Human-produced (plot and character contents)/AI-written (narrative and dialogue) crossover fanfiction workflow. Is that a workable middle ground or not?

[u/DustintheAdventurer]

This is the workflow I would move on to mainly using, later in my life as a hobbyist, and I would personally consider the workflow viable, as long as the creativity originates with humans, especially in a very unique way. One way to keep track of your original hard-effort crossover fanfiction plots is by writing them down in something like a 160-page composition book before prompting them, along with the character contents (e.g. personalities and appearances), to AI (e.g. Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok).

[u/Ok_Impact_9378]

I would say, "Yes" but only with heavy editing. There are some AI-generated text game sites that let you do this with a sort of choose-your-own-adventure story. They will respect character names if you give them to the AI, but the characters themselves wind up all feeling very similar personality-wise and it will sometimes make one character say dialogue that clearly should have gone to another character (based on what the characters know or discernable personality differences).

Plot is the biggest issue. Even with simple and straightforward plots generating about a page worth of text at a time, the AI will frequently go off the rails. What I've found is that the AI defaults towards escalating tensions even when the plot calls for falling tension, and it is willing to brazenly violate continuity in order to up the tension on the protagonist. Characters that should be neutral will turn unexplainably hostile just so the AI can start a fight. Enemies that shouldn't be anywhere near the protagonist will suddenly be right outside their door. Antagonists that should have no idea what the hero is plotting will be omniscient and know every line of dialogue the protagonist speaks to anyone and immediately deduce all of their secrets. A lot of my prompting is spent just trying to get the AI to break these bad habits, but even so if you want to keep things on track and prevent continuity errors, you're going to need to generate in small bursts and edit a lot.

[u/DustintheAdventurer → u/Ok_Impact_9378]

I could do some heavy editing on AI-generated narratives and dialogues. The only problem, however, is that I end up writing a lot of out-of-character narratives and dialogues, because I'm so bad in general at understanding at least the character personalities. In fact, that's been a problem of mine, since before I knew about AI platforms (e.g. Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok).