DISCLAIMER: I read a lot more than I write, and fiction writing isn't exactly my wheelhouse. I'm a copywriter by trade and tend to focus more on non-fiction/marketing copy. But I recently got hired on to review some manuscripts and check for AI-generated content, so this is a "here's what I've been seeing" wrap-up after reading so much slop (and objections to turning down said slop) that I want to gouge my eyes out.

TL;DR: "Writing well" is not evidence against you. (I hear this objection all the time when I flag pieces for being AI-generated content, and it starts to grate on my nerves after a while.)

The issue is "writing well" in combination with some of the stuff below. Because someone who has excellent prose is not going to make all of these mistakes as consistently as AI. The flag is that the prose is perfect, and prose that perfect is not going to be written by someone who doesn't care about the story enough to address these issues (which are super easy to spot, and it takes just skimming the book to catch some of this stuff).

Let's look at the way it writes fiction as an example.

The issue with Claude, specifically, is that it writes excellent prose. It's lyrical, flows nicely, and reads beautifully. (Other AI tools have their own tells; I'm just picking on Claude as an example. Sorry, Claude!)

The problem is that a writer who writes prose that excellent would not then constantly make these mistakes:

1. Knowledge management. Claude uses characters to deliver the narrative and does way too much exposition. Characters are treated like they're part of some hive mind and have information they shouldn't.
2. Characters are too perfect (underlying problem is the same as #1, but it reads differently). They read with uncanny levels of detail (because of the way Claude treats them like narrative tools rather than focusing on making them feel like people). They automatically read other characters perfectly, and then Claude tries to retroactively justify it. (Think: Sherlock Holmes on steroids, to the point that it's comical and even the most serious scenes almost read as satire because of it. (Related to characters being too perfect: they also somehow manage to be perfectly composed/deliver entire speeches while stressed, under duress, and in life-threatening situations!)
3. Characters serve as a "mouthpiece." Much of the character interaction/dialogue exists because the story needs it, not because the character would actually say it. Characters are constantly delivering exposition and tend to psychoanalyse other characters. This is a really lazy way to avoid action/getting to know a character through either their internal thoughts (if you're writing from their PoV), or to emphasise defining traits of a character because apparently AI doesn't trust the reader. Thematic summation is delivered heavy-handedly through dialogue.
4. Perspective/PoV issues. I don't think I need to elaborate on this one. AI in general struggles to write in limited PoV. It does not understand the joy of third-person limited and unreliable narrators. (I blame the fanfiction community for this one, honestly.)
5. It writes toward payoffs, rather than events. It tends to get sucked into "slice-of-life" fluff and every scene ends in a payoff that hasn't been earned.
6. Every scene has a major emotional hit. Speaking of things that haven't been earned, Claude specifically likes to start dropping emotional hits before a reader would reasonably care about the character. (Another big issue I see in fanfiction, where you can tell the writer is emotionally invested in the characters to the point they can't stay objective for even the first part of the story.)
7. It curates emotional moments. Slightly different than the last point—it knows people respond to emotion, so rather than trying to earn these moments through action and conflict, it provides them early and instantly.
8. Constant repetition of motifs for symbolic weight. Another case of being unable to trust the reader!
9. Friction is treated as something optional, rather than a requirement for the story to exist. Characters are messy. They should have conflicting interests and competing priorities. They should misread each other.
10. Weird MC interactions. It makes sure the MC is "seen," almost compulsively. Every single character sees right through the MC to their underlying motivations. Whatever they're trying to hide, no matter how well, everyone sees it and typically sympathises. Claude specifically treats being neutral/indifferent toward the MC like a crime.
11. Every significant moment is narrated, reflected on, and has massive emotional impact on the characters. In good storytelling, some of the "biggest" moments go unnoticed or downplayed until much later in the story. Characters react to each moment of significance immediately, undermining any potential for plot twists.
12. Overly rhythmic structure. (As someone who loves to write with triads, AI just has way too many.)
13. Em-dashes. Em-dashes by themselves aren't a tell. Em-dashes that see an increase in use during every emotional scene are.
14. Overused internal thought, rather than reserving it for when something can't be conveyed any other way.
15. Lots of narrating of micro-expressions.
16. Too much parallelism, causing it to read like a sermon.
17. QUALIFIERS. QUALIFIERS EVERYWHERE. Possibly the worst offender. ("Not quite X, but X")
18. Use of negative space. (Lots of describing what's not present, rather than just describing the action what's happening. Unless a character really feels the absence of something, there's no reason to describe what's not there.)
19. Vague. "Particular quality," "Something like X," rather than finding the actual word.
20. Overuse of metaphors/similes.
21. Overexplaining everything. Without a lot of training, Claude is particularly bad about trusting the action to stand on its own, rather than writing action that does its job. Action is almost always followed by interpretation and, true to form, it's usually through character dialogue.
22. No dialogue fumbles. Lack of incomplete sentences, wrong words/misspeaking, awkward silences, and just not being able to find the words.
23. Narrated backstories to establish character authority, rather than showing it through action. (I've probably already said this one somewhere in something above, but it needs its own line.)
24. Scene/paragraph architecture. Even if the prose avoids repetitive words/overuse of rhythm, there's a certain structural pattern in how the scene plays out that almost always bleeds through. This one is huge. Even if someone has edited the piece to death for grammar, style, etc., this last one is harder to break. (And this is the piece AI checkers cannot seem to check for, since most of them are checking sentence-level structure, and ultimately, why people still currently make better AI checkers than the paid tools do.)

PS: And before anyone says, "But I see that in writing everywhere! It's not just AI!"

Put on your critical thinking hat for a sec and think about where AI probably gets most of its habits.

Unless AI is given access to a pirated library, it's trained on CC0 stuff, or things that are no longer copyrighted. It's trained on fanfiction and it does not care about what constitutes good vs bad writing/storytelling. It looks for the patterns, and what most people are doing. It's trained on quotes and blurbs and paragraphs shared on social, out of context.

So yes, most people probably make a good chunk of these mistakes.

But most people do not make them as consistently as AI because we have some semblance of self-awareness and tend to catch them on the re-read.

PPS: Feel free to chime in with your own things you've noticed. This is by no means an exhaustive list, just the main things that I see in content that's clearly AI-generated, off the top of my head. And yes, this particular combination is specific to Claude. I feel like certain ChatGPT models tend to be a bit harder for me to pin down (possibly because it's more about what it's not doing than what it is doing).

PPPS: I don't necessarily agree that sites should be checking for AI-generated content, but it's what gets me paid. As for what I feel personally, I think if you're just checking for what most of us consider "bad writing," you'll naturally weed out most AI-gen content. (Because most people using AI don't seem to put effort into actually training it, giving it guidelines, and helping it improve.)

🐈PSPSPS: I don't bother with AI checkers when reviewing content. By the time a piece gets to me, it has already passed a preliminary automated check by a team that uses tools that check for sentence-based patterns and common "signatures." I get hired to check for deeper structural issues in content. (Not sure which tools they use, just that it's not Winston because I told them I'd quit on the spot if I caught anyone using Winston.)

Just wrote a piece in Fortune Magazine about writing with AI: https://fortune.com/2026/07/22/award-winning-memoir-author-ai-detector-publishing-hypocrisy/?utm_source=search&utm_medium=suggested_search&utm_campaign=search_link_clicks

Also no-paywall here on Yahoo: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/confessions-award-winning-ai-memoirist-113000392.html

Genuinely curious because mine has shifted significantly over a year, I started at maybe 95% me, now tho it's harder to calculate like for context the sentences are mine, story decisions are mine but some of those decisions happened during conversations with AI that I'm not sure I would have reached alone.

Is that 95% me or 80% me or something else entirely. I don't know how to count it anymore, where does everyone actually land and has it shifted?

Lately I've been noticing something that honestly makes me a bit sad.

A few years ago, if someone wrote clearly, connected different ideas or had a strong writing style, people would usually think:

“Wow... this person can write.”

Now?

Write well...?

“It was ChatGPT.”

Use precise words...?

“Definitely AI.”

Organize a complex thought...?

“AI again.”

And yes, I use AI every single day.

A lot.

It helps me organize my thoughts, connect things, cut the noise, sometimes find the exact shape of what I’m trying to say.

But the thoughts don’t appear from nowhere.

I’m bilingual because I lived and worked in London for more than ten years. I have an education, I’ve spent most of the last decade studying different subjects on my own and I grew up in a family of obsessive readers and culturally curious people.

I’ve always been able to express myself well.

Not always neatly, to be fair... my brain usually gives me 34 ideas at the same time and throws them on the table like a bag of puzzle pieces (My ADHD never misses a chance to join the conversation🙄🤭)

AI helps me put them in order.

Still, lately I’ve actually been told things like:

“Learn to write for yourself.”

And that one stayed with me.

Because yes, AI helped me shape the final answer.

But the angle was mine.

The experience was mine.

The connections were mine.

The opinion was mine.

Somewhere along the way, it feels like we started treating competence itself as suspicious.

As if the existence of AI automatically means humans can’t possibly think deeply, write well or connect complex ideas anymore.

Maybe this is just a transition phase.

I don’t know.

But I do wonder...

How are we going to recognize real human skill in a world where every sign of skill is immediately dismissed as AI?

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.

I'm considering whether I should try to send my book to publishers but I'm struggling with whether or not it would be considered AI assisted.

What I did do.

I used chat gpt or Google search (which gives an AI summary) for prompts like:

What was a tent in the 15th century made of? What was underwear in the 15th century made of? What were common curse words in the 15th century?

Synonym searches such as "What is another way to say "violently?" mostly to avoid repetition.

I would plug my descriptions into chat gpt and have it make images of my scenes/characters so I could describe them in more detail.

Plug in passages and tell chat gpt to correct the grammar in a novel appropriate way. I found grammarly was terrible for this.

What I did NOT do:

Have AI write or storyboard passages or any part of the book.

Have ai recommended changes that would alter the story or beats.

Copy paste anything from it into my book.

Have a try at this. Potentially useful - it surfaced several issues in a manuscript that survived dozens of rounds of AI-powered editorial checks before:

This is a two-prompt set.

Prompt one is setup. Claude will generate it as a markdown file you can reuse if you like:

Sketch out the profiles of twenty different beta readers.

Diversify: gender, ethnocultural background, native language, age, education, life experience, professions, hobbies, tastes in fiction, non-fiction interests, what the given beta reader pays special attention to, what they are more forgiving towards, degree of <language> proficiency.

Try to follow a distribution of factors broadly approximating the demographics of <language>-speaking readership in <region>.

Prompt two actually puts them to the task. This is the one you attach your manuscript to:

Now, one at a time, run each beta reader profile against the attached manuscript. Tell me what did they like, what did they dislike, what stood out to them and why.

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?

Large Language Model (LLM)-enhanced authorship is accelerating at an extraordinary pace. Within academia, the share of papers crediting an LLM tool or model has grown exponentially since 2023. In software development, over half of all new code commits are now LLM-assisted. Largely due to LLM assistance, the rate of knowledge production has never been higher. The intelligence explosion will not be constrained by the limits of LLM capability, but by our cultural norms around attribution and by linguistic gatekeeping. Although intended to control the quality of academic work, traditional ideas of authorship within many disciplines may instead act as a buffer, diminishing the potential for human knowledge growth.

The accelerating capability of LLM systems to generate scholarly text highlights a longstanding tension within academia: the dependence on clearly identifiable human authorship as a basis for credibility. Universities and journals currently restrict LLM co-authorship, citing questions of accountability, transparency, and research ethics. These concerns are grounded in the principle that scholarly claims must be traceable to a responsible agent who can defend the work.

Legacy Attitudes Towards Attribution

Recent public discussions surrounding citation and attribution practices across academia have demonstrated that authorship norms have always involved collaboration, borrowing, and iterative drafting to varying degrees. Committee-produced writing, multi-author workflows, and the role of research assistants and editorial staff have long contributed to the final scholarly voice. The result is paradoxical: LLMs can make knowledge creation faster and clearer than ever, yet systems designed to ensure trust and credit are slowing its publication.

This conflict has played out very differently in software engineering. There, authorship is secondary to utility. Copying, pasting, and reusing existing code is not simply tolerated, it is the norm. Attribution norms are weaker not because developers lack ethics, but because their incentives are aligned around functionality. This norm makes software uniquely suited to rapid LLM integration, because LLM code assistants are a continuation of a long-standing culture of reuse. GitHub Copilot, for instance, builds on decades of norms around forking, patching, and sharing code with minimal concern for original authorship. As a result, software R&D will outpace other disciplines due to relaxed provenance norms.

In 1997, Garry Kasparov became the first world chess champion to lose a match to a computer. The machine, Deep Blue, used brute-force computation combined with heuristic evaluation in what was an early instance of machine learning. No human has defeated a cutting-edge chess engine since. However, even as humans lost their dominance in pure play, they have been successful against those same machines when playing in a human-machine pair. Competing alongside machines in a style known as cyborg chess, they routinely outperform both human grandmasters and standalone AI systems. This model offers a lesson for other domains of knowledge. The scholars of the future may become “cyborg scholars.” Their strength will not lie in generating ideas faster than machines, but in discerning which of those ideas are worth pursuing.

LLMs as a Lingua Franca

We should consider some of the advantages of LLM co-authorship. The most direct is the massive creative capability LLMs can offer. LLMs can facilitate brainstorming, assess dispersed datasets, or conduct targeted literature reviews in seconds. They are not replacements for human thought, but enhancers.

A second advantage is that AI tools flatten linguistic barriers. With the aid of LLMs, non-native English speakers can contribute more effectively to academic publishing without years of immersion in academic English or dependence on English-speaking co-authors. Nature, for instance, recently noted a sharp increase in manuscript submissions from non-Anglophone regions correlated with the adoption of LLM-based writing tools. This does not replace subject expertise. Rather, it allows researchers to communicate their contributions more clearly across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

This benefit extends beyond non-native speakers. Even native English speakers who do not write according to the grammars or stylistic mores of elite institutions can now participate more easily in specialized discourse. An economist may use an AI assistant to adapt language for a history journal. A sociologist might adjust verbiage for a technical publication. Perhaps even a high school-educated plumber could contribute to an occupational safety journal. For better or worse, those without the cultural background can now spoof the linguistic shibboleths that once served as informal barriers to membership.

We should use this moment to ask how many of our norms around communication exist to ensure clarity, and how many simply reinforce hierarchies of access. A wider acceptance of AI co-authorship could lead to genuine epistemic democratization: access to creation no longer mediated by elite English-speaking institutions, and a reorientation of academic hierarchy away from aristocratic standards of legitimacy and toward meritocratic ones. The lingua franca for academics may no longer be academic English, but frontier LLMs used as a medium to exchange ideas freely across language, nation, and social class.

Traditions of Delegation

Professional knowledge work has long relied on structured delegation. Supreme Court justices have opinions drafted by clerks, generals have orders drafted by staffs, and academics have papers drafted by research assistants. Authorship delegation is nothing new. In each of these cases, the principal’s role is to provide final judgment and assume liability, not to micromanage the specific language of the document.

We should think of our new LLM assistants in the same way. We can now all be principals, and we may all now employ staff. As principals, our responsibility shifts from wordsmith to idea curator. The central question when publishing should be: Do these words faithfully express what I intend them to? While it may detract from personal ego, the best strategy to accelerate the collective pursuit of knowledge is to assume all writing is enhanced. Natural language should be treated as a neutral medium for transmitting ideas, not as an art form to be guarded. “Cyborg academics” should be welcomed as the next logical stage of scholarship.

Aesthetic Caveat

Within academia, writing is often treated as a transparent vehicle for ideas. But in many fields, the voice of the writer forms part of the intellectual contribution itself. Some scholars are recognizable not only for what they argue, but for how they argue it. Their habits, tone, and sense of emphasis are inseparable from the ideas they advance.

As LLM tools increasingly assist in drafting and refinement, these disciplines must ask to what extent individual voice is central to advancing knowledge. If clarity is all that matters, standardized and perhaps sterile LLM prose may be most practicable. But if expression shapes interpretation, then writers have a responsibility to preserve the qualities that make their work distinctly their own. This might mean intentionally drafting certain sections unaided, maintaining stylistic consistencies across works, or using LLMs with deliberate constraints. Recognition of beauty is essential to the human experience, but we should intentionally bifurcate the aesthetic from the pragmatic.

The intelligence explosion will not be limited by LLM capability, but by our willingness to rethink what authorship means. In software, utility has long triumphed, and code is judged by whether it works, not by who wrote it. Academia may follow, if it can draw a sharper distinction between the medium used to communicate ideas and the ideas themselves. As machines master the craft of expression, the human role will evolve from mere authorship to intellectual design. The LLM can become the craftsman, while the human mind remains the architect of the idea. The future of writing will belong to those who can not only originate meaning, but direct the machine to portray it accurately.

https://www.letters.senteguard.com/p/cyborg-scholars https://youtu.be/c7DdLtGSux0

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.

Guys please do let me know if anyone uses any LLM models with Max Effort and adaptive thinking for writing? Or do you guys use less effort like extra high or high or medium.

I have tried to search for the answer about which effort the majority of people who write with AI, in forums like this with search function, but I can't find an answer. I am afraid nobody has talked about this before. I am so curious. Please.

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!

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.

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?

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?

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.

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'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 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?

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 :)

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.