In an effort to limit the number of repetitive AI posts while still allowing for meaningful discussion from people who choose to participate in discussions on AI, we're testing weekly pinned threads dedicated exclusively to AI and its uses, ethics, benefits, consequences, and broader impacts.

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All other threads on AI should be reported for removal, as we now have a dedicated thread for discussing all AI related matters, thanks!

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  • I've seen others say this, but I've intentionally limited using our beloved emdash just to avoid being accused of AI. It's quite sad.

  • I think the bigger question is if you use AI in your writing process, would you disclose that to your readers? Would you make an AI disclaimer in your book?

    How much AI use is required for disclosure?

    Do I have to say that I use it for brain storming and coming up with names?

    Do I have to say I used it to fix grammar and clean up readability?

    Last week in the AI thread, someone was talking about AI was art and how how AI writing made him thousands of dollars a month. When I challenged him to disclose that his stories he was selling were AI written, crickets.

  • I feel it’s important whether the AI tool has paid for a license to use all the works it used for its training set. If it did not, that is literally theft of intellectual property which is a crime.

  • LLMs were built on the stolen works of fellow writers. Its use is unethical, inexcusable.

    Agreed. Plus, for me writing is a passion project so using any sort of AI assistance in any way, shape, or form is a complete nonstarter for me

    Not exactly. The most common LLM databases are built on stolen works, not the base systems the databases are hung on. LLMs have a place. Medical diagnosis is the best example.

    And if we were in /r/okbuddyvicodin maybe I'd have a different take, but we're in a writers subreddit talking about AI as it pertains to the craft of writing.

    And in this arena, there's almost no GenAI (and certainly no popular ones) that make use of ethically sourced databases. The underlying technology may not be fundamentally evil, but one need look no further than the quotes by its makers to see that they are. They hold creative work in contempt, think its theft to be no crime at all.

    That we even have to debate this in here in pathetic. Anyone who uses GenAI as part of their creative workflow has transgressed against the rest of us. Period.

    This will, of course, be seen as a challenge by dilettantes and fools to try and pen an excuse; they will fail.

  • In my WIP, I used it:

    as a concordance to look up bible passages. I ended each query with “Cite book, chapter, and verse.” And then checked them in a real, paper bible. This worked perfectly.

    To find diseases and injuries meeting specific symptoms. Again, “cite sources” was appended to each query so I could double check. This worked ok, but it refused to tell me how long a bruise takes to heal on a teenage boy. In the end, just searching with DuckDuckGo gave better results.

    I used Duck.ai’s Claude back end. Would recommend for concordance and similar look ups on public domain books that you can then check. Would not recommend for much else.

    I also use it as a search engine. Google’s search AI always gives links to sources so it’s easy to check, too.

  • I think as with everything it's got good and bad sides, I think it's got many pros: you can ask it for some ideas or you can ask whether a sentence sounds better in a way rather than in another but of course as with every thing the problem is people who abuse of it making it do the work instead of the person itself.

    (sorry for my bad English but it ain't my first language)

    Yeah Ai can help as much as it can hurt (if you use it wrong). I personally mostly use to it for this things:

    1. To talk about my own story to learn my world, characters and moments.
    2. Make profiles
    3. Lore fragments that I want to get out of my system ASAP.
    4. Because I have a guide of my style of writing, I often ask the Ai if what I wrote is consistent to my own writing rules (That I give to the ai as reference)

    But there's one part that you have to take with huge care is when asking to fix or add thing in your story...optimally you never ask the Ai to do that. But if you do, prepared to change the entire prose it send to you. Pretty much just do that when you have a writer block, yet still have a outline on how the chapter may proceed and you just want something to edit and heavily change...just don't leave it how the Ai send it to you (don't let the Ai do the story for you)...I think of it as asking the ai to vomit my idea and is now my job to turn that vomit into gold.

    But I can't stress enough how much you should evade doing that last use case. Because pushing yourself to write some ideas you have, yet cannot place into prose is a important skill to develop....that use of Ai skips that step (hindering your learning).

    At least that's from my experience when using it.

    Surprised to see some reasonable positions on it. I voiced how using AI to generate random names to help you naming characters is perfectly fine and absolutely does not constitute as AI writing your book for you and got flamed for it lol.

    Same here, were I often ask some of this things:

    1. Make the name only have a certain amount of caracters.
    2. Make the name base on "sumerian god names" or sound like "Daren" for example
    3. I want the name to convey the "fressia flower" in another language.

    Then after you find one that look nice you may edit it if you want. However I often make the name myself...mostly the ones that only goal is sounding nice and easy to pronounce.

    Yup. Or sometimes I'll come up with cool names on my own and then ask it what are some potential meanings that I could derive from the prefix or root or whatever, and I'll keep those in mind when fleshing out the character.

    I basically use it as a more precise google. Sometimes you can barely even properly phrase your question, making google useless. I can stupidly and clumsily ask AI about something and it will often come up with what I am thinking. I've done this for words on the tip of my tongue that can't be easily googled.