Seems reasonable. I wasn’t sure when to use each tag, but that clarification helps. Sadly that won’t help at all around people who don’t voluntarily use the tag.
That’s really discouraging and I’m sorry it’s been so much for the team to handle. I recently submitted a story to GSS after quite a bit of time away, and I was surprised by how long approvals took. Now I know a reason why!
I’d honestly say “just tag em if it’s obvious”, but as someone who’s trying to do ‘high quality ai’, I feel particularly cautious of floods of lower quality stories using the same tag, since it makes it more likely my stories will be caught in the crossfire of readers blocking the tag.
For what it’s worth… my opinion is similar to DerekWilliamswho said he went middle of the road. I would vote for both and be neutral. I think there is a strong argument for encouraging people to contribute to sites like this. If someone isn’t a confident writer but has great ideas, that person might take advantage of AI to help them write it. I suspect that would fall into the “ai assisted” tag category.
However, I also wonder what is the difference between “ai assisted” where parts were generated by AI but big portions were edited and reworked by a human versus Grammarly reworking what a human wrote? Those seem to be the same thing to me where rephrasing and reworking are happening both directions.
I completely agree that literally leaving ChatGPT prompts or response tags in a submitted story is either careless and a lack of even editing it oneself, or should clearly have a tag IF we have to tag. I have seen some of these AI LLMs using certain phrases a lot which could indicate written by or assisted by AI. I guess I just don’t understand what the issue is if the story itself is still good.
If the contests are meant to be true writing by an author then it makes sense to exclude stories with AI involvement.
I apologize if I am rambling.
I am neutral to the use of AI on this site. Like human writers, the output can be real good or real bad. I personally love AI and use it in all aspects of my life now, even as a teacher. Instead of trying to resist or limit its use, we need to be embracing it because, like it or not, it is the future.
I still write my own stories but with my most recent series, I have ran them through an AI program that is NSFW to garner feedback on how I can approve the sexual scenes, for example. Those are areas I’ve always felt my stories were the weakest so it has been nice to have that feedback, in addition to the feedback I get from a regular “editor” friend. I think, like all stories, if an author uses AI to write their entire story then yes, it should be tagged. One of the best features of this site is the tagging/blocking feature so you don’t have to encounter stories that ruin your vibe.
I hate AI stories. I feel that AI is the death of creativity and quality. I want the stories I read to be created with at least minimal effort. Using AI just lets a lot of low effort poor quality stories to be published quickly, and it lowers the overall quality of the stories on this site. At some point there will be a critical mass of AI stories, and this site will die.
Beyond the quality issue there is the ethical one. Generative AI is trained on the writing of real people who did not consent to have their work used like that. The massive server farms needed to run AI is a huge power drain and terrible for the environment. Literally killing the planet to create low effort dross.
While I think this is an important discussion to have, I feel the poll above could have used an option for “I am fine with AI-assisted stories, but not fully AI-created stories.”
I think rules similar to “you can only post so many words of AI-assisted or AI-created work per week/month” would be helpful to lessen the burden on our approval team, which is my main concern here. If they’re tagged properly, follow basic standards of grammar, structure, and readability, and aren’t flooding our approval queue, I don’t mind them.
People use AI assistance for a lot of things. I may hate its polluting power and the illegal scraping of art to try and obviate artists, but I can’t deny that the workload of some of my close friends has been greatly improved by a bot that fills in wording for them when they’re stuck, or helps them restructure (for example) a lesson plan composed entirely of true statements that they fed into the prompter. So I see AI assistance as something that is understandable—even if the place I think it belongs the least is generating sentences for a story.
AI can be a helpful tool for non native speakers so I’m not against using AI as a help to write better. Writers can learn using it. But usually I don’t like if the story was fully created by AI with prompts.
I’m definitely dissappointed at the amount of ai created AND assisted stories in this site, so I’ll be glad to see them gone… but at the same time forbbiding them outright would discourage people from tagging them. I guess allowing only ai assisted stories is a decent enough compromise for this, but I still think those stories shouldn’t be allowed in the site’s contests either. Like, really, if you want help with writing a story use a regular spell checker for grammar and text a friend for creative ideas/editing help. No need to use the infinite theft machine.
I can only repeat that there is the option to block AI-assisted or AI-created stories, so for the users doing that, it would look like the site would outright ban these stories.
As long as everything is labeled properly i dont mind. I dont seek them out, but ots at least nice to know. It is inevitable that AI bleeds into everything it can, just banning it will only make things worse as people will still do it if they want to its just unknown.
This might be an unpopular idea, but now I wonder what an AI assisted story contest would look like. And the stories should be about an AI program or something. Make it real meta just for fun.
AI is not a tool that any serious writer should be even entertaining. You’re not being ‘assisted’, you are not ‘getting ideas’, you are willingly giving up your own human instinct on what is meaningful to a machine that can create nothing and improves upon nothing. And not in the sexy way.
It’s disappointing that the leaders of a site supposedly intended as a community for writers are making excuses for laziness. “As long as it’s just ‘assisted’”. “Rephrasing sentences to make them more readable is fine.” Writing isn’t supposed to be easy, and even if you’re just trying to help some reader get off you should have some standards for what you’re putting out there into the world. AI doesn’t understand what is sexy, what is erotic, what is genuinely compelling. All it does is spit out more of the same of what’s been fed into it.
I’m glad the poll seems to be indicating people don’t want this on the site, and I hope that the site’s staff take that as an indication that tag blocking isn’t enough. A ban on AI writing should be implemented, sorry. And a statement should be made that it is not welcomed as a part of the community.
This isn’t meant as a dig on anyone, but if you really, really want to go up to bat for AI, consider what habits and mindsets about writing you’re cultivating in yourself. Sorry if any of this comes off aggressive, I’m mad at the technology and how it is sold to the everyday person who uses it, not the people who use it.
I don’t mind AI assisted stories at all. However, some AI tools fall into tropes or cliches far more easily than even your average smut writer, and when I see it, I’m drawn out of the story. (“Low and husky”, for example) One reason is that most AIs aren’t trained on smut, or if they are, they’re trained on straight smut, so they go down certain routes commonly.
I personally think that the current backlash against AI and the claims that it’s “theft” for training with it are, all ethics aside, trying to stick your finger in a dike. There will come a point, and I think it isn’t many years in the future, where it is going to be very hard to tell a story was AI-generated or assisted, and there’s just no stopping it.
I chose the middle ground, because I find the debate itself right now to be completely unable to change minds. Allow AI-assisted, require AI-assisted tags.
(I personally have been using NovelAI’s collaborative AI writing tool on a personal basis, without submitting any stories, regularly to help me write erotic stories. I think it’s fantastic. Just so we’re not on a one-note “OMG AI SUXXXORX” tirade here.
It’s quite disheartening to upload a story that you took weeks or months to write and seeing it booted off the front page in a day or two by a glut of AI writing. I’d prefer to see no AI stories on the site as generally the quality is lower and the plots are often nonsense with no real cause and effect.
See this is where the confusion lies for me on where the line is on whether something is AI or not. For me, I specifically despise AI stories of the person simply gave a prompt on an AI site and relied on them to write the whole thing. But for situations like this where you just ask AI to assist on grammar/ editorial means, I can understand it because you can’t always find editors to help you out, and honestly AI is just far more convenient for fixing grammar mistakes and such as opposed to finding a real person to help you out
Tbh there just wasn’t any rule in place about it, which is why AI stories have been permitted in the contests. And I hadn’t bothered with examining the rule about this yet because I figured—perhaps cynically—that an AI story is just not going to place in the top 5 for the contests. So I was like, “eh it’s not going to skew the results anyways, so I’ll focus on addressing bigger site issues for now…”
I’ll give it some thought and see if I think it’s worth making it a rule or not. I might leave it be and not bother with the rule, just because I do think it’s not going to affect the contest results one way or another. But I will see.
The origin point is the important part, really—aka, who is the ‘original’ author of the paragraphs which are then being edited, so to speak.
I guess one metaphor here is the difference between taking a photograph with your phone and then applying a filter to it, versus grabbing an AI-generated image and then touching it up in Photoshop. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but maybe it gets the rough idea across in what the difference feels like?
And no need to apologize! Your post was clear to me.
Ah yeah I did this on purpose. I considered some additional options for the poll, but I realized what I really needed to get a sense of was whether there was a strong divide in sentiment among readers. So I tried to reduce the poll to the most basic options and encourage discussion for more nuanced takes.
I think that, in practice, it will be very difficult sometimes to distinguish whether some AI stories are fully ai created or the hybrid ai assisted ones. It’ll also add an extra load of scrutiny for approvers to try to distinguish it with edge cases, and I want to avoid adding more work to the approvers’ plates if I can. So I think that if we allow one kind of AI story, we end up having to allow the other.
So I was like, “eh it’s not going to skew the results anyways, so I’ll focus on addressing bigger site issues for now…”