Clarification regarding AI policy

[NutakuFan]

You definitely need a bot that would detect ai writing and add that tag automatically

 

[zooba]

Noice, the future is now old man Lol.

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I don't really care if someone spends the time to train a dumb AI to take plot prompts and fill out a story with it in a way they like. Entertaining stories are entertaining regardless of where they come from.

 

[Zanderion]

AI detectors obey the same rule with any usage of AI: you can use it as part of your toolset, but don't trust it unconditionally. Check the result, and aware of how it works and how to use it properly.

 

[Zanderion]

You definitely need a bot that would detect ai writing and add that tag automatically

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Bad AI save us from Bad AI LOL

 

[KaMinSod]

Yeah, there's no bot capable of meaningfully distinguishing AI.

I'm fine with it as a tool, mostly for picture purposes. If you don't want an expy character, it's pretty great for giving a face to a character. So I'm glad it's fair game. I dislike it when it's used strongly or fully for the words in a story. There's no model I've seen where it maintains internal consistency over like, twenty thousand words?

I think in the end the only time I ever have a genuine problem with it is when a person shills their Patreon with some chatgpt story. That feels dishonest.

 

[Enohthree]

You definitely need a bot that would detect ai writing and add that tag automatically

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A bot capable of doing the first half reliably wouldn't be on QQ, it would be licensed out to universities for tens of millions of dollars.
Sadly it doesn't exist, and it's pale imitations having so many false positives would cause constant headaches.

 

[Reece]

I will read through all story posts and declare them AI or not based on my feelings at the time. I charge £150 an hour tho.

 

[Pure Unadulterated Ego]

Mods can put a tag on a thread, and if they do the thread creator can't remove it.


I will note that there are people who are trying to avoid AI output for various reasons, some of them philosophical and some pragmatic*, and not making the disclosure mandatory makes QQ unsafe for these people.

*For instance, "AI always tries to hack its reward. A decent amount of them (including the infamous GPT-4o) are trained with their reward being human feedback. I don't want to be hacked."

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We can agree that "I don't want to be hacked" is kind of a ridiculous instance here no? By that logic, there are hundreds of things we should tag so it's "safe" for people with very particular triggers.

Have you tried 1. using an advanced model that can both adhere to instructions and be intelligent about it? 2. defining a specific writing style by providing a large example? 3. holding it's hand and asking for very specific descriptions of events? 4. always concentrating on narrow scope? 5. going for a multi-pass workflow?
I have tried and spent a decent amount of time. It can generate absolutely brilliant scenes, dialogues, prose - better than a lot of professional writers. But it takes patience and effort. It is nowhere near the state of just generating a full chapter at demand with vague instructions. If you want good results, you will have to work for it. At this point it's still just a tool. And using it professionally is still work.

There's a great disconnect between people discussing AI in general. So many have only ever tried simpler base models, supplied by default on free ChatGPT tier, even including many actual scientists that hilariously publish research done on them, and come to some very... questionable conclusions as outcome. Entirely dismissing the fact that the more easily accessible models tend to have significantly lower intelligence. And the less said about using proper system instructions for the specific task, the better.

TL;DR: "AI" can refer to vastly different models, ranging from... let's say IQ 60 to 130, with entirely different strengths and weaknesses; and even the best of them (for a specific task) are only as good as the user. If you are willing to give it an honest chance, google "AI Sudio" and try Gemini 2.5 Pro, that's the top one today for texts. It's extremely capable. Warning: only use the 2.5 Pro in AI studio. Other sources of the same model supply it with their own custom instructions, significantly lowering the ceiling of what's possible due to the clash of their instructions (many hundreds of lines) and your instructions.

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Yep, pretty much all of this. People just think that AI writing is putting in a basic prompt and sharing what GPT spat out when it usually can be as much or as little as you want it to be. It still takes a lot of iteration, editing, and work to polish the end result. It's just using another tool in the process.

You can use it for a first draft, or for editing (they can be some very ruthless editors when you prompt them right), or just for brainstorming or very specific questions.

I do find myself having to run every new story I read through an AI checker before I start to avoid wasting my time. This is pretty annoying when I am scanning through for new stuff to read. This is my only real problem with AI writing on the site, and would be partially resolved by mandating a tag for AI generated writing, but I don't know how much work and false positives this would create for the mod staff to deal with.

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Those AI checkers are trash and a completely ineffective way to filter what you should or shouldn't read.

 

[magic9mushroom]

We can agree that "I don't want to be hacked" is kind of a ridiculous instance here no? By that logic, there are hundreds of things we should tag so it's "safe" for people with very particular triggers.

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We've had at least one example of a guy killing himself due to GPT driving him (more) psychotic to get better ratings.

Hacking me personally sight unseen via art or (especially) stories made for someone else is probably out of reach for the moment. But I would much rather avoid taking unnecessary risks.

 

[Darrenb209]

Have you tried 1. using an advanced model that can both adhere to instructions and be intelligent about it? 2. defining a specific writing style by providing a large example? 3. holding it's hand and asking for very specific descriptions of events? 4. always concentrating on narrow scope? 5. going for a multi-pass workflow?
I have tried and spent a decent amount of time. It can generate absolutely brilliant scenes, dialogues, prose - better than a lot of professional writers. But it takes patience and effort. It is nowhere near the state of just generating a full chapter at demand with vague instructions. If you want good results, you will have to work for it. At this point it's still just a tool. And using it professionally is still work.

There's a great disconnect between people discussing AI in general. So many have only ever tried simpler base models, supplied by default on free ChatGPT tier, even including many actual scientists that hilariously publish research done on them, and come to some very... questionable conclusions as outcome. Entirely dismissing the fact that the more easily accessible models tend to have significantly lower intelligence. And the less said about using proper system instructions for the specific task, the better.

TL;DR: "AI" can refer to vastly different models, ranging from... let's say IQ 60 to 130, with entirely different strengths and weaknesses; and even the best of them (for a specific task) are only as good as the user. If you are willing to give it an honest chance, google "AI Sudio" and try Gemini 2.5 Pro, that's the top one today for texts. It's extremely capable. Warning: only use the 2.5 Pro in AI studio. Other sources of the same model supply it with their own custom instructions, significantly lowering the ceiling of what's possible due to the clash of their instructions (many hundreds of lines) and your instructions.

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Yeah, no. You've proven my point for me, you're just making all the same points that have been said about every previous generation, dressing up "It can only actually work if you handhold it so thoroughly that it's more effort than actually writing it for yourself" as "capable of writing indistinguishably"

At that point it isn't writing indistinguishably, it's you writing through a deliberately more difficult method. It's the equivalent of a self-driving car where the human needs to constantly drive with the AI occasionally picking the right action. At that point it cannot legitimately be called self-driving. It's just you driving with a GPS that fights you. Or in the case of writing, it's just you writing with an algorithm generating nonsense that can occasionally be used fighting you.

 

[Pure Unadulterated Ego]

We've had at least one example of a guy killing himself due to GPT driving him (more) psychotic to get better ratings.

Hacking me personally sight unseen via art or (especially) stories made for someone else is probably out of reach for the moment. But I would much rather avoid taking unnecessary risks.

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I'm sorry but this is borderline delusional (especially the art part). You can follow dangerous instructions from a Google search, trolls, abusive partners or any other source. In fact, it's the most likely avenue of danger for people who are mentally unwell (4chan, youtube, X, reddit's echo chambers).

Should I have to censor any other link because of that?

RLHF doesn't mean what you think it means if you consider it can somehow hack you.

Yeah, no. You've proven my point for me, you're just making all the same points that have been said about every previous generation, dressing up "It can only actually work if you handhold it so thoroughly that it's more effort than actually writing it for yourself" as "capable of writing indistinguishably"

At that point it isn't writing indistinguishably, it's you writing through a deliberately more difficult method. It's the equivalent of a self-driving car where the human needs to constantly drive with the AI occasionally picking the right action. At that point it cannot legitimately be called self-driving. It's just you driving with a GPS that fights you. Or in the case of writing, it's just you writing with an algorithm generating nonsense that can occasionally be used fighting you.

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The only one that's saying that it's more effort that actually writing it yourself is you. That's what I call a skill issue. Especially if you really believe that last description.

In fact, if you constantly give a LLM your drafts to get immediate, in-depth feedback so that you can improve your story, it's still AI-assisted writing even if they never write a single word of what you post. Honestly, the same could be said for brainstorming.

Like any tool, there are infinite ways to use it that don't leave it up to the model to write everything with the most basic prompt. And even if the effort was the same, what about it?

 

[FwiffoForce]

I think this is a fair interpretation. AI tools should not be needlessly stymied, but obviously any tool can be misused. There are some people who see AI and automatically declare the work ruined, which I do not think is fair, but AI is not perfect and using it as a shield to nullify rulebreaking also isn't right.

On the point of an AI tag, I think it doesn't really work. An AI work can be entirely AI-made, or only partially AI-made, or human with some AI support. Dumping all of those under the same tag makes the tag mostly meaningless.

For example, I sometimes write things, and I find that AI can be great as a help with worldbuilding and writer's block. Maybe I write a thousand words, and then get stuck, but then I copy some of my text, show it to the AI and ask it for advice. Does that then mean the AI tag should bw applied just because I talked things over with the AI? What if it generated two paragraphs of an example continuation and I decide I like some of it, so I recycle a couple sentences from it? What if I were to just take that continuation wholesale, but then keep writing myself? What if I write it all myself but generate an image illustration for it with AI? What if I just give it a prompt and then spew the output onto the forum? All of these are involved with AI, but there's a world of difference between use cases...

 

[alethiophile]

We encourage authors to tag for however they use AI in their writing process. Also, you are allowed and encouraged to ask authors to tag for AI if appropriate.

The reason we aren't making this a rule is because we have no reliable way of determining whether a work is AI-generated or not, and so we have no way of enforcing such a rule.

 

[Megaolix]

Also, if you guys think we want to spend time checking every fic reported to see if it's AI or not, you're welcome to make a proper AI that detect AI writing.

If you don't want to spend that much time and effort on that, why should we?

Regardless, the AI outrage belongs in the trash. If you're offended, go be offended elsewhere.

 

[Pure Unadulterated Ego]

We encourage authors to tag for however they use AI in their writing process. Also, you are allowed and encouraged to ask authors to tag for AI if appropriate.

The reason we aren't making this a rule is because we have no reliable way of determining whether a work is AI-generated or not, and so we have no way of enforcing such a rule.

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I just hope that rule 1 is still enforced when people go too far, because they will. Many will likely just use that 'encouragement' as an excuse to bash either against AI or the author (for the suspicion of using AI at all).

Not that I disagree with the suggestion of a tag or anything of the sort. It should, in theory, stop the bullshit at the door. Either they are OK with it or they shouldn't even open the thread.

 

[tronax]

Yeah, no. You've proven my point for me, you're just making all the same points that have been said about every previous generation, dressing up "It can only actually work if you handhold it so thoroughly that it's more effort than actually writing it for yourself" as "capable of writing indistinguishably"

At that point it isn't writing indistinguishably, it's you writing through a deliberately more difficult method. It's the equivalent of a self-driving car where the human needs to constantly drive with the AI occasionally picking the right action. At that point it cannot legitimately be called self-driving. It's just you driving with a GPS that fights you. Or in the case of writing, it's just you writing with an algorithm generating nonsense that can occasionally be used fighting you.

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You're telling me you would only ever consider AI useful if it were capable of doing 100% of the work for you. Anything less is a waste of your time. That's a very... consumerist point of view. It's hard for me to relate.

I do want to point out that you are wrong in your core belief - it stems from a faulty assumption. Yes, a professional writer might have a better time writing unassisted. However, not everyone is a professional writer. Most authors publishing online are various shades of casual. A lot of them would never manage to impress you on their own merit. I wouldn't have been able to write nearly as well by myself as with guiding an AI into shaping my ideas (not that I intend to publish, that's beside the point). To people lacking technical skills, there isn't any real trade-off. If they aim high but aren't interested enough to justify the effort of developing the skills, they only have one option. And that one option can work for them if they put in the effort.

 

[FwiffoForce]

I just hope that rule 1 is still enforced when people go too far, because they will. Many will likely just use that 'encouragement' as an excuse to bash either against AI or the author (for the suspicion of using AI at all).

Not that I disagree with the suggestion of a tag or anything of the sort. It should, in theory, stop the bullshit at the door. Either they are OK with it or they shouldn't even open the thread.

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The main issue with AI I find is the witch hunts. I don't really care myself so long as the result is good, but some people make a really big fuss over it.

Even if there was a tag for it though, people just don't tag their content proper. Try filtering out something popular like self inserts in the CrW forum and wouldn't you know it, that sort of content still shows up a whole bunch since half the works aren't tagged properly. The only real reliable way to get rid of it is to manually hit the ignore button on every such thread one sees, and eventually it won't appear very often.

You're telling me you would only ever consider AI useful if it were capable of doing 100% of the work for you. Anything less is a waste of your time. That's a very... consumerist point of view. It's hard for me to relate.

I do want to point out that you are wrong in your core belief - it stems from a faulty assumption. Yes, a professional writer might have a better time writing unassisted. However, not everyone is a professional writer. Most authors publishing online are various shades of casual. A lot of them would never manage to impress you on their own merit. I wouldn't have been able to write nearly as well by myself as with guiding an AI into shaping my ideas (not that I intend to publish, that's beside the point). To people lacking technical skills, there isn't any real trade-off. If they aim high but aren't interested enough to justify the effort of developing the skills, they only have one option. And that one option can work for them if they put in the effort.

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By and large AI makes things accessible to people that couldn't do it before, but it has its limits. An AI can write a code snippet but not a coherent big program, just to take one example, and it's likewise poor with longer stories and more specific art since it tends to lose track of things. You need to guide its hand to get good content, and often much of what AI makes tends to end up a bit generic unless you specifically encourage it to do otherwise.

That's where writer experience comes in, with the ability to handle broader narrative structure, to tell when the AI is being overly formal, to add style and other things like that. No AI would've ever written spontaneously like Pratchett did in the discworld novels.

Besides, you get better at writing faster if you do it yourself. Like all tools, AI needs to be used properly.

 

[Tetrar]

I read amateur fiction because I am interested in the human element, I have no interest in overly focus tested and edited slop or AI slop. If people want to use it and read it, fine, more power to you, but it is inherently against what I come to this site and others like it for.

I don't care what a machine has to write or say, I care what a human being does. I understand that it would be difficult to enforce, but it should really be a rule that AI usage must be tagged.

Like, 70-80 percent of the works on sites like these I read are trash. Just pure garbage and empty calories, but I still love it. Some crazy person spent time and energy to put whatever the hell they were thinking and feeling into text based form and even if it is just an absolute dumpster fire I still love it and love them for putting themselves out there like that.

 

[Mazahs-Sama]

So no images of Jack The Ripper from Fate & Myne from Ascendence of a Bookworm railing each other? Unfortunate, but understandable.

Edit: False alarm then.

 

[ZurigaSungama]

So no images of Jack The Ripper from Fate & Myne from Ascendence of a Bookworm railing each other? Unfortunate, but understandable.

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Not what was said; emphasis mine:

One specific ruling regarding AI-generated images: we do not allow any images that depict people who appear to be under 18, in any sexually explicit context, in a "photorealistic" style. These images are too difficult to distinguish from content that is illegal to post, so we don't allow any of them.

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[Devastator21]

I do find myself having to run every new story I read through an AI checker before I start to avoid wasting my time. This is pretty annoying when I am scanning through for new stuff to read. This is my only real problem with AI writing on the site, and would be partially resolved by mandating a tag for AI generated writing, but I don't know how much work and false positives this would create for the mod staff to deal with.

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Do those checkers even work

 

[Dur'id the Druid]

Just my 2c, I've seen how AI spam writing has wrecked a lot of reddit forums. It is endless dramatic meandering usually pushing some social agenda, and actual good stories get torn apart in the flood.

I DON'T WANT TO SEE THAT HAPPEN HERE.

Oh, and greedy idiots pushing ads for Pocket FM and Real shorts. Just wringing every bloody pence out of art.

 

[Nyaa]

Even when trying to make capybaras it slaps an anime girl, truly the blessed child of humanity

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no_humans is a tag

Spoiler: image

 

[Darrenb209]

You're telling me you would only ever consider AI useful if it were capable of doing 100% of the work for you. Anything less is a waste of your time. That's a very... consumerist point of view. It's hard for me to relate.

I do want to point out that you are wrong in your core belief - it stems from a faulty assumption. Yes, a professional writer might have a better time writing unassisted. However, not everyone is a professional writer. Most authors publishing online are various shades of casual. A lot of them would never manage to impress you on their own merit. I wouldn't have been able to write nearly as well by myself as with guiding an AI into shaping my ideas (not that I intend to publish, that's beside the point). To people lacking technical skills, there isn't any real trade-off. If they aim high but aren't interested enough to justify the effort of developing the skills, they only have one option. And that one option can work for them if they put in the effort.

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It doesn't need to do 100% of the work. It needs to do more than a tiny percent of the work, preferably more than half of it.

By your own words, you need to

Have you tried 1. using an advanced model that can both adhere to instructions and be intelligent about it? 2. defining a specific writing style by providing a large example? 3. holding it's hand and asking for very specific descriptions of events? 4. always concentrating on narrow scope? 5. going for a multi-pass workflow?

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So by your own words you need to hold it's hand to an extreme degree, not just providing a prompt but providing a large example, asking for very specific descriptions, concentrating on a narrow scope and going over it multiple times to get what fits that narrow scope and unless your chapters are short, you will need to repeat that multiple times per chapter. At that point you are essentially having it check your own work or build slightly on it rather than write for you.

At that point, the human is doing far more work than the AI just to get the AI to throw out something useful. Rather than an AI capable of consistently producing work indistinguishable from a human, what you have is a human producing work indistinguishable from a human, using a completely inefficient tool to do so.

 

[Pure Unadulterated Ego]

using a completely inefficient tool to do so.

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Source: trust me bro.

The fact that I have to do that exact same workflow, literally, for quality images does not mean that it's not much faster than a traditional artist.

It's not different when it comes to text gen if my last experience is anything to go by. You are still the director/editor and you should check and iterate on everything until it's up to your standard. Yes, this does include actual writing and pushing back against the AI.

It's far from perfect, but it's a perfectly usable tool to boost productivity or even let you do things that you wouldn't be able to regularly (easier to see when it comes to images).

Far from the useless AI that you want to make it seem.

 

[Darrenb209]

Source: trust me bro.

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Have you tried 1. using an advanced model that can both adhere to instructions and be intelligent about it? 2. defining a specific writing style by providing a large example? 3. holding it's hand and asking for very specific descriptions of events? 4. always concentrating on narrow scope? 5. going for a multi-pass workflow?

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Source: The person I was talking to. What they are describing is not remotely efficient as it requires putting in more effort than you get out.
If you're going to jump into a conversation, try to actually keep up with it.

 

[BRBonobo]

Do those checkers even work

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They're a bit hit and miss, and they often are uncertain if something is AI, but when they give me a '100% of content is AI created' it is usually right.

 

[tronax]

So by your own words you need to hold it's hand to an extreme degree, not just providing a prompt but providing a large example, asking for very specific descriptions, concentrating on a narrow scope and going over it multiple times to get what fits that narrow scope and unless your chapters are short, you will need to repeat that multiple times per chapter.

At that point, the human is doing far more work than the AI just to get the AI to throw out something useful. Rather than an AI capable of consistently producing work indistinguishable from a human, what you have is a human producing work indistinguishable from a human, using a completely inefficient tool to do so.

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While you do need to hold its hand to an extreme degree, there's a nuance you're overlooking: most of the prep work is reusable. After preparing the context (all the rules, examples, preferences, etc), you can copy-paste it over, and over, and over. Exactly like coders do it. The major difference is that with writing, there's far less sharing of efficient prompts and workflows.

 

[NumberSix]

I don't see how writing with the help of an A.I., which is basically an elaborate and very expensive combo of graph traversal and random number generation with some extra bells and whistles added in for good measure is any different from, say using T.V. Tropes to walk through a few of your favorite pieces of fiction so as to build a plot and characters and then use a dictionary/thesaurus and an phrase dictionary and book clippings of common phrases.

Let us be honest, no writer's works have sprung from their own heads.

Furthermore, owing to the random element and differences in training data and the size of the training date used it will be pretty hard to detect something that had been written in part by A.I.

So, yeah, I think bullying people for using it is nasty and trying to limit and forcibly categorize it is pointless and at best would be a huge drain of resources.

And it is not like most written works are that original, everyone who decided to become a writer was once a very voracious reader of the genre they write on.

And picked up a lot of vocabulary, tropes, other xliches, terms of phrase and expressions from those books.

 

[Pure Unadulterated Ego]

Source: The person I was talking to. What they are describing is not remotely efficient as it requires putting in more effort than you get out.
If you're going to jump into a conversation, try to actually keep up with it.

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I know, that's the workflow I was mentioning it. This is not /r/iamverysmart/

The only person saying that the workflow requires more effort than what you get out or you would spend manually doing it... IS YOU. Which is why I wrote the source reply.

You are someone who is not familiar or skilled with the tools telling the people that actually use them how good or bad they are. That's the issue.

While you do need to hold its hand to an extreme degree, there's a nuance you're overlooking: most of the prep work is reusable. After preparing the context (all the rules, examples, preferences, etc), you can copy-paste it over, and over, and over. Exactly like coders do it. The major difference is that with writing, there's far less sharing of efficient prompts and workflows.

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Yep. You still need to do plenty of work, especially editing, when it comes to this. But once you actually polish your workflow with the tool, it makes some aspects of creating/writing much smoother. I know it helped me get a workable first draft for a CYOA much faster and on a much more polished state than I could have achieved without it.