I made an outline 
Behold!
- Here We Go Round the Prickly Pear
- Frankly, My Dear, I Don’t Give A Damn
- Fly, My Little Bird
- The Stars Are Wrong
- London Bridge is Falling Down
- The Long Arm of the Law
- Where Dead Men Lost Their Bones
- Heart of the Machine
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Okay so like. Question! I haven’t been posting a lot in these threads but something making me a lill anxious lately is how people (at least outside of COG) actively have been using AI to create stories, which makes me fear how stories actually planned and written by humans will be getting overshadowed eventually by how quick they are processed and released. I haven’t checked on these forums yet but is it like. A recognizable problem around here too? It’s a little stupid to feel anxious about this but I was curious!
I have been actively working on the new update for my WIP by editing older chapters and writing new content up and even creating some visuals, yet sometimes stumbling into stuff like this eats away at my motivation real quick. Am I the only one?
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tbh this may be naive of me but i’m like…not that concerned by AI rising in popularity. i’ve done a little data annotation (reviewing and critiquing AI outputs) and honestly..i’m like. not that impressed by AI as it stands? idk, as far as i can tell it does stuff that people are capable of doing, but it does them faster and shittier. that’s really the only thing it seems useful for in any sort of writing/creating field. also, i just don’t care what an artificial program has to say in terms of compiling a story or whatever based on someone’s prompt. i really don’t find it compelling at all, nor do i find it threatening to creative work on the whole.
EDIT: to clarify, i don’t think ur question/concern is unfounded at all! there is a lot of “buzz” around AI—i personally just do not find it even remotely true that AI could or will ever have a valuable place in creative work
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CoG and its subsidiaries won’t publish material made using generative AI, because AI-generated material isn’t copyrightable. There was a case last year in which a game published by Hosted Games was taken down after a couple days (and all purchases refunded) when the author admitted to having used AI in making it.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I haven’t actually seen anyone anywhere *successfully* using AI to create stories. Even if there’s an algorithm out there that can string together words in a way that goes beyond the serviceable-but-boring prose that’s all I’ve ever seen of AI-generated fiction, the results wouldn’t be profitably publishable. The only way that AI-generated material could ever be protected by copyright in some cases is if it’s been so transformatively reworked by an actual human being that it counts as a product of human creativity and labor, in which the AI served as a tool rather than the primary “creative” force.
There have been at least a couple cases this year of speculation/accusation/misinformation about specific published literary works being AI-generated, but none that were substantiated or even carried enough weight to be worthy of serious investigation.
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It’s just that I’ve stumbled across a few discussions regarding it where people boast about writing 70k worth of stories entirely written by ai and selling those like any other generative media out there right now. It demotived me quite a bit and made me feel a bit anxious about the future of creative writing itself.
Thank you two much for the replies! It does ease the concerns very much so. Especially @AletheiaKnights , I’m glad to know there’s a legit guideline on it c:
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Currently working on a fic (detective story, set in not!Austria-Hungary, 1913) in a sort of turn-based system, where I post small 500-2000 word updates on a small discord server where they vote on the big choices. I’m about to reach the end and 100k words. Looking to rewrite it into choicescript eventually, but not before doing a bunch of extra research and improving it a bit based on feedback.
I figure the best way to better my command of CS would be to try to do a smaller one-shot, probably 10k words or so, maybe post it on the Hobby section. So that’s probably what I’ll try to work on next.
Actually I have a very short complete project of around 4k words, do you think it’s worth starting a thread in the Hobby section or posting snippets here on Snippet Day?
EDIT: As an aside, I’m floored that there are WIPs with 50-90k Chapter 1 wordcounts. It’s super humbling. I’ve struggled to get to 100k (in the aforementioned fic ofc) and that took me the better part of a year.
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Definitely post on Snippet Day! I’ve posted the randomest of things. Usually my note-to-self scene sketches!
I’m still scratching my head how one even plots that. I’m incapable of even plotting over 3k-word chapter.
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That’s like a novelle! I’m sure a bit of repetition is involved, but that’s still crazy. And I can’t say any of the ones I’ve played through felt dragged out or anything.
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I forgot to say, your detective story sounds interesting.
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Thanks! It’s something I started writing on a whim, mostly to address some interests I’ve been fixating on for a while. Planning it out has certainly given me an appreciation/understanding why there are so few HG mystery stories lol.
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Oh a Quest! I used to love reading them on the spacebattles forum. Good luck making it into an IF!
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Lmao yes, a quest. I assumed people wouldn’t know what it is. Interesting parallels to IF, but also so, so many differences.
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AHH this sounds so cool!! this makes me think of a novel by Stefan Zveig called Beware of Pity set in this location and CLOSE to that time (prob a year later), i looooved it. your story sounds super cool!!!
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A few years back, this article came out about fiction writers on various content treadmills (mostly Amazon) making use of AI to keep up their insane level of output:
The hallucinations are probably not as extravagant today as they were back then[1]– the AI companies have worked hard to train their bots into a blander, more toned-down register for their intended corporate clients. But I’d be very surprised if, three years on, there weren’t even more people who use AI assistance to keep popping out a new novella every month.
That doesn’t mean that AI is the future of fiction. The content treadmill model is deeply psychologically unsustainable for authors, and the inevitable quantity-over-quality ethos doesn’t scratch most readers’ itches. It remains a viable business but hasn’t displaced regular publishing, pre- or post-AI.
There’s certainly a possibility that a future AI gets so good at writing that there’s no longer a quality differential. At present, though, I’m betting that that would require us discovering an entirely new world of sapient beings whose output could be used to train the bots. ChatGPT has fed its models on just about every word of English ever committed to paper or silicon, and as impressive as the results can be, they’ve plateaued well below the level of a good human author (and without the ability to sustain ideas beyond short story/essay length).
Without more high-quality training data, I don’t think even the best AI developers have any good ideas for how to escape the plateau of fluent mediocrity.
Because I’ll never ever get tired of sharing these examples:
“the moon was truly mother-of-pearl, the white of the sea, rubbed smooth by the groins of drowned brides.”
"Alice closed her eyes and sighed, savoring the moment before reality came back crashing down on them like the weight of an elephant sitting on them both while being eaten by a shark in an airplane full of ninjas puking out their eyes and blood for no apparent reason other than that they were ninjas who liked puke so much they couldn’t help themselves from spewing it out of their orifices at every opportunity.” ↩︎
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There are two authors od the Highlands. Message Nerull too maybe.
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It was the Hong Kong Blood Opera WIP that was mentioned, not Highlands, Deep Waters (Highlands, Deep Waters was mentioned in another context in the same post)
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I hope it’s okay to just ask questions here related to writing. I don’t think it warrants a post. How do y’all handle writing stamina? I like to feel like I’m putting in good work every day, but I definitely have good days and bad days. I’m a hobbyist, so writing this consistently is unfamiliar.
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Poorly. 
Making super detailed to-do lists and taking breaks after every twenty minutes or so does help me, though. There’s only so long I can focus if I’m not enjoying myself.
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in past writing projects, i’ve definitely overwhelmed myself by writing every single day. for the past few months, i’ve switched tactics a bit and that’s helped my stress-levels (and probably also the quality of my work) a lot! now i probably actually write 4 days a week, but only a few hours each day max. i let myself spend the rest of the days stewing subconsciously on bits i don’t feel super confident in, misc. brainstorming, or just collecting inspiration wherever im at. it works a lot better for me that way!
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I make sure to take short breaks through the day - I set timers so that I don’t end up going too long without doing so, because once I hit a certain point I get diminishing returns.
I try to break scenes into chunks as well, so that it feels more manageable, and outline and code before I do the writing part so that my time is focused on a particular kind of brainpower rather than swapping what I’m doing.
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