About AI use in edits

[Eldoria]

Sis, I may be a 'legend' but that comes from my drawings, not the writing.

And I reached to forum peeps whose opinion I trust, but no one replied so far.

And enough with the edits. I'd like to know if I should cotinue to write with what I put up. It's what led to me editing my work in the first place, to try to improve on it.

I'm sorry to hear about your situation. What I can do here may not be of much help to you, but a little. Ultimately, I leave the writing and editing decisions to you.

 

[Hans.Trondheim]

I'm sorry to hear about your situation. What I can do here may not be of much help to you, but a little. Ultimately, I leave the writing and editing decisions to you.

Nah, tis fine. I just want to know if my writing is still worth continuing, mainly because real life is slowly encroaching my resources and time.

I can't hold on everything, so I should cut my losses and cut cleanly.

Oh well, life sucks.

 

[BeezussWrites]

I mean, I did that before, and still nothing. How can you ask for feedback when no one is answering in the first place?

I've written about 150k words total through a few accounts for my stories, and I've never got a single comment that wasn't from me talking to a friend and asking them to take a look at my work. I sent my stories to paid beta readers, and all they gave me was "this is generic and it sucked.” I’m pretty good at taking criticism, but when the only criticism you’re getting is from people you have to pay to give it to you telling you it sucks, it kind of sucks a large amount of your confidence away. I feel your pain on this my man, and if you ever want feedback/are willing to settle for mine, feel free to send the full story my way and I’ll actually get to telling you if it’s worth continuing or not.

But for now, I’ll just give you an idea of what I can see on this post. I took a close look at your three versions, and I’ll break down what the AI change your story into, so you can make your own decision on where to go from here:

First, we are told how a scene feels almost every time, which leads us readers to be unable to immerse ourselves in the scene. Let’s just take a look at this from your passage: “They wanted me to carry the trays manually, exposed and vulnerable.” Exposed and vulnerable don’t do anything to help out the passage, and they are instantly explained through a way better frame with the next sentence that talks about the Vietnam war and dense greenery. What specifically makes him feel exposed? In your original version, you explained what it felt like to be exposed, and how it related to his current situation. In the ai versions, we were told that he felt exposed, without any reason to understand why.

Second, which ties into the above point, is its ruthless need to trim pacing. Ask ai to give you a rating on any of your work and see what I mean. It always believes there’s fat to be trimmed, and that fat is usually cutting long, flowery descriptions that might often help a scene feel more alive in favor of something shorter that it believes “means the same thing.”

Words that mean the same thing don’t often feel the same to us humans, but ai can’t tell the difference.

Let’s take a look at this piece from your original:

“where you suddenly hear the trees and shrubs speak Vietnamese for a moment, and then a hail of bullets and explosions would follow seconds after.”

Now take a look at the AI’s version:

“the kind where the trees suddenly started speaking a language you didn't understand right before the first flare went up.”

It got rid of the “for a moment, and then” in favor of just “right before.” It believes it’s cleaner, which it definitely is, but it lose the cinematic feel in favor of word count. It might be a few words, but those few words serve to create tension that is now non-existent in the second version.

Lastly… AI just sucks at dialogue, and “sullied failure” is a perfect example of that. Ai doesn’t understand how people talk, but rather the context a conversation is spoken in. It sees this “high class” setting you’ve crafted, and reaches for a more elevated set of words to use instead. “Sullied” checks out logically, but when you look at “sullied failure” you know a person would never actually say this.

On top of that, it’s clear that it was meant to be a nickname, which it completely failed at. A nickname is supposed to be some sort of observation about the person it’s describing. Sullied failure doesn’t do that, and you clearly saw that yourself when you changed it to “useless lust demon” in the revised version. It clearly makes us understand what about him the maids didn’t like, while also giving us a better idea of the type of worldview people of their standing have.

The reason it’s bad to use AI to write is because its repetitive patterns will keep your story from getting to its full potential. Rather, you should reverse engineer what exactly the ai is doing correctly so you can apply it to your writing. To help you out, here are a few things I think it did well:

Ai is actually decent at filling in gaps some writers might have missed. Your original writing just said: “If those fell into the food, it would get contaminated.” I couldn’t tell if the problem was with the leaves touching the food, or specifically what would happen to him if they did. The AI fixed that by adding this:

Only here, the "hail of bullets" would be wet leaves and spiteful splashes of fountain water. If a single stray leaf touched the patrons’ food, the kitchen maids would have all the excuse they needed to declare me a "sullied" failure.

Now I understood both what he was trying to avoid and why it mattered.

My final point is actually a somewhat counter to my original point about AI over-explaining things, which sometimes can be a benefit to the author. Writers begin their story with a perfect idea of the setting they’re writing about, but forget that none of those ideas are visible to the reader. Like if I wrote something like: “The cold air made me shudder,” you’d know it’s cold. But if I wrote “I really need to patch that hole in the roof,” I shuddered. you’d understand that there was a hole in the roof, and that’s why the character was cold.

Here’s an example of the AI doing just that in your writing. We get “back on Earth” and “the saint’s visitors.” This now made it completely clear that this was some sort of Isekai/Fantasy world. Though, if this is part of a larger piece and the readers are already aware of this, then these might become a bit redundant, but based on this excerpt, they help out a ton.

I know from personal experience how hard it is to continue writing when you’re endlessly yelling into the void for someone to give you advice, only for no one to ever notice. Don’t think that the goal should be not to write with AI, but rather to improve your craft to a point where AI is no longer needed.

 

[Rolanov]

Nah, tis fine. I just want to know if my writing is still worth continuing, mainly because real life is slowly encroaching my resources and time.

I can't hold on everything, so I should cut my losses and cut cleanly.

Oh well, life sucks.

You'd better take a break for a while, mate. Don't pressure yourself too much, especially when it involves creative work. Do something outside your usual routine or things you actually enjoy.

It's just a guess, but are you perhaps reading others' work and feeling discouraged about your own writing?

 

[Erysion]

It's just a guess, but are you perhaps reading others' work and feeling discouraged about your own writing?

From the look of it, he is reading comments Retard Road users posted on his stories and it make him want to stop writing.

Hans might have left Retard Road Legends, but they followed him here.

 

[Rolanov]

From the look of it, he is reading comments Retard Road users posted on his stories and it make him want to stop writing.

Hans might have left Retard Road Legends, but they followed him here.

That’s lovely, perhaps they’re proper fans or secretly in love with Hans? Since they’ve got bags of time to follow him here as well!