In light of the new rules, and as a long-time and reasonably known author, I want to set an example to encourage authors to disclose their AI use.
In spring of 2023, when ChatGPT started to become popular, I experimented with it and created two series of stories heavily assisted by AI. However, I am a writer above all and even though it was new to me, I only ever saw it as a tool and did not delegate any creative decisions to it. The creation of those stories involved almost a thousand prompts altogether, on ChatGPT 4 for non-sex scenes and a jailbroken clunky ChatGPT 3 for sex scenes. There were prompts to generate text yes, but most of the prompts involved brainstorming with it to create the characters, the setting, basically a very large writing bible before even starting on the first line. Another large part of the prompts were as a thesaurus, and as questions like “Do we say came into or came inside usually?”, “What would be a nice location in Maine for this kind of house?”. All of the text was heavily heavily edited because what came out of those generations was often awful. All the twists, the humor, the plot, the themes, etc… came from me, I would never trust an AI with that. I wrote one chapter while I was in the hospital after a heart attack.
Both series are about 30000 words each (divided into 4 chapters each) and I spent about 120 hours on them total, for 60000 words. Overall, it took me about twice the effort I would have spent writing them manually from scratch, so low effort my ass. Still, they gathered dozens of favorites and comments and the first chapter of Human Trials earned a silver Mind Control badge. They stand as an example of what a writer who treats AI only as a tool, doesn’t delegate it any aspect of creativity, and certainly doesn’t delegate the effort of doing the real final writing to it, can achieve.
I have the pages and pages of chat logs still in archive, and I might post in the forum to give more details on how it was created for forensic interests.
They’re still not my best stories, they were just an experiment, and they are full of AI Patterns that make me cringe today. I had taken them down a few months before the AI rules came in effect, I will now reactivate them with a proud “Contains AI Patterns” tag AND a disclaimer in an effort to encourage other authors to disclose.
