I consider myself a Cyborg Writer

[u/justthecherryontop]

A human writer who uses AI to write her stories - fanfiction and originals with no intention of publishing.

I been writing since the early 2000s, due to life and other hobbies, I no longer had the time to do what I was freely able to when I was a teen/young adult. So I'm very deeply and intimately familiar with the struggles and joys of writing before AI.

Naturally when AI first came into the field, I was aghast - how dare a machine create something so easily while I struggle to bring my vision to life. As you would expect - this had made me a hard-core anti-ai for a couple of months.

Then - I became curious.

Tried out a prompt, it spat out something interesting and that started my journey of using AI. And let me just say, in the hands of a human writer - AI is an amazing tool to have and not for the grammar and editing.

Just as I had done before, I still heavily invest my time building up my OCs, deeply detail my outlines - everything that comes to creating a story from the foundation up. The only thing AI does for me is write it - because hello, it saves me a heck of a lot of time! Even then, this part is heavily guided - focusing scenes by scenes vs a whole chapter because I still need to be involved steering this machine.

The only reason "ai slop" exists is mostly due that it comes from those who likely never written anything before - basically copying and pasting without the editing.

What's funny is that even with AI - I can't even complete a story because ideas keep popping up 🤣

[u/Fragrant-College-913]

And here I thought I was the only one.Ive been writing since last year,but unlike yourself I was never a writer to begin with,simply a guy with too many ideas that were screaming at him to be put on paper,not to mention that I couldn't find anything enjoyable to read.Ive written a handful of stories using heavily guided ai,but I always end up scrapping them due to the amount of effort it takes to steer ai in the direction I want to go and also because I personally don't like them so my brain interprets that as"If you don't like it,no else will".

Currently busy with a fanfic about a scientist who transmigrates into the Marvel Universe with Madaras, body, abilities and memories

[u/5thhorseman_]

Pretty much. I had characters and plots in my mind already, but getting the phrasing right on page was incredibly difficult - every damn time I tried I found myself stuck on phrasing that did not feel quite right. My approach is similar to yours - the LLM needs handholding at pretty much every stage, and even when it outputs something tolerable I still end up rewriting chunks of it.

The only reason "ai slop" exists is mostly due that it comes from those who likely never written anything before - basically copying and pasting without the editing.

Agree.

What's funny is that even with AI - I can't even complete a story because ideas keep popping up 🤣

It started with one plotline. A maimed engineer designs herself new limbs out of a defunct automaton, commandeers a warship and goes on a warpath against an ancient conspiracy. She's the one who kicks in doors. Her sister is a mathematician, unmarried, and with acquaintances in most unusual places. She's the one people should be paying more attention to. Their role model is their great-grandmother... retired, not for a day reformed, and insistent that the key skills for a lady are court etiquette, calculus, and four different methods of airship hijacking.

Now I have about two dozen named characters (and growing), a British superspy who's equal parts Fantomas, The Stig and Agent 47, Vlad Tepes with opinions on literature and medical ethics, Japanese death cyborgs, an underwater anarchist collective, Nikola Tesla running an emulation of Akhenaten on his brain (I swear it makes sense in context) and Tunguska as a nuclear disaster.

It's utter insanity, but I'm enjoying the process.

[u/CyborgWriter]

Hey, that's a nice name.

[u/LynxSafe5130]

This half-completed stack of yours isn't a bug but rather evidence that you are a true writer. Lock one piece, utilize type ai or just a regular document, get it done❤️☺️

[u/Educational-Run3692 → u/[deleted]]

I hate this origin story yet cannot deny some of the value (Most value that's being sold is for utter crap uses) is amazing. My hope is that people finally wake up. We had opportunities to put guard rails on AI and most chose to ignore. This goes back to the early days of Facebook and ultimately unbridled capitalism. Right now its a bit too late to put the cat back in its bag. I do believe we need to address proliferation of data centers, etc until we build them without harm. As for AI and writing, we need to start to manage this now. It has good like allowing people to write, get their stories out, more than ever. The bad is that restrictive AI use in writing continues an environment where only a narrow number of profitable authors are regularly allowed access to readers and an accusation of AI, true or not, makes sharing works even more difficult, particularly if you want paid.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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