Using AI as a reviewer to improve my writing

[AlexBailey]

Great, don’t use it, and stop spamming us with it.

Muppets prattling on about humanity and depth... SMH.

You just quoted the AI mimicking someone who “…refuses to see any benefits of its use.”

 

[Voboy]

You just quoted the AI mimicking someone who “…refuses to see any benefits of its use.”

While admitting the AI was producing spam.

Wonderful.

 

[Lifestyle66]

One point I noticed when reading the AI's discrediting the use of AI is similar to others here on the forum: that it's mining all other written works of real humans.

But how many people EVER have a truly unique thought which is not based in some way on the cumulative readings and inputs from all others throughout their lives? Aren't we all mining everybody's works?

Superman, the alien savior of Earth and all people, dropping out of the sky to save you ... sounds to me a little like it was influenced by The Bible's New Testament.

Even Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was only made possible by the integration of the work of mathematicians and scientists who came before him.

 

[AlexBailey]

It's easy to recognize this as AI-written. The rule of three in some sentences is such a huge tell.

The pervasiveness of that pattern could be adjusted by a simple addition to the prompt.

Critical feedback will go into training the next version. It’s not a finished product.

 

[MelissaBaby]

One point I noticed when reading the AI's discrediting the use of AI is similar to others here on the forum: that it's mining all other written works of real humans.

But how many people EVER have a truly unique thought which is not based in some way on the cumulative readings and inputs from all others throughout their lives? Aren't we all mining everybody's works?

Superman, the alien savior of Earth and all people, dropping out of the sky to save you ... sounds to me a little like it was influenced by The Bible's New Testament.

Even Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was only made possible by the integration of the work of mathematicians and scientists who came before him.

But in your examples, Siegal&Shuster and Einstein curated their work from multiple sources to create something new, obtaining the knowledge of those sources for themselves, using their own discretion in synthesizing them into something new and, with their own creativity, bringing the product of their efforts into existence.

If I bake a cake, I don't produce the wheat, sugar, eggs, etc. on my own, I gather them and create a cake from them, to my own taste or the taste of those I hope to share the cake with. It's my creation. It doesn't matter how many other people have made cakes. This one is uniquely mine.

 

[Voboy]

But in your examples, Siegal&Shuster and Einstein curated their work from multiple sources to create something new, obtaining the knowledge of those sources for themselves, using their own discretion in synthesizing them into something new and, with their own creativity, bringing the product of their efforts into existence.

They also credited their sources, where applicable...

 

[AlexBailey]

But in your examples, Siegal&Shuster and Einstein curated their work from multiple sources to create something new, obtaining the knowledge of those sources for themselves, using their own discretion in synthesizing them into something new and, with their own creativity, bringing the product of their efforts into existence.

If I bake a cake, I don't produce the wheat, sugar, eggs, etc. on my own, I gather them and create a cake from them, to my own taste or the taste of those I hope to share the cake with. It's my creation. It doesn't matter how many other people have made cakes. This one is uniquely mine.

The cake is a great analogy.

AI is a barcoded, plastic wrapped, high fructose corn syrup, chocolate flavored thing based on the concept of a cupcake. Human writing is like the confection grandma toils over as she recalls a family recipe.


The factory made cupcake is designed for the masses and is available at any gas station - supposedly consumed daily by hundreds of thousands if not millions.

Grandma‘s is far better, as long as you like carrot cake and have the patience to wait until the next time she makes one.

 

[Plathfan]

While admitting the AI was producing spam.

Wonderful.

Why do those who loudly claim confidence in their craft and profess disdain for AI rail against it so vehemently in every discussion? I don’t take part in threads that don’t interest me, so why do they? What threat could a silly machine pose? Is it because, deep down, they know their adoring audience is largely composed of silver-haired pensioners wasting their days consuming smut—an audience AI could win over in the future?

Huh? My new interlocutor...

Since Christmas is coming, I’ll back off now. Happy holidays!

 

[Lifestyle66]

But in your examples, Siegal&Shuster and Einstein curated their work from multiple sources to create something new, obtaining the knowledge of those sources for themselves, using their own discretion in synthesizing them into something new and, with their own creativity, bringing the product of their efforts into existence.

If I bake a cake, I don't produce the wheat, sugar, eggs, etc. on my own, I gather them and create a cake from them, to my own taste or the taste of those I hope to share the cake with. It's my creation. It doesn't matter how many other people have made cakes. This one is uniquely mine.

True.

But you didn't create all of the materials which went into the cake. You used the works of others and built upon them to create it to your taste. Just as Einstein didn't create all of the math and other experiments which gave him the ability to pull it all together, we all draw from the works of our ancestors to build something bigger and hopefully better.

Everything we write is based on what we have previously read, with some personal experiences thrown in to pull it all together. So, if there's any criticism of an AI's ability to create a new story, it that lack of personal experience. It's still drawing from a much larger pool of readings.

AI is effectively "a thousand monkeys banging away on a thousand typewriters over a period of a thousand years" and eventually producing "War and Peace". We're seeing that with the computer speeds today, those monkeys are doing it in seconds. EDIT: The human is merely telling the monkeys what they're looking for in the randomly produced pages.

 

[Plathfan]

I'll say this one last time and then leave the endless AI debate: Anything that helps craft a better piece of work is sacred.

Sooner or later, we will all be gone, but the craft remains.

 

[StillStunned]

Why do those who loudly claim confidence in their craft and profess disdain for AI rail against it so vehemently in every discussion? I don’t take part in threads that don’t interest me, so why do they? What threat could a silly machine pose? Is it because, deep down, they know their adoring audience is largely composed of silver-haired pensioners wasting their days consuming smut—an audience AI could win over in the future?

You're becoming repetitive. You already used the "profess disdain" and "rail against is vehemently". I know your trolling isn't getting the response you hope for, but don't start phoning it in. Just try harder.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Perhaps @Plathfan is AI, you think?

You're becoming repetitive. You already used the "profess disdain" and "rail against is vehemently". I know you're trolling isn't getting the response you hope for, but don't start phoning it in. Just try harder.

 

[ChasBozwell30]

This is an interesting debate, but I don't think it's entirely about AI. Writers have had to deal with a dwindling audience and having to compete with other mediums for some time, anything new that just divides an already distracted audience is understandably going to worry people. If artists have no value, does the art?

I'm sure it can be a useful tool, but I personally wouldn't use it. I wonder if it might become a crutch to people in the future, and hinder them instead of helping? As a self taught writer I have no idea what AI would have done to my creativity if I'd relied on it as a youth...!

 

[Andreas_Kreuz]

My advice: keep thinking about it. Then use those thoughts (NOT AI's "thoughts") to improve your writing.

Your thoughts about "emotional depth" are likely to lead you to a different place than mine would lead me, or Laurel's would lead her, or anyone else's would lead anyone else. That's the whole point: it's how you develop your own style. You appear to be starting from a premise that says "I need to improve." Maybe you don't. Maybe you just need to find your own voice.

Maybe you can do that with AI's help. CERTAINLY you can do that without AI's help. Your writing needs to be authentic and organic; it needs to be yours. AI will homogenize your writing and make it like all the other writing out there. I'm thoroughly mystified about why any writer would want that, but it's what Laurel is quite rightly fighting against.

Be different. There's nothing wrong with that. Find your own answers.

If you write and publish, you usually want to be read. Otherwise you just write notes to yourself. My writing was criticized by humans as hard to follow and rushed. To understand it better what they meant, I tried to ask the AI. It has given me valuable insight. But ultimately the same happened as with using AI for coding at work. You reach the limitations of AI very soon.
AI is based on statistics, so it tends towards the average. So asking AI for reviews will generate a review by comparing to the average of all stories. And if you don't want to write mainstream, then these reviews are not going to help. So I have to answer my original question with no. AI is not much help for me even as a coach.

 

[ElectricBlue]

The cake is a great analogy.

AI is a barcoded, plastic wrapped, high fructose corn syrup, chocolate flavored thing based on the concept of a cupcake. Human writing is like the confection grandma toils over as she recalls a family recipe.

The factory made cupcake is designed for the masses and is available at any gas station - supposedly consumed daily by hundreds of thousands if not millions.

Grandma‘s is far better, as long as you like carrot cake and have the patience to wait until the next time she makes one.

Are these your words or the words of your toy? Seems to me you've reached a point where every post sounds the same (artificial), which I'd have thought would be a curse for a writer. Something to think about, before you deluge us with more junk...

 

[AlexBailey]

Are these your words or the words of your toy? Seems to me you've reached a point where every post sounds the same (artificial), which I'd have thought would be a curse for a writer. Something to think about, before you deluge us with more junk...

Hmm,

Everything I have posted that has been AI generated was formatted to show that it was an AI response.

 

[StillStunned]

My writing was criticized by humans as hard to follow and rushed. To understand it better what they meant,

Back in a previous millennium, when I was at uni, I noticed that I'd do better with essays that I bullshitted than the ones where I really had a point to make. The difference, I realised, was that if I had a point I'd get excited and present my arguments in as few words as possible. When I was bullshitting, I rephrased everything two or three times to get to the required word count. And guess what? Repeating things made them easier to understand.

When writing fiction, the trap is the same (although not necessarily the solution). You have a story in mind, and you want to get it out. It's tempting to present the bare minimum to get you from point A to point B. But, like with my essays, what's in your mind doesn't always carry over through the words to your reader's mind. You become like a small child so eager to tell what's happened that they rush through the story and forget details and get tangled up in the words.

If readers say your story is rushed, take a deep mental breath and slow it down. Examine every element of every sentence and draw it out. Picture yourself being there, and describe what sensations you'd feel, what emotions you'd have. Live every moment in your mind and describe that.

Remember that your readers are coming along for the journey, not just the destination. They're like tourists on a scenic railway, in an old-fashioned railway carriage being drawn by a steam locomotive. They're with you for the experience - the charm of the slightly uncomfortable wooden benches, the romance of the steam engine, the sound of its whistle, the conductor in his old uniform, the sunshine coming in through the windows, the dramatic scenery outside, the picnic you packed for them, the sense of being on a small adventure with friends.

That' what they want when they read a story too.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Hmm,

Everything I have posted that has been AI generated was formatted to show that it was an AI response.

You've been caught by your own game then. You've assumed people have been paying full attention, when all you've done is taken up space with junk and lost any credibility you might once have had. Which is a shame, because before you got seduced by the toy you had something interesting to say.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Remember that your readers are coming along for the journey, not just the destination. They're like tourists on a scenic railway, in an old-fashioned railway carriage being drawn by a steam locomotive. They're with you for the experience - the charm of the slightly uncomfortable wooden benches, the romance of the steam engine, the sound of its whistle, the conductor in his old uniform, the sunshine coming in through the windows, the dramatic scenery outside, the picnic you packed for them, the sense of being on a small adventure with friends.

Careful there, StillStunned. This is beginning to sound artificial. I'd get out of this thread if I were you.

 

[onehitwanda]

Here’s a critical response. (It sounds like it may have been trained on some responses here)


Me:
Respond to the same forum post in the style of a college English professor who is resentful and hypercritical of AI and refuses to see any benefits of its use.


ChatGPT:
Ah, yet another love letter to the glowing false god of artificial intelligence, as though we haven’t already debased ourselves enough with this technological obsession. Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate: AI has no place—none whatsoever—in the realm of genuine writing, and the fact that we’re even having this conversation is a testament to how low we’ve set the bar for creativity in the digital age.


The premise that AI could somehow offer valuable feedback on writing is, frankly, laughable. A machine does not—and cannot—understand the very essence of what makes writing worthwhile. Writing is born from the human condition: the struggle, the yearning, the raw, imperfect attempt to make sense of existence. AI, by contrast, is nothing more than a soulless mimic. It processes words without meaning, regurgitates patterns without purpose, and pretends at insight with all the charm of a vacuum cleaner manual.


And yet, here we are, entertaining this ridiculous fantasy that AI could one day “analyze” stories or “assist” writers. Let me disabuse you of that notion right now: AI is not a collaborator. It is not a partner. It is a glorified parrot, squawking back at you the fragmented nonsense it’s cobbled together from stolen data. If you think it’s offering profound insights, I assure you, the only profundity is your willingness to mistake its formulaic output for anything resembling human thought.


But let’s be honest, this isn’t about improving writing. It’s about laziness, plain and simple. People want shortcuts. They want the glory of being called a writer without enduring the agony of the craft. AI is the perfect enabler for this: it promises all the output with none of the effort. But here’s the hard truth: real writing is not easy. It’s not clean. It’s not something you can outsource to a machine while you sip your coffee and scroll through social media.


And don’t get me started on the ethics of it all. Feeding your work into an AI system so it can “help” you is nothing short of intellectual prostitution. Who benefits? Certainly not you. Certainly not the other writers whose words were unceremoniously ingested by these systems without consent. No, the only winners here are the tech companies, fattening themselves off the carcass of human creativity while selling you the lie that AI can somehow “augment” your art.


So, no, I won’t concede a single point about AI’s supposed utility. It is a crutch for the unimaginative, a tool for the lazy, and a symptom of our society’s increasing inability to value depth and nuance. Writing is—and always will be—a human endeavor. It requires effort, emotion, and soul. If you can’t bring those to the table, then perhaps writing isn’t for you. But don’t expect a machine to fill in the gaps where your humanity ought to be.

this comes across as extremely hyperbolic - as if it were a marketing intern who was given an academic essay and told to make it more approachable.

 

[Plathfan]

Careful there, StillStunned. This is beginning to sound artificial. I'd get out of this thread if I were you.

Beginning? That’s a snapshot of that desolate, ornate park.

 

[StillStunned]

Beginning? That’s a snapshot of that desolate, ornate park.

Still upset about not being allowed to write sequels to my stories, I see. That's alright. If you don't have the imagination to create your own worlds, I'm sure AI can do it for you.

 

[Andreas_Kreuz]

Back in a previous millennium, when I was at uni, I noticed that I'd do better with essays that I bullshitted than the ones where I really had a point to make. The difference, I realised, was that if I had a point I'd get excited and present my arguments in as few words as possible. When I was bullshitting, I rephrased everything two or three times to get to the required word count. And guess what? Repeating things made them easier to understand.

When writing fiction, the trap is the same (although not necessarily the solution). You have a story in mind, and you want to get it out. It's tempting to present the bare minimum to get you from point A to point B. But, like with my essays, what's in your mind doesn't always carry over through the words to your reader's mind. You become like a small child so eager to tell what's happened that they rush through the story and forget details and get tangled up in the words.

If readers say your story is rushed, take a deep mental breath and slow it down. Examine every element of every sentence and draw it out. Picture yourself being there, and describe what sensations you'd feel, what emotions you'd have. Live every moment in your mind and describe that.

Remember that your readers are coming along for the journey, not just the destination. They're like tourists on a scenic railway, in an old-fashioned railway carriage being drawn by a steam locomotive. They're with you for the experience - the charm of the slightly uncomfortable wooden benches, the romance of the steam engine, the sound of its whistle, the conductor in his old uniform, the sunshine coming in through the windows, the dramatic scenery outside, the picnic you packed for them, the sense of being on a small adventure with friends.

That' what they want when they read a story too.

Yes, a good point. The other reason is the fear of being boring because of too much detail. Or the doubt, that the observations, that I find striking are irrelevant to others.

 

[AlexBailey]

You've been caught by your own game then. You've assumed people have been paying full attention, when all you've done is taken up space with junk and lost any credibility you might once have had. Which is a shame, because before you got seduced by the toy you had something interesting to say.

Caught by my own game?

That’s all you and your perceptions. I’m sharing the AI prompts and responses as related to the subject of this thread - demonstrating what it can and cannot do for the sake of the conversation.

I don’t really have a target audience here except that I am arguing against underestimating AI’s capabilities.

Personally for me it can be far more helpful for projects than the hardcover encyclopedias I had for reference as a kid. As a musician and artist of other sorts I understand how disruptive it is. Do you ever think of what recording and radio did to the market for live musicians?

Do you have a suggestion on how to counter progress? Something besides your recommendations for personally rejecting it?


An analogy: I have a few old guitar tube amplifiers. They are said to have the best tone and provide a feeling of pushback as you play that digital emulation could never copy. That changed a few years ago when digital technology caught up. Yes it’s still digital. No, it doesn’t have real warmth. Can you tell the difference by ear? Possibly live but not in a recording…


My opinion on AI doesn’t matter. It’s a fact that the quality of its response is improving from version to version and it is already good enough to save businesses money and to fool people or provide satisfactory results for many purposes now.

I think our world is coming to a crisis point with AI and robotics. Quantum computing is on the near horizon and will accelerate processing power and development in ways yet to be determined. It’s fascinating to me and it could easily become terrifying.


So, what “credibility” have I spent by sharing aspects of something that will continue to drastically affect many parts of our world?

 

[Voboy]

Yes, a good point. The other reason is the fear of being boring because of too much detail. Or the doubt, that the observations, that I find striking are irrelevant to others.

There are ways to spellbind, though, even with excessive detail. Tolkien is an example: the man was obsessed with botany, but he was aware that not all readers were. Yet he felt like he had to include a lot of plant stuff in order to more vividly describe his world, hoping to make it real in his readers' imaginations.

So? He chose a style that, in part, stemmed from his training in northern European poetry: he included all the details, but he wove them into sentences that read lyrically, rhythmically, so that even a reader who couldn't tell a rose from a rhododendron could still enjoy the poetic nature of the prose, meaning it was still an immersive experience. Just in a different way.