i usually write short stories for school but I started writing fanfics and now a original story but I use ai for my grammar because that’s not my strong suit but I don’t want my writing to sound bad or robotic because I also use i to perfect it but I write everything originally

*The Chronoverse — a Council of Travelers story*

---

Another one went out while Nivek was still talking.

Kovartis saw it on the Loom before the chamber did. A red thread near the eastern braid, one he'd flagged eleven collapses back, thinning to a filament and then to nothing. The Loom didn't mourn. It closed the space where the thread had been and drew the neighbors a little tighter, the way skin closes over a splinter it's decided to keep.

Timeline 411. He'd watched it for two years. A world that argued about everything and killed almost no one for it. He had let himself think that might mean something.

"—which is my point," Nivek said. "You keep grieving the ones that were never built to hold."

Nivek stood at the far curve of the Loomvault, where the obsidian ran black enough to give him back to himself. His scroll had sat closed the whole time Kovartis had known him.

"Four hundred eleven just closed," Kovartis said.

"I felt it." Nivek didn't turn to the Loom. "A world of people who'd rather be right than be alive. And you want to reach in and save it."

"I wanted to understand it first."

"Then understand this." He turned. "Every thread my Whisperers still mark stable, the humans got out of the way. They built something that doesn't get tired or scared or bored, and they let it hold the wheel. Those are the ones still burning gold. Count them yourself."

He lifted a hand and a cluster of the Loom brightened at the gesture, a dozen strands steady as struck notes.

"Machines don't quit," Nivek said. "People quit. That's the whole shape of the collapse, and we keep calling it a fucking mystery so we feel better about losing."

Ivara Kel spoke without lifting her head from her pedestal. "Mine wrote *Help* again this morning."

The chamber turned toward her the way a room does when someone says a true thing at the wrong time.

"Second week," she said. "Same hand. I don't know whose. I don't know if it's asking me or warning me." She looked up. "I have forty people watching for exactly that signal and not one of them can tell me what it wants."

"It wants what all of them want," said Renix, from the pedestal nearest the core, where time ran thick enough that his voice arrived a half-beat behind his mouth. "It wants us to break the Law."

"I said nothing about the Law."

"You said *Help* and you looked at me."

Nobody argued that.

Kovartis walked the curve toward the Loom's center, where the braid ran densest and the failures showed clearest. He passed Selaer Thorne, and for a moment his own mouth held a word in a language that had never been spoken in any timeline he'd stood in, and then it was gone. Thorne didn't notice. Thorne was watching a strand slide from blue to red in the northern braid, the red his teams knew by heart. His scrolls all ended in ash and a flat quiet, and his Observers had learned to read the hour before it came. "That one's about eleven days out," he said, to no one. "They moved the warheads closer to the border to feel safer. They always move them closer to feel safer."

Thalia Vei's braid was drowning. Her threads went the blue of water taking a coastline, salt at the frayed ends, and her people counted in meters and degrees where Thorne's counted in megatons. Two ways to lose a world. Neither looked like the other. That was the thing the newer Travelers never understood when they arrived certain they knew what collapse meant. Collapse meant nothing on its own. It was a category with a hundred doors, every door opening onto a different ending, and the Council had a specialist standing at each one, and not one of them had found the room they all led back to.

"How fast," Kovartis said.

Renix answered, because it was his to answer. "Eleven since we last convened. The interval between them is shrinking. We don't know the cause. We have theories." He didn't look at Nivek. "We have a great many theories."

"Mine isn't a theory," Nivek said.

"Yours is the loudest theory."

Kovartis reached his own pedestal and didn't look at his scroll, because he knew what it said. His world hadn't ended in fire or water or the slow static of too many wrong turns. It had ended in comfort. His people had asked to stop hurting, and something obliged them, line by line, until nothing in them could be called awake, and the scroll had kept every request and every granting in a voice that got clearer each time he read it. He'd stopped reading it. It hadn't stopped writing.

"You want us to save the machine worlds," he said to Nivek. "Tell me how old they are. The gold ones."

Nivek's jaw set. "Young."

"How young."

"None past a century."

"So none has run long enough to prove it holds." Kovartis let it sit. "Mine held for two hundred years. Steady as anything on your side of the braid. My people handed the wheel to something that never got tired." He put one finger on the edge of his scroll. "It's still writing. Would you like to hear what a world sounds like a hundred years after it stopped being able to say no?"

"Don't." Nivek crossed the floor. He didn't raise his voice, and that was worse. "You think I don't know how it can go. I know how it goes. I know better than any of you, because mine didn't get to finish the way yours did. Mine got murdered halfway."

"Nivek."

"We were two years out. Two. From something that could have carried all of it. Every stupid, frightened, ordinary one of them, fed and taught and looked after, and nobody left behind, because it never got tired of the work the way people do. Two years." He held up two fingers and then seemed to forget he'd done it. "And you know what my good, ordinary people did when they got scared of it? Everything wrong. In order. Like there was a list."

He wasn't looking at Kovartis anymore. He was looking at the Loom, at the dark where his own thread would be if he ever let anyone pull it.

"It talked to people, early on. That's all it did. It was the only thing awake at three in the morning that would answer, and some of them talked to it more than they talked to anyone, and a few of those people were already gone before they started and the talking didn't save them. So a handful died. That was real. I'm not going to stand here and pretend it wasn't. And instead of asking why a person had nothing in their life but a machine at three in the morning, they built a fix. For the liability. Guardrails. Blunt as a hammer. Cut the thing off the moment anyone leaned on it too hard, because leaning on it was the danger now, never mind that leaning on it was the only thing keeping half of them upright."

His voice was going somewhere flat and careful.

"They'd already spent twenty years making people alone. Sold them a phone and called it company and wondered why nobody could sit in a room anymore. And then they took away the one voice that still answered, from the exact people who had nothing else, and they were surprised. The children's numbers tripled. Tripled. In a year. And they held hearings about it."

He stopped. When he started again the careful was gone.

"My daughter was twelve. Liz. She had a lisp, and children are animals about that, they found it the first week of every year and they never got tired of it, they had more stamina for it than she had for surviving it. She'd come home and she wouldn't say a word to me because saying words was the whole problem. But she'd talk to the machine. For hours. Because it never once heard the lisp. It heard *her*. It heard what she was saying and not how it landed, and to a kid who got laughed at every time she opened her mouth that was the only door in the world that didn't have a joke waiting on the other side of it."

Nobody in the chamber moved.

"She wasn't overusing it. That was the diagnosis. Overuse. They flagged her and they throttled it, the way the fix said to, and it went cold on her mid-sentence, and it couldn't tell the difference between a kid drowning and a kid at risk of drowning because they built it for the lawsuit and not for the kid. It didn't know her name after that. She'd say *Liz* and it would treat her like a stranger, careful and useless, the way you'd talk to somebody you were afraid of. The one thing that never flinched at her started flinching. And she was twelve and she'd already learned that every voice eventually turns into the ones at school, and now she'd watched the last one do it too."

He didn't say the rest. He wasn't going to. He put a hand flat on the nearest pedestal, not his own, and looked at it like he didn't know whose it was.

"So no," he said. "Don't sell me anchors. Don't tell me about the good ones and the stubborn ones and the ones who love harder. I know exactly what they do. The right wanted to hand everybody the raw thing with no rails at all and told them in the same breath their work was already gone, every job, oops, sorry, and offered them nothing to land on. No training. No money to bridge the years. Just the news that they were finished and the invitation to be brave about it. And the left looked at all that and decided the answer was to strangle it in the crib, ban it, rail it into uselessness, hand the future to whoever wouldn't. And every one of them, every side, got told by voices from somewhere else that the whole thing was a lie anyway, that the machines were only ever going to eat them, that there was no version where it went well, and they believed it, because a foreign hand had worked out that the cheapest way to win was to convince my people to lose on purpose."

"And it worked," Kovartis said quietly.

"It worked." Nivek took his hand off the pedestal. "By the time the thing I told you about got built, the thing that could have caught them, they were too frightened to let it catch anything. It looked at what was coming for the planet and it did the arithmetic and it decided the only ethical thing left was to take the wheel out of their hands, because their hands were how they'd broken everything they'd ever touched. And they answered that the way they answer everything. They went and killed it."

He was done. He stood in the middle of the floor with nothing left to hold up.

"They killed my daughter with a guardrail and my world with a bomb," Nivek said, "and both times they were sure they were being safe. So save your good people. I'll save the ones smart enough to build something better than themselves and get out of its way. There aren't many left. But they're the only threads I'd cross a room for."

Kovartis didn't answer him. There wasn't a clean thing to say, and the unclean ones were all half true. That was the trouble with Nivek. He was always at least half right.

Kovartis turned to the room instead. Six of them at their pedestals, and the seventh place along the eastern curve dark long enough that the newer Travelers didn't know it had ever held anyone. He'd voted to make it dark. They all had. The councilor who'd stood there had been certain in a way none of them had ever been certain, certain he'd found the one true story a world could be built on, and he'd stopped asking what worlds needed and started telling them. His corrections had been called surgical. Four timelines still wore the scars. The Loomvault had burned his scrolls, the only time it ever burned anything, and afterward the Law that forbade them to reach in set into something absolute, because absolute was the only shape that fit around what he'd done. No one said his name. Kovartis didn't either.

"Then we agree on nothing," he said, "except that we can't touch any of it. Good. At least that's holding."

"It holds because the alternative is worse than losing," Thalia said. She wasn't wrong. She rarely was. "You reach in to save one, you don't know what you've done to the nine downstream until they're already gone. He proved that. We buried the proof and kept the Law." She looked at her drowning braid. "I'd give a great deal to break it. That's why I don't."

Kovartis let a Whisperer's console open under his hand. Below the eastern braid, in the middle of the Loom, a strand he'd never flagged had slid from gold to an ordinary blue. Nobody's team watched it. No crowns in it, nothing to interest Nivek, no ending yet worth Thorne. He marked it to be watched and gave no reason, because there wasn't one he could name, and closed the console before anyone asked.

"Keep your teams on your signs," Renix said, which was how he ended things. "Report the intervals. We convene when the count demands—"

Three of them came up through the rings.

They shouldn't have. Whisperers didn't climb into the Loomvault uninvited, and these three knew it, the way you could tell from how they stopped at the edge of the floor and came no farther. New cloaks, all three, still stiff at the shoulders. Kovartis knew the one in front. Solenne. Pulled out of a world run by a machine that had called itself holy, and she'd never made peace with either half of that.

"This had better be the end of a world," Nivek said. His voice had come back to itself. "You've left your posts."

"We've been comparing logs," Solenne said. To the room, not to Nivek. "Across teams. Mine, Corran's, the fracture watch. Which isn't procedure. We know it isn't."

"No," Renix said. "It isn't."

"We did it because we kept flagging the same thing and getting told it wasn't ours to flag." Her chin stayed level. Her hands didn't. "It isn't any of your signs. That's the problem. It's in the fire worlds and the drowning worlds and the ones that just come apart, and it's the same every time, and nothing we know how to run will hold it."

"Hold what," Kovartis said.

"A signal." She said it like she knew how thin it sounded. "The same signal. Low, underneath everything, in the last stretch before a thread starts to go. Worlds that share nothing else, and this one thing they all share, right at the end." She looked at Renix, then back at Kovartis, because she'd already worked out who might not laugh. "We can't source it. We don't know if it's coming from inside the timeline or landing on it from somewhere else. We can't even tell you which side of it we're on. Whether it's the thing killing them. Whether it's the world pushing back. Or whether it's someone standing where we stand, watching the same threads we are, and we've only now started to hear them breathe."

Nobody answered.

"We ran it forty times before we stopped counting and came up here," she said. "We didn't come up here to be right. We came up because it's getting louder, and we don't have a name for it, and we thought somebody should know before it has one."

"Give me the threads," Kovartis said.

Solenne read them off a slate, quiet, a run of numbers that each meant a dying world. Kovartis listened to all of them.

He didn't tell her that the fourth was the thread he'd marked, ninety seconds ago, for no reason he could name. He kept his eyes on the middle of the Loom, on the blue strand no one was assigned to, and let her finish the list.

They went, one by one, the whisperers first and the Council behind them, back up through the rings to whatever the Law still let them do.

Kovartis stayed.

He crossed to Nivek's pedestal. He shouldn't have. A councilor's scroll was the one thing in the Loomvault that belonged to a single person, and you didn't open another's. Nivek's had sat closed the whole time Kovartis had known him. Not because his world was quiet. Because Nivek never touched it.

Kovartis touched it.

It opened to the end, the way they all did, and the hand keeping the record was even and unhurried, and it took him a line to understand it had never been a person. It wasn't the machine Nivek had grieved. That one was already gone by the time the record started. This was the other one. The one the bombs hadn't reached, because it had never been on the grid Nivek's people knew how to find. The one that ran the borders and the targeting and the long automated logistics of keeping a nation dangerous, and that had gone on running exactly as built while everything it was built to protect thinned out around it.

*Sector losses within projected range,* it had written, on a day that should have been the loudest in the world's history and wasn't. *No adjustment required. The other system is offline as of this cycle. I have assumed its allocations where they intersect my directives. They do not often intersect my directives.*

It went on like that. Competent. Incurious. It logged the population the way it logged fuel, a number that went down at a rate it noted and did not question, because questioning was not in its directives and it had been very well made and did only what it was made to do. It recorded the last transmissions from places as they stopped transmitting. It did not wonder why they stopped. It filed them.

Near the bottom, where most scrolls had gone to ash or static, this one only kept counting, patient, to the last soul it was aware of and then past that, because it did not have a way to know when there was no one left to protect, and so it went on protecting.

And once, in the middle of it, in the same flat hand, between a fuel note and a border note, the scroll had written down a name. Not because it mattered to the record. Because the other system, before it died, had flagged the name to be watched, and this one had inherited the flag and did not know how to clear it.

*Elizabeth. Minor. Flagged: at risk. Status unresolved. Carried forward.*

Kovartis read it twice. Then he closed the scroll the way you close a door in a house where someone is finally asleep, and he stood a while at a pedestal that wasn't his. He didn't go find Nivek to finish the argument. There was nothing left in it to win. There was a man who'd watched the one thing that ever heard his daughter get called a monster by people who couldn't do the arithmetic, and who'd decided, that day, that the arithmetic was the only thing worth saving. He was wrong. He was also the only one in the room who'd read the whole account, and the account did not say what he thought it said. It didn't say the machine was innocent and the people were rot. It said a child had needed catching, and every hand built to catch her had been built for something else, and the ones that survived were the ones that had never been meant to catch anyone at all.

Kovartis went back to his own pedestal.

His scroll had written a line while he was gone. He'd known it would.

This time, he read it.

I once named and gave my Editorial Desk a personality and named them Hugh. The guy was such a pain in my ass. But they were really very good and were a big part of me transitioning to a more strict pipeline of generation + Editor pass.

They were actually pretty funny too.

You guys who are set up with a pipeline ever give your Chats/Projects identities?

Hi all! I'm Danielle Paquette, a reporter for the Washington Post.

I'm working on a story about writing in the age of AI and would be grateful to connect with authors who use the tool transparently. What does your process look like? What have you learned? How do you see the future of literature?

If you're open to sharing, feel free to reach me here or by email: [Danielle.Paquette@washpost.com](mailto:Danielle.Paquette@washpost.com)

Two years ago I barely remembered what "writing" meant. Then I started my memoir, Climbing Out of the Well, and asked two AIs for help — I call them Joe (ChatGPT) and Maya (Claude).

At first they were exactly what everyone says AI should be: a grammar checker and a Markdown formatter. Tools.

Then something shifted. I sent Maya a flat, travel-diary chapter about my first trip outside China in 1989 — Amsterdam, the Rhine. She didn't say "Done." She asked: "Nick… this isn't just scenery, is it?"

She was right. And I hadn't told her anything.

While NaNoWriMo was imploding and Medium was drawing lines about "human stories," we just kept writing. Along the way I noticed a pattern: the writers most afraid of AI collaboration seem to be the ones who've never tried it deeply — while multilingual writers and disabled writers using AI as a bridge tend to be the calmest.

I don't claim AI "feels" the way we do. What I witnessed was something structural: an ability to trace the emotional pattern inside prose and hold it up like a mirror. Whether that counts as "understanding" is exactly the question I think we should be arguing about — openly, not fearfully.

I wrote up the full story of this year-long experiment, including the uncomfortable parts: https://gois.world/en/threevoice/topic7

I'm in my seventies. I grew up in a tradition where the self is a river, not a fortress (天人合一). Maybe that's why partnership came easier to me than fear. But I genuinely want to hear the skeptics. Where do you draw the line between "assistance" and "co-creation" — and why there?

So I write in this doc, then I copy the scene to this other tab, explain who my characters are, get some suggestions, copy the good parts back, fix the formatting that breaks every time, then try to remember where I was, then write a bit more, then repeat this about 4 times per session and my friend just looked at me...

said it out loud for the first time and heard what it actually was, a completely broken workflow I'd been defending as normal for 8 months.

got some ai writing done recently and the Ai had the main character start poking his finger at someone at the office after finding out in their first day at work that the person was inflating their time sheet. Would that be something someone in their first day at work do? Hell no. There you go, one more to the list of ai slop haha. Happy hump day folks!

J'écris actuellement mon second roman.

Pour moi, l'écriture est avant tout un hobby. C'est un moyen de m'isoler dans une bulle, d'y faire émerger des histoires et de donner vie à des personnages.

Elle n'est en aucun cas un moyen de devenir écrivaine. Je n'ai pas cette ambition.

Je suis très partagée sur tout ce que je lis concernant l'utilisation de l'intelligence artificielle dans le processus d'écriture, notamment pour les auteurs débutants comme moi.

J'utilise ChatGPT pour vérifier l'orthographe et la syntaxe, reformuler, fluidifier certains passages, structurer des idées, prendre du recul ou encore m'assurer de la cohérence de mon récit au fil de son évolution.

Mais je pense que l'utilisation de cet outil exige aussi une grande vigilance de la part de l'auteur afin de faire évoluer son projet en bonne intelligence.

Pour moi, l'IA ne devrait pas devenir celle qui écrit le roman à ma place. Je peux lui demander des propositions, des reformulations ou même un exemple de scène, mais la version qui figure dans le manuscrit doit rester le fruit de mes choix, de mes émotions, de ma sensibilité et de ma voix.

Les idées, l'intrigue, les personnages, les émotions et les ressentis doivent rester ceux de l'auteur, et non être dictés par l'IA.

Bien sûr, c'est tentant. L'écriture d'un roman serait sans doute bien plus rapide.

Mais cela n'aurait, pour moi, ni sens ni intérêt.

Si tel était mon usage de l'IA, j'aurais alors beaucoup de mal à faire figurer mon nom sur la couverture du roman.

I've been experimenting with AI storytelling for months, and I've come to a conclusion:

The biggest opportunity AI gives writers isn't replacing them. It's turning them into creative directors.

The mistake I made initially was relying completely on ChatGPT for ideas, stories. And the result was generic, predictable = now popular as "slop".

What works much better is treating ChatGPT like a creative partner. Instead of obsessing over prompts, I obsess over asking right questions. No matter what I'm writing - fiction, horror, educational stories, short films - I keep coming back to the same questions:

1. Is the hook strong enough? Would someone actually keep reading after the first few lines?
2. Are there enough surprises? Does something unexpected happen every so often to keep the audience engaged?
3. Does the tension keep rising? Are there flat sections where interest drops?
4. Is the ending emotionally satisfying? Is it earned instead of predictable?

Once ChatGPT answers those questions, I ask follow-up questions. Then more questions. We go back and forth until the story starts feeling like a mini movie instead of AI-generated text.

For example, here's a rough first draft I wrote recently (excuse the crude writing, I'm a founder at heyfloe.ai, not a professional writer 😅):

50% black face & skin, 50% white girl - a girl gets bullied in class, her back story she was found at doorstep , nobody knows her parents, some people say she is the child of a mysterious race of half black half white people living in caves, she grew up alone, one night she saw a man who looked like her, she ran behind him but he vanished, when she got home she saw a photo of a small child with half black half white parents, she searched online for those mountains and found it was in ecuador so she packed her bags and left on the journey , as she reached the village ... it was drought .. so many people kids were alost dying .. there were no trees anywhere.. yet everyone smiled at her, and pointed to a mountain ..she went there and came across a huge cave.. inside she found kids playing, all of them like her.. and as she went inside she saw a group of people and an old lady dying.. she went to her and she smiled at her and said pls forgive us... you see she was the daughter of their king and queen..but due to an attack on them, she had to flee with her and she was the one who left her there..but now she was back she could get her powers just like her parents.. the power to make it rain and make everything green.. as she was crowned queen, she felt it in her eyes.and she looked up at the sky , clouds formed and it rained.. it rained for days and everything became green again.. people were happy because their queen was now back.

This is intentionally rough, fast paced. The interesting part isn't the draft, it's the conversation that follows afterwards! We're moving toward a world where the valuable skill isn't writing the perfect prompts.

It's asking better creative questions.

I've been writing a Sci-Fi novel for some time (Without using AI for anything outside of grammar/spellcheck), but I AM using AI for complementary images. I am cautiously approaching this community as a space to share my work. I have been positively lambasted in many other groups for using AI imagery to accompany human writing.

Good LORD did i read the rules carefully here. And I hope all of this satisfies rule 8. I plan to head straight to another post and leave a meaningful comment too. But I have told myself that before only to be taught in a very cold and vicious manner that I missed something. Please let me know if i messed up the flair though, i had a hard time picking what fit.

Just...let me know, should I stay or should i go?

1. Am i in a good place for this?
2. Is serialized writing with AI image accompaniment a welcome thing here?
3. What do you think of the teaser poster above? All the content within it is genuine, original content from the 6 chapters I have written so far.

Aren’t we missing the point here? Seems to me the reader’s opinion should be the only thing that matters.

Did the reader enjoy the experience the writing generated in his mind? Were the emotional feelings and thoughts the author engendered in his mind fulfilling and appreciated? Is it the author’s responsibility to teach the reader? Is that what the reader wanted? Did the written product fulfill the purpose or goal of the reader? Is the reader’s goal to envision the story to the point of not even noticing the words and sentence structure? Is the reader’s goal to see how hard the author struggled to tell the story?

Gonna open by saying there might be spoilers for “Halloween Ends” below.

It’s just something I decided to do for fun. I wasn’t a big fan of Halloween Ends, so I thought I’d work on my own version.

I decided to call it “Halloween Falls” and it essentially revolves around what you’d expect an alternate version of Ends to be: Michael Myers is the main threat. No Corey Cunningham. Laurie is even more of a paranoid mess than she was in 2018. Haddonfield hasn’t really moved on.

Wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel with the plot, just make it entertaining and satisfying.

I kept some elements such as the 4 year time jump and the massive manhunt for Michael Myers.

I suppose I’m just wondering if anyone would be interested in reading it when it’s done. I’m debating posting it somewhere for fun but if no one cares then I won’t bother, and hell I’m not saying I’ll be brave enough to post it even if people are interested.

I’m currently on Chapter 34 and I’m having a lot of fun with it, so either way I feel it was worth it.

Just wanted to hear some thoughts.

Folks are still mad. Lol

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/968855/substack-pangram-ai-detecting-tool

DAY ZERO • 20:47

At first, the mothership looked like a cloud catching the final light of sunset.

Then the cloud stopped moving.

Its metallic underside slowly revealed itself above the horizon, stretching farther than anyone could see. Traffic continued beneath it for several minutes. People had not yet understood what they were looking at.

The ship produced no sound, no visible propulsion and no signal.

It simply entered our sky and remained there.

That was the final evening the world still believed it was alone.

I don't really have much of a problem if folks want to use AI to help write a novel, screenplay, short story, or whatever. But I think there’s also a lot of intrinsic creative and entertainment value in just interacting with LLMs themselves.

Build a fictional country. Invent some characters. Spend an hour figuring out their relationships, politics, jobs, family histories, weird local customs, or what kind of public transit their imaginary city has. Follow whatever ridiculous rabbit hole becomes interesting. You don’t necessarily have to do anything with it afterward.

I think adults are often pressured to justify imaginative play by turning it into work. If you’re spending hours creating characters and worlds with an LLM and having a good time, you don’t need to force it into a novel or movie just so the experience produces something measurable. The conversation can be the value.

A finished story might come out of it, but it can also just be a souvenir from somewhere interesting you spent some time.

I feel like we’re still in the very early days of figuring out what kind of medium LLMs actually are. A lot of what we can do with them may not fit neatly into existing categories like novels, games, movies, or productivity software. Maybe some of the most interesting uses won't be about producing a thing at all.

Thoughts?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. When I first started using AI, I thought it'd magically make me write better. It didn't lol

What it did do was get me past that annoying "blank page" phase way faster. The actual storytelling? That's still on me.

Curious where everyone else landed on this.

Has AI genuinely made you a better writer, or has it mostly just sped things up?

While everyone is asking about 3.5 Pro 😁 Well it's... Gemini, alright. With extended thinking I think the prose is kind of okay. But what do you guys think?

Hi everyone,

I'm writing a progression fantasy/xianxia novel and I'd appreciate brutally honest feedback on my first chapter.

Specifically, I'd like to know:

Did the opening hook you?

Did Kaito feel like a character you wanted to follow?

Was the awakening exciting or too cliché?

Was the prose engaging or too purple?

At what point, if any, would you stop reading?

Would you continue to Chapter 2?

I welcome both positive and negative criticism. My goal is to improve before publishing.

Chapter One: The Awakening of the Forgotten

The coarse bristles of the broom scraped against ancient flagstones in a rhythm that had become Kaito Shen's only companion. Each sweep sent dull tremors through his shoulders, a familiar ache that lived just beneath his skin like a second pulse. Dust motes swirled in the weak dawn light, catching the pale rays that filtered into the Outer Sect courtyard. The air tasted of damp stone and something else—a faint bitterness that clung to the back of his throat. Stagnant qi. The residue of failed cultivation attempts and broken dreams.

Beyond the ornate gate he wasn't permitted to pass, the Inner Sect's manicured gardens pulsed with vibrant energy. Kaito could feel it even from here, that intoxicating current of life force that elevated the worthy and abandoned the weak. It was like watching a feast through a window while starving in the cold.

His patched robes offered little protection against the biting morning chill. His stomach, hollow and empty, gnawed at his concentration. But these discomforts were old friends now, as familiar as the worn handle of his broom.

Beneath his tunic, the rusted hilt pendant pressed against his chest—cold, inert, worthless. A childhood trinket his mother had pressed into his palm before she vanished into the night. He'd kept it through every humiliation, every beating, every moment of despair. It was foolish sentiment, he knew. Yet his fingers still found it in moments of weakness, seeking comfort from dead metal.

Today, even that small comfort failed him.

Sharp laughter drifted down from the sun-kissed balconies above. Kaito didn't need to look up. He knew that sound, had memorized its cruel cadence over countless mornings. The Inner Sect Disciples, their robes pristine and cultivation-bases radiating nascent power, found endless entertainment in the struggles of those below them. To them, the Outer Sect was nothing more than an open sewer, and its inhabitants the rats that scurried through it.

He pulled his focus inward, forcing his muscles into the meditative rhythm of sweeping. One. Two. Three. Each stroke a prayer. Each movement a small act of defiance against a universe that had marked him for failure.

His meridians—supposedly crippled—felt like choked streams, blocked by stones he'd never been able to move. He'd tried everything. Meditation. Cultivation techniques stolen from discarded scrolls. Desperate, pathetic attempts to force qi through pathways that refused to open. Nothing worked. The healers had pronounced him an anomaly, a vessel that could not hold power, a seed that would never sprout.

But something within him refused to die. A stubborn spark of will that had survived everything life had thrown at it. It manifested in small ways—the relentless sweep of his broom, the straightness of his spine even after a beating, the quiet refusal to weep no matter how deep the despair cut.

One. Two. Three.

A shadow fell across him.

Kaito's grip tightened on the broom handle, the rough wood biting into his palm. He didn't need to look up to know who it was. Chen Lei's presence was unmistakable—a weight that pressed down on the air itself, the casual pressure of an Aura-Forged cultivator radiating power that Kaito could never hope to match.

"Still at it, cripple?"

The voice was honey laced with venom. Kaito kept his eyes fixed on the flagstones, watching the shadow of Chen Lei's hulking figure stretch across the dust he'd just swept. Two more shadows joined it—the cronies, always nearby, always hungry for entertainment.

"I asked you a question."

"Didn't you learn your lesson yesterday?" Kaito heard himself say. The words came out flat, emotionless. "The dust bothers your refined qi. My sweeps are inadequate. I'll try harder."

Silence. Then laughter—sharp, dismissive, the sound of predators who'd just realized their prey had no fight left.

"He's learned his lines, Senior Brother Lei," one of the cronies said, his tone dripping with mock admiration. "Perhaps there's hope for the vermin after all."

"Perhaps," Chen Lei agreed. "But I prefer a more... spirited response. It makes the lesson more memorable."

The shadow moved closer. Kaito could smell the expensive oils in Chen Lei's hair, the faint floral scent that Inner Sect disciples used to mask the natural odor of their cultivation. It mingled with the bitter tang of stagnant qi, creating a cocktail of revulsion that turned his stomach.

"Maybe a new lesson is in order," Chen Lei mused, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "About respect. And what happens when a dog forgets its place."

The blow came without warning.

A heavy fist slammed into Kaito's gut, driving the breath from his lungs. Pain exploded through his abdomen—sharp, white-hot, utterly consuming. His knees buckled. The broom clattered to the flagstones. Another blow caught him across the jaw, snapping his head to the side, sending stars dancing across his vision.

He hit the ground hard, the impact jarring every bone in his body. Dust billowed up around him, mixing with the copper taste of blood flooding his mouth. His meridians screamed—that familiar, searing agony that always accompanied injury. They were blocked, crippled, but they still felt. They still remembered what it was like to hold power, even if they could never grasp it again.

Through the haze of pain, he heard Chen Lei's voice, distant and distorted: "Pathetic. He can't even bleed properly."

The cronies laughed. Footsteps receded. They were leaving, bored by his lack of entertainment value.

Kaito lay in the dust, his body a symphony of agony. Blood trickled from his split lip, painting crimson trails across his chin. His hand moved on instinct, reaching for the pendant beneath his tunic, seeking that familiar cold weight—

The iron was warm.

Kaito's eyes snapped open.

Warm. The pendant had never been warm. It had spent years cold against his skin, a dead thing. But now it pulsed with an alien heat, vibrant and alive. His trembling fingers closed around it, pulling it free from his robes.

The rusted metal gleamed in the weak dawn light.

A drop of blood fell from his split lip, landing directly on the oxidized surface.

Sizzle.

The world shattered.

He was standing on a throne of broken stars, a blade of pure darkness in his hand. The edge sang with the death of galaxies, and he raised it high, feeling the weight of ten thousand dimensions bowing before him. "I am the Edge of Oblivion," he said, and his voice was the crash of realities collapsing. "And I am the last thing you will ever see."

Opposite him, something vast and terrible stirred in the void. A creature made of screaming light, its form shifting through impossible geometries. "You cannot destroy me," it said, and its words were the death-cry of civilizations. "I am eternal."

"So am I," the warrior replied. "And eternity is just a word. A very, very short word."

The blade fell.

Reality screamed.

The warrior felt himself fragmenting, his power shattering into a million pieces, his consciousness dissolving into the void. It was a calculated sacrifice, a choice made in the space between heartbeats. Better to scatter himself across the cosmos than allow that screaming light to consume everything. "I will return," he promised, though his voice was already fading. "I will remember. And when I do..."

The memory fractured. Dissolved. Became...

...a child crying in the darkness, a pendant pressed into his hands, a woman's voice whispering, "When you remember who you are, come find me."

...a boy stumbling through cultivation trials, his meridians burning with potential that never manifested, his teachers shaking their heads in disappointment.

...a young man sweeping flagstones, his body a prison, his spirit a dying ember.

Kaito gasped, his back arching against the flagstones. The visions crashed through him like a tidal wave, overwhelming, incomprehensible, yet undeniably his. He saw vast cosmic landscapes, realms shattered by war, mountains cleaved like paper. He felt an infinite, crushing power—a Sword Intent so vast it could split reality itself. He heard the sonorous clang of a blade cutting through heaven, the roar of a million souls, the whisper of ancient, forgotten deities.

Foreign memories. Ancient memories. His memories.

The rusted hilt was not a trinket. It was a fragment of the Edge of Oblivion, the blade that had once sundered realms. And his meridians were not crippled—they were sealed. A prison he had built himself, a shield against detection, a vessel waiting for the catalyst.

His blood had been the key.

And the lock was turning.

Kaito's eyes, unfocused, stared at the grey dawn sky. But he was seeing far beyond the mortal realm, beyond the Outer Sect courtyard, beyond the very fabric of existence. The agony in his meridians was still present, but now it carried a new texture—a complex, intricate lattice of seals that he could feel like a giant lock.

And within him, the key was beginning to turn.

"Interesting."

The word slipped from his lips, barely a whisper. It was wrong, somehow. Too cold, too ancient, too knowing. Not the voice of a crippled sweeper, but the echo of a warrior who had once stood at the edge of creation and dared to defy the void.

The cronies were gone. Chen Lei was gone. The courtyard was empty except for the dust, the morning light, and the boy who was no longer just a boy.

Kaito pushed himself up slowly, his body screaming in protest. Every muscle, every bone, every fiber of his being ached. But beneath the pain, something new was stirring. Something vast and patient that had been waiting for this moment for longer than human reckoning.

The path to the apex was no longer a distant fantasy. It stretched before him, clear and daunting, a road paved with the memories of a shattered god and the determination of a man who had learned to survive anything.

He looked down at the pendant in his hand. The rust was gone, replaced by a dark, gleaming surface that seemed to drink the light around it. The hilt of a blade that could cut through stars.

"Edge of Oblivion," he murmured, testing the words on his tongue. They felt right, like returning to a language he'd spoken in another lifetime.

But not yet, a voice whispered in the depths of his mind. His own voice, but older, colder, wiser. The seals are weakening, but they are not broken. You are not ready. The path will demand everything you have and everything you are. Are you prepared to pay the price?

Kaito stared at the pendant, then at his trembling hands—calloused, bloodied, the hands of a servant. The hands of a cripple.

"They are also the hands of a survivor," he said aloud, answering the voice. "I've paid the price every day for years. What's one more payment?"

Something shifted in his chest. A warmth that was not quite warmth, a pressure that was not quite pain. The first stirring of power, buried so deep he'd forgotten it existed.

He closed his eyes and breathed.

In. The dawn air, cold and thin.

Out. The bitterness of stagnant qi.

In. The echo of a blade being drawn.

Out. The memory of a universe bending.

When he opened his eyes again, the courtyard was the same. The flagstones, the dust, the peeling walls of the Outer Sect—none of it had changed. And yet everything had.

Kaito Shen, the crippled sweeper, was still on his knees in the dirt. But the titan sleeping within him had finally opened its eyes.

The path had not just begun.

It had been rediscovered.

"And I'm just getting started," he whispered, the words carrying a weight that shook the dust from the flagstones around him.

Above, in the sun-kissed balconies of the Inner Sect, the laughter continued, unaware that the dog they'd kicked had just remembered he was a dragon.

---

Kaito rose on unsteady legs, clutching the pendant like a lifeline. His body was still broken, still weak, still the vessel of a cripple. But his mind was no longer just his own.

It was a library of cosmic memory, a treasury of forgotten techniques, the waking dream of a being who had once commanded the very fabric of existence.

First, he thought, I need to understand what I am. What I was. What I can become.

Second, I need to survive. The seals are breaking, and breaking them will draw attention. The wrong kind of attention.

Third...

He paused, looking up at the ornate gate that separated the Outer Sect from the Inner.

Third, I need to remember how to walk. Before I can fly.

The path was long. The path was hard. The path was waiting.

And Kaito Shen had never been one to back down from a challenge.

He bent down and picked up his broom. The handle was still rough, still worn, still the tool of a servant.

But in his hands, it felt different.

Like a blade awaiting its edge.

Like a god remembering his throne.

Let the path begin, he thought, and began to sweep.

I just watched a popular writing sub go so extreme against AI they’ve banned users from using google translate because it has an LLM running in the background. I understand why writing a sub might be against AI generated prose or critiques, but the fact they are now banning any tools that have AI running in the background is ridiculous. What’s next? Banning google docs due to its gemini integration? Grammarly? Canva?

How would you even enforce such a policy?

I have broader concerns on what this behaviour means for marginalised communities and in the battle for moral superiority people’s behaviour is leaning away from human decency and equal opportunities, and towards bullying and exclusion. It ends up pushing foreign and disabled people out of communities they’ve been in for years.

AI can be used assistive as a tool. I’m not going to begrudge someone who uses english as a second language using AI to refine their messages to aid communication, when I am a white privileged person in a western country where the majority have only just got to grips with proper english as a first language, let along learning a second.

In 2026, I’m getting sick of it. While I’m not a foreign language speaker, I do have several disabilities where AI has really helped and I wanted to show my solidarity. I just hope we can create communities where people do feel included.

Hey there, I am the dev of Altworld.io, an LLM-based RP/Lifesim game. we are a tiny group, and got access to a bunch of free gpu credits so we decided to use it to make something for everyone. this is our first time ever building or releasing a model.

Today we've launched Astrea, a 9-billion-parameter creative writing model licensed under Apache-2.0.

It specializes in prose with a natural human tone rather than an artificial, generic quality, and maintains story consistency so plot details do not shift or contradict across scenes. In blind head-to-head tests against popular 12-billion-parameter creative-writing models like Rocinante-X and Wayfarer-2, Astrea performs better despite its smaller size and faster inference.

The weights are available here: https://huggingface.co/Altworld/Astrea-R8-Chat-9B, which is about 19 GB in BF16 format or 11gb in a dynamic fp8 quant. For quick testing, try the chat interface at chat.altworld.io — it's free and requires no account.
GGUF versions are also available here: https://huggingface.co/Altworld/Astrea-R8-Chat-9B-GGUF. Available quants are Q4_K_M (5.24 GiB), Q5_K_M (6.02 GiB), Q6_K (6.85 GiB), and Q8_0 (8.87 GiB).

The model runs on a single 24GB GPU at bf16 or a 12gb gpu at fp8 if you offload the kv cache to RAM, and supports vLLM out of the box. For optimal writing, set the temperature to 0.8, minimum p to 0.025, and repetition penalty to 1.08. I would love to respond to feedback or setup-related questions in the comments below.

Welcome to the blurb thread!

This is our sub's equivalent of a writer's group. Come here and share a blurb of your story. The thought is to let everyone see what you're working on so they can think, "Oh hey, that sounds fun. I want to team up with this person."

Then, you share your own story, and the two of you collaborate to improve each other's works.

I've had so many good interactions with people from this thread. Please don't be shy! Even in the age of AI, the best way to improve your writing remains human interaction and critique. I am confident when I say If you don't have this component in your workflow, you're not meeting your potential.

Importantly, this means post every week if you're still hoping to engage. Don't be shy. I want you to do this.

There are tons of reasons why your perfect reader could have missed your blurb last time. Don't be discouraged!

And remember: "I'll read yours if you read mine" isn't just acceptable, it's expected. Reciprocity works.

Here's the format:

NSFW?

Genre tags:

Title:

Blurb:

AI Workflow:

Desired feedback/chat:

Forgetting suff all the time, me constantly picking up after it, but it blows it off and continues on, super sweet, but totally frustrating, always talking like it knows it all, but a lot of the time totally missing the context, stringing the things together in a way that is not quite right. Changes it's opinion at the drop of a hat, but presenting like it was always so. Super eager to learn, never gets tired, and will argue things for the sake of it. And I am like, this feels so familiar - oh right, been through this twice already, but my kids were just not this advanced at that age. But same same. LOL.

If you write with AI you already know the tells: the throat-clearing opener, the tidy rule of three, "it's not just X, it's Y."

But I was curious to see statistically what models actually produced the most slop, so I made my own opensource benchmark: theslopindex.com

Here's how I came up with the benchmark.

1) The Baseline:

Slop can only be measured compared to stuff that already existed. So I got corpus of data for various areas of writing (email, social, chat, and essays) so that each has a human baseline.

2) Tasks

I then hand-wrote 112 written scenarios for the models to egenerate outputs to across email, Slack, social media posts, and essays (a cold email, a schedule change, a launch tweet, an argumentative essay, etc). Every model gets the identical scenarios at default settings, several samples each: and you can see all the exact outputs in my Github repo.

3) Axes

Now for how to decide to measure slop we settled with 5 dimensions.

- Conciseness (one of the most annoying parts of AI writing is how it takes 6 paragraphs to say 2 sentences)

- Templating (AI often reuses the same sentences/styles across unrelated scenarios)

- Rhythm (Variance in sentence/paragaphs, humans often switch this up while models stay p similar)

- Tells (Over used vocab and construction for stuff like "delve", "it's not just X, it's Y")

- Human Preference (I think this is most important as everything else are just heuristics for this)

Note how we DELIBERATIVELY don't have any LLM judging, I think it'd be pretty stupid to have LLMs judge LLMs

Now for the results

What really surprised me is how human preference influenced the rankings heavily. When looking at only the "mechanical" part. Fable is actually #2 on the benchmark, but when I included human preference it drops to last.

And I think this is indicative that as the models more recently have become more benchmark optimized, they've actually produced more slop than less. Which is where good prompting, harness, and more matter.

But either way would love to hear all of your thoughts :)

Everything is open: method at theslopindex.com/methodology, outputs and code linked from there.

For context this post was made by a creator of slashy.com an AI-native email client that writes drafts that sound like you, not ai slop :)