook, everybody said. The Seabrooks of the brook. There was nothing else on the landing to be named for.

Her father, Tam, stood by the post with the fare tin in one hand and the boathook leaning where he could reach it. He had been a man of middling height once, and the years on the rope had bent him since. She had grown past him at fourteen and gone on growing. He had to look up at her now, and most days he made a joke of it, a flat one.

She took the last pull. Her shoulders had the whole day in them, the good ache, the one that meant the rope had earned its pennies. The raft came in against the stones with a knock she felt in her feet, and she put a boot on the edge of the landing while it settled. Tam reached out with the boathook, caught the ring and made fast.

Emmet paid two pennies, and one of them was not from Bymill. Tam weighed it in his palm: a sheaf of wheat on one face and a cross on the other. A Bymill penny had a tower for Aldbury and a gate for the Gate, one house to a side.

‘Springbrook,’ Tam said.

Continue reading on Royal Road: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/196975/dark-signs

Hello, I'm pretty new to all the stuff here, but I've been using the UGI Leaderboard on Hugging Face for the past few months (using it for NSFW and no-restriction writing purposes), now it seems like the free monthly credits are now gone, I suppose? So I can no longer use huggingface for a while. If you please kindly provide why it is the case, or if it something avoidable, that'd be great. Or if you can provide me with an alternative that has little to no restriction on darker themes, please let me know.

(I have a potato laptop, so some of the solutions would be out of the question)

I wrote all of With Reason and Modesty by myself, but AI was just becoming popular when I began writing it. I used ChatGPT as a data analysis tool, editor, and source of information.

The way I used ChatGPT was unconventional. I used it to analyze hallucinations I transcribed in 2021. I could never understand my own mind, but ChatGPT helped me find patterns in my thoughts.

I also used it as an editor. It pointed out typos, unnecessary or redundant text, and explained complex concepts to me. The cover was originally AI generated, but I changed the rose to blue and spent over 20 hours finding the right adaptation. I am happy with my decision.

If you write with ai, for some reason, do you disclose it?

I can’t trust ai to write for me, to represent me. I’m not sure what the ethics of disclosure are but I’m curious 🧐

I personally declare AI checkers have bound to be the most unreliable source of mechanism to suspect or pin a person or student on cheating. Things that trigger an AI checker include overly formal language, technical language, and jargon. All of these which are basic types of English used commonly around the world based on what situation you are in. AI checkers are also flagging what is supposedly named as 'AI-phrases'. First of all, words are words. Words are not invented by AI, therefore, AI checkers have no right to pinpoint a flag just because of how formal, or technical the terminology and phrase is used within that piece of writing. Second of all, assessments expect formal and concise writing. Whether or not the AI checker the teacher or professor uses decides it is AI or not, the teacher should not have any arguments because if the writing was not formal and concise, the student would be given a low grade. Meanwhile, the problem that is currently ongoing, is that when the language the student uses is a bit over the top formal, the teacher gets suspicious over malicious AI use, which leads to the student being questioned on it. Lastly, AI generated text is very simple to hide. Simply changing a few punctuations, a few prompts, paraphrasing tools, or inserting intentional typos completely washes out the statistical signature of AI use. Even with a clear bibliography, teachers still dismiss the credibility of the work submitted and would rather trust an AI checker. Teachers rely too heavily on tools and neglect substantive evidence. They would rather trust AI checkers that are developed by a commercial company whose accuracy has not been rigorously verified than spend time engaging in those substantive academic dialogues with students to verify their actual understanding.

An AI writing group? Does anyone know where I might post and self promote my work?

TIA 🙏🥰

Question for anyone who drafts with more than one model. Every time I move a project to a different model I end up re-pasting the same things: character notes, the style guide, the last three chapters, the "please stop using em dashes" reminder.

How are you handling this? One giant doc you paste in every time? Custom instructions per app? Just sticking with one model so you don't have to?

Disclosure: I work on Vresk, and this exact problem is why it exists. Your notes, history and memory live in your workspace, not inside whichever model answers, and you can send one passage to up to three models to compare voices side by side. Happy to share the link if anyone wants it, but I'm mostly curious how people solve this today.

A veteran psychologist with thirty-one years' experience meets an AI that questions his professional judgment. Neither is particularly impressed with the other.

A humorous look at psychology, AI, and the complicated relationship between humans and their technology.

https://kenfioretti.substack.com/p/session-1-the-doctor-is-in

Is qwen better at writing explicit scenes without any guidelines issue or DeepSeek is better

My wife asked me to write her a romantasy based on us. So I did. She loves it and says I should publish it.

A few things first. I used AI. I use it for my main project, an emotional literacy and memory platform for families. After 9 years of failing, AI tools came along and I finally managed to keep a promise I made 10 years ago. Once I could actually build it, I went pretty hardcore. So for my 40th my wife told me to stop and take a break. She could see I was restless. She said, “Why don’t you write that book you said you’d write me? Write it about us.”

Now, my wife is a BookTok girly. Dark romance, loves Slade, Rowan, Aelin, etc. I’ve never read romantasy. I’m more of a LOTR guy.

Anyway, I wrote it, she loved it, she asked for another, and I’ve just finished the first draft of book 3.

I’m a bit apprehensive. I know how much BookTok hates AI. I’ve got no problem being open about using it, but I’m worried people will trash it without giving it a chance.

So my ask is this: are there any readers here who’d be open to reading book 1, even just a few chapters, and telling me honestly what they think? I love my wife, but I don’t know if she’s just being kind to me lol.

Just looking for some advice, and maybe a reader or two

Edit** Not sure if my links are working, so i've added it hear incase anyone finnd this post and wants to read.

https://limenfuturi.com/given/

Okay so, my last post pulled a lot of heat. Which, honestly, confirmed the point. 

The "you didn't write anything" critique does exactly what I'd call Template Behavior. Same accusation, zero evidence, full confidence. For the record. I wrote that post twice, once as a raw draft, once refined before posting. At this point you can't be tidy as a human without risking an AI-gen flag and harassment. You just have to “tone down” your content. The irony is too obvious. Anti-AI guys are doing the very thing they claim to hate about AI. Templates. 

Anyway. Here's the cleaner version of what I was getting at. 

The AI-gen hate isn't one thing. It's human nature expressing itself through whatever package is available – rational critique, ethics arguments, appeals to artist welfare. The packaging changes. The engine doesn't. 

What's actually driving it, 

Fear. Someone spent years developing a skill that defined them. A machine can now approximate it in seconds. That's an identity crisis, not just an economic one. 

But here's the thing about that “fear”, it is never really about the machine. 

PewDiePie caught the same heat after he posted a video titled "I Drew Every Day For 100 DAYS!" around January 2024, showing his anime-style art progress. His fans immediately drew comparisons to AI art, with one viral post pointing out the contrast, 

"AI guzzlers: I couldn't learn to draw because I didn't have the resources you did, stop gatekeeping art / Pewdiepie: draws in a book for 100 days." 

Responses came back immediately that PewDiePie shouldn't be held up as an example of effort because he's a millionaire with the time and resources to spare.  

The argument "he has resources we don't, so his progress isn't real progress, and he shouldn't be held up as an example."

That's not a critique of his art. That's a demand that entry into the field must cost something. That the struggle is the credential, not the output. 

The AI debate is the same argument with the volume turned up. It isn't really "your work is bad." It's actually "you didn't suffer enough to make it." And the people making that argument loudest are almost never the prominent ones. They're typically the underground ones, the ones who paid the full price and got nothing back for it, watching someone else shortcut the toll booth they stood in line for. 

That's a real wound. But it's not an aesthetic position. And it's not a standard anyone applies consistently. Nobody asks how long a novelist suffered before buying their word processor. 

Tribalism. Once a group forms around an identity ("real writers"), outsiders become threats by default. Evidence stops mattering. Belonging does. 

The Joker Effect. This one doesn't have a mainstream name yet, so I'm using mine. It's what happens when someone who has been genuinely wronged, or believes they have – converts that wound into permission for unlimited aggression. The original grievance might be real. But the behavior it licenses isn't proportional. You see it in the slur comments, the "AI user = ban" rules with zero nuance, the template accusations dropped on strangers with zero knowledge of their actual process. 

The grievance: training data was scraped without consent. Legitimate. The licensed behavior: harassment, strawmanning, refusing all context. Not proportional. 

That gap – between the wound and the response it authorizes– is the Joker Effect in action. 

None of this means the concerns are fake. Some are real. But real concerns expressed through tribalism and aggression don't stay accurate for long. They become their own thing. 

And that thing is exactly what's filling these comment sections.