The rules for AI involvement in stories

Exactly this!

There’s a few important points here to help understand the rules.

There is no way to tell with any precision how much of a text is AI, detectors are not reliable, trained readers do their best but there’s no special “watermark” in AI writing that can determine that, percentages returned by detectors is not the ratio of AI writing but how likely the text is AI. 30% returned by detector does not mean 30% of the text is AI but that the text is 30% likely to be AI.

So the tags that were used in the past did not match exactly what people intuitively understood about their names. The difference between “AI Created” and “AI Assisted” was never truly determined or enforced because there was no way to actually tell. “AI Assisted” was interpreted by people as any AI assistance (unless you read what the rules about the tag were, which most didn’t) and AI can assist in a million different ways.

So as Corin said, what people seem to understand about AI Created, which is effortless, little edited, prompted mostly generated AI text, doesn’t need tags anymore because it just won’t be published here anymore.

“AI Prose” is to be understood as “Contains AI Prose” (there was a technical issue preventing the more precise term), and covers anything that contains enough AI to be clearly recognizable, enough to bother those who don’t enjoy the type of prose AI generates. So if you hate this type of writing, filtering it out is OK. We will detect it and encourage the author to tag it, but in the end, it’s up to the author to decide.

Again, the focus is on the content of the story, not how it was created.

If it’s complete AI slop → banned.

If there’s obvious AI prose in it, the kind a lot of people don’t like → we’ll detect + author strongly encouraged to tag.

Otherwise, apart from disclaimer from authors with more detail, there’s nothing we can do because nothing about the content itself will tell us how it was created and the story itself will not be distinguishable in any reliable way from a purely human story.

In the end, these are free stories. Read what you want to read.

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That’s not the case. “AI Prose” will cover only what was “AI Assisted” before. It will be recommended only to authors in the same cases where we would have pushed for an “AI Assisted” tag. No other use of AI will require an “AI Prose” tag. It’s not an umbrella term at all. That’s what @Soren_Fitz was getting at here:

As far as I can tell from these rules, the types of stories that would require “AI assisted” under the previous rules still require “AI prose” under the new rules; no stories that would not be tagged by us as AI will be tagged under this ruleset.

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Hi.

i use ai because i am not able to express myself in the right way. And it is totaly unnecessary if i write things and got roasted because i made to much errors in writing a foreignlanguage (i am german) or if i got roasted to use ai. And i got hate for both.

I paid a (rather expensive) human person to correct my storys but honesly, it is very difficult to find a translation / editor for “special intrest” storys and got hate for that too.

So I can’t make it right.

When i use ai, i try to find the best ai model (no not chatgpt) to write and none of the story i posted are “first gen slop”. I try to balance the story and redo most of “strage thinks” when the ai does impossible things like puting boots on befor the trousers or take a piss bevor opening the fly or things. And it helps me formulating my initial idea.

And even my old (written in german) storys are worked with ai. When i drop it in a model and translate it into english.

The countless hours to discuss with ai is hard work. Because some human beings have problems to express their sexuality and restrict things like rubber suits and mind controlling for ai users because a arbitrary ruleset backed in into ai.

I have a problem with blaming a toolset like ai translations or ai correction. Some users should deperatly use ai to correct writing. Some users should use ai to put more details into their storys and some users should use ai to write comments less hurtfull. We are all here because of our kink not of our profession.

Tagging ai content today is something like “created by using glasses” in medivel times. Or “written by using a mac computer” for people who cant handle proper error message. (Blaming the tool)

Ai is a tool. (Or toolbox).

In 5 to 10 years only some hardcore stoic writers will cry over ai usage in writing. There will be writers that write wonderful storys without ai and maybe there will be a tag “written without ai” (and spoiler , some humans will blame them for not using ai)

Tldr : in my opinion the ai tags are not useful unless every creation tool is marked. (Tags like word, notepad, emacs, vim are also not a good idea)

Greetings from Germany

Lex

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@Lexorius Unless your stories sound too much like typical AI generated prose, you could just use a disclaimer at the top of your stories to indicate how you used AI (in your case, to help the translation). That is permissible under the new rules. No need for a tag. It’s up to you.

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I appreciate the clarifications on this, especially surrounding the removal of fully AI stories all together rather than having the AI-generated tag. I know that was being done before for pure “slop”, but having the separate tags gave the impression that there was a significant difference in the amount of actual writing that was assisted vs generated still allowed on the site. I understand the decision/distinction more and it makes sense.

My only hope is that authors will be true to their word and disclose when a significant amount of their text is generated.

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I think there are advantages to disclose, especially if everyone can tell from the prose. And as a favor to readers who’d like to opt out.

Still, all that disclosure does anyway is making it more convenient for readers to avoid those stories. So if they don’t disclose, you’ll lose a few minutes of reading then you’ll know to avoid that author in the future. It’s not the end of the world.

My opinion probably does not matter much. But I can say this…I probably have 60 stories set aside that I’ve been writing, playing with, expanding, going back and rewriting, and things like that (and that is from before and since I experimented with AI). Prior to acquainting myself with ChatGPT, for example, I did all of my own writing which obviously took a lot of time and sometimes was difficult in itself. I’m not that creative sometimes with words and description and a variety of vocabulary to make a story more enjoyable (at least to me). Now that being said, that’s my own opinion, and there are other people who have read things I’ve written and totally disagree.

I had things I was ready to send in and then the first rules about AI started showing up, and I just never did. I have continued to write because I enjoy the stories and I enjoy creating them and I enjoy the thought and topics I play with.

I do not enjoy overly critical people or comments that are intended to be denigrating and not constructive. I make comments on things I read and typically, I do it as anonymous. I don’t care if it’s somebody doing that or not. I care about what they are saying when they do it. And in some ways it seems to me that some of this AI discrimination, prejudice, bias, whatever word you choose… sometimes feels like it comes off as elitist and extremely judgmental. And more often than not from people who do not write the stories themselves either with “AI assist” or not.

Now, I assume that people will not like my comment here, but I’ve been around in this community for 30 years or so. I know that many of you also can say that. But we have also seen, or at least I have, more and more and more of our sites and our places to go and create or enjoy or read or discuss… they have disappeared. We have very few places to do this now. And I’m sure there will be people who take this invitation to correct me if I am wrong, but the point of these sites was, at least my thought about this one, is to be able to read about these kinds of topics. Now I am someone who comes from the viewpoint of hypnosis and things like that, which goes directly to what gay spiral stories was about, I thought. And I don’t know how many of you have actually worked with ChatGPT or some of the other AIs that are supposed to be able to help write stories, novels, etc. But if you’ve ever actually tried it, I think you would find out that it takes a hell of a lot more time and energy and frustration to use them and to write something well, than it does probably to just sit down and write.

Now that being said, I still continue to do it because it’s interesting for me to have other ideas thrown at me or as I said earlier to be able to have other words that are getting used when perhaps the only thing I can think of is to say “it turned him on” and the AI can come up with several other ways, especially as it works so damned hard to frustrate and disrupt the author because it violates some moral guideline such that the AI has to even walk around saying it other ways.

As I said, I like hypnosis, and even that is extremely hard to write with AI because it considers hypnosis, not consensual, or some weird comment like that. I have spent a few hours before going around and around and around trying to find a way to get JUST 1 paragraph written. And even when I write it and insert it into the narrative within the AI so that I can continue… the AI then gives me a wall or multiple walls of text back about why it can’t do that…what’s wrong with it…how it violates this that or the other thing…how it is inappropriate and so on. And that even happens if you just talk about someone smoking. Even if it is situationally appropriate to do so without any issue in the outside world.

Now, someone looking to argue and continue to judge and condemn or dictate would simply respond at this point (or already has) by saying: “Then, why don’t you just write it yourself And not even worry about the AI?” And I’m not gonna argue that point. Because if you’ve already missed what I and others have said about using it to help correct grammar or make it flow better or something like that, then you’ve missed the point. I do like to use it to give me more ideas for sure. But then I have to fight with it, just to use the idea and more often than not, Ihave to go back and rewrite large swaths of it, because it derailed or hallucinated or kept doing its moral PSA (iykyk).

But here’s the thing… I took something that I wrote and actually had on the site a few years ago. I had simply stopped writing it. and I’m not even sure.. it could have been under a different name. But I took that, and I uploaded the whole damn thing into the AI and asked it to continue it or suggest what comes next. In general, the direction it went, I hated. And it almost immediately gave me the moral PSAs. And I actually stopped writing that one. I probably will continue it again at some point on my own. But now if I use any of the ideas it gave me, (I gather) I have to say that it was “AI assisted” or “AI prose”. And I get and understand that, for whatever reason, people don’t want AI. I certainly can say that with ChatGPT, it likes certain phrases and certain words. They happen so often, it is so freaking annoying. I have to change them out. I have to keep redoing it. But I don’t know which authors you all are talking about who have gotten so angry or have challenged things. But I can tell you, for me, I’ve had someone say something I wrote completely on my own was too much like AI…and therefore it was AI. I have never yet submitted anything at all that i’ve written with AI. And as I said, I have quite a few things that I could.

Now, if you’ve been around a long enough time, you’ve seen people who were lurkers and readers who have tried writing and submitted something themselves. Many times they say that a certain writer or a certain story inspired them to do it and perhaps they sort of took off from that other story or writer. I doubt that everybody who has done that has said that or that they actually took off from a story they read and didn’t write something of their own completely. But if you have somebody who writes because they like the style of someone else, they like the motif or the literary tools of that individual, or of those stories that they read, they are likely going to look like that other writer (imitation and all…). Is that wrong or shouldn’t we encourage that to happen so that sites like this continue to stay vibrant and alive? And younger writers are going to be coming out of their educations, their adolescence, or whatever having used AI. So what is the message that we are giving now to younger writers who find our community and want to join it or find that they like it and want to contribute to it? We want to label them. We want to tell them that they have to label themselves.That somehow what they create is lesser because they wrote with AI? That’s the message that this seems to be giving and seems to have been the message that I certainly took from it when these first started being promulgated as “rules”.

I read all kinds of stories, and I do look at tags from time to time…but only because i’m looking for content, not so I can judge and discriminate against them. If it has a certain type of content that I’mnot interested in, I don’t want to read it most likely. Or more often than not the content wasn’t listed in the tags and I run into it. Now I’mnot saying one way or the other about rubber or latex; but, I saw a comment as I read and got to the end of the comments where somebody mentioned rubber. I believe it was somebody from Germany perhaps “lexorious”. And again, I’mnot saying I like it or I don’t, but just using that one topic…There are tags for that. But many times I’m reading and something like that shows up in this story. And it wasn’t in the tags. If I really don’t like it, I just stop reading. I don’t write them a nasty message. I don’t get on some forum to complain about them or their story or what they did or didn’t put in a tag. I just don’t read it. If it was bad enough for me and I see they’re the writer of another story, maybe I don’t read it, or I go into it with one eye open instead of doing it blindly.

Now, I get that what i’m saying may not be popular. But from the other side of it, I doubt I’ m the only one that feels like there’s this group that is somehow deciding what’s better and what’s not as good. And while some people might use AI and crank out a 3000 word story every 15 minutes, and there isn’t much to it, and there’s not much meat and there’s not much of anything, it isn’t like I haven’t read a lot of those kinds of stories over the years that were written by a person anyway. But, I think there might need to be some more consideration given to how much effort people actually DO put in to writing with AI. And how much they’re using it as a tool as some of the replies have mentioned about Word or Copilot or grammar or spellcheck or translation… instead of just wanting to condemn them and what they’re doing, or even assume that it’s so easy for them to do that, as opposed to other people apparently laboring for weeks and months to write a story. I’ve probably said far too much, and I don’t speak out very much; but I’vebeen wanting to submit some stories, and I’ m still not doing it. And today, I logged in, and I found another set of “rules” being promulgated about AI again, and read that people are wanting it completely banned…Don’t even want to read it…Don’t even want to see it. And I’mshaking my head because I’m thinking “damn y’all. I’m glad to have a site where there’s content… where people are still creating and they’re still posting, and I can still see a variety of things.” i don’t want anybody to leave a site or feel like they don’t want to be here anymore or they’re not welcome. So do whatever with what i’ve said, but I doubt i’m the only one feeling it.

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It took a lot of courage to say what you said, and I’m certain there are many who feel like you. The goal of the changes in rules is to recognize more variety in the use of AI, while protecting the site from the AI slop you mentioned yourself, the factory story generated in 10 prompts and 15 minutes. It’s also a focus on the content of the stories produced instead of the way they were created.

There are ways to use AI that will give some authors putting a lot of effort into their work a way to use it not as a replacement for their voice but as a boost to it, as a means of making better stories that people will want to read. I know Corin doesn’t want to discourage such use or stigmatize it with a tag. The tag “AI Prose” is only to be used for stories that have a significant amount of prose easily recognizable as AI generated and that many readers dislike and want to avoid. I know too well that prose style as I’m often the one detecting it, and now I hear it in 60% of the YouTube videos I watch and it drives me crazy!

But low effort and AI bad prose are not the only results possible with AI, it’s only the easy way, the lazy way, and unfortunately, the prevalent way.

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Anyone who gets upset over being asked to tag their stuff as AI needs to get over themselves, if you think it’s worth posting then you shouldn’t care what the tags are.

Ngl I feel like some people are using assistive writing programs as a smokescreen to sneak in arguments for generative AI, which is what people clearly have a problem with. Programs like Grammarly have been around for years and I don’t see anyone actually arguing that they are unhelpful or should not be used, however there is a clear and obvious difference between using a program that proofreads/offers feedback on text you yourself have created vs. using a program that creates the text wholesale based off of prompts that you feed it.

I’ve toyed around with gen AI programs and it does take effort and finesse to get an engine to turn out good results, but that is a different thing than writing and thus it is going to be treated differently. I get the appeal of it but imo, if you do this, it’s basically you admitting that you don’t want to put in the work to actually write/don’t take pride in the results of your labor/think a machine can do it better than you and like, that’s fine, power to you, but don’t whine when other people react appropriately.

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I think one of the big things is that the dichotomy of the AI choice is misunderstood. It’s not whether AI allowed or not allowed alongside human generated content. It’s whether you’re going to have AI stories or human ones. I know I’ll no longer be submitting the stories I’m currently in the process of writing, as there’s no point to submitting something that will be drowned out 3 to 1 (or more) by someone playing madlibs with a computer. There’s no way I can keep up production with it.

I’ve noticed that a number of the authors I enjoy have stopped uploading too, so I’m not really the only one who’s gone from this. Even the story quality of works not deemed AI is dropping, so I’m pretty sure there are a bunch of false negatives. Dialogues are often stilted, nonsensical, and repetitive. Continuity has frequent gaps and and errors.

What’s possibly even worse is that by offloading the cognitive task of writing, those that use AI will never improve their writing. This is the same as someone plating up a meal from McDonalds and calling it cooking.

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What do you expect us doing about this instead?

Stories that are, for lack of a better term, nothing but “ai slob” are going to be banned from being published altogether under the new rules.

This is the major change with the new rules. And it should be right in line with what you want.

If an author used AI to create some sections but revised the text heavily and/or worked so much on their story that it becomes a pleasurable and enjoyable read, it’s taking them not much less work and time than writing the story from scratch themselves.

With these stories, it’s sometimes even hard to tell whether there’s been AI involvement, so there probably ARE a lot of false negatives, as you noted yourself.

Which makes it even less fair to force the tag on SOME of these stories, where we feel that there has been AI involved.

If people like you stop publishing stories because they’re, to say it frankly, butt-hurt that there are AI text generators around these days, this will only result in the overall quality of stories going down further.

I would expect that good authors feel challenged to write good prose that stands out against anything an AI is creating, and if you would be right with your statement that the overall quality is going down, this would make it only that much easier for them to stand out.

We implemented mechanics to avoid being flooded with cheap mass-generated stories. So this is not what’s happening; your stories won’t drown in the slob. It’s up to YOU to make the case that human-created content is always better than AI-generated content, but turning away is simply NOT the right way. It’s just giving in and sulking.

I don’t know why you’re so mad at me about this. I just provided my perspective on the fact that AI generated content is far outstripping human generated content at this point. What’s the current ratio that the approvers are seeing? I know that there are more AI stories, because I keep watching the percentage of stories on the site that are blocked by the AI tags rise. A ban wouldn’t be 100% perfect, but at least some reduction on those stories would be helpful. You wouldn’t turn down a 50% off sale just because you weren’t getting the item for free.

If you’re trying to get me and other authors to stick around, maybe you shouldn’t attack them when they point out their quite legitimate concerns about how there’s a difference between accepting that AI detection and self reporting will be spotty and allowing AI content in the first place. I don’t think that the new rules on AI go far enough, and I don’t think that publishing my stories here is in my best interest at this point. Perhaps put a restriction on the number of stories people can publish in a week might be helpful. I don’t have any perfect or foolproof answers, but I don’t think giving up is helpful.

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What were your motives for posting your stories buddy cos surely that’s the most important thing ? I’ll tell you what my motives for posting my AI assisted stories were, as my kinks evolved over the years I was struggling to find many stones that I enjoyed, so decided to give it a bash , if 9 out of 10 people wanna call them slop I don’t care , if there is just 1 like or nice comment or good rating it makes me so happy and makes sharing and all the time I put into to them worth it to me .

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Because I’m sad that you’re moving away from writing? I thought this was more than obvious. This feels like a threat and a statement of contempt for our attempt to deal with the issue.

You seem to think that everything is black and white.

A story is either AI written or not, and it’s always possible to detect that with 100% certainty.

But it’s not. So there is no easy way to deal with this. And reactions like yours do nothing to help keeping things afloat and enjoyable for us all.

I’m still going to write, but I’ll end up posting places where my writing doesn’t have to compete with people not writing.

I don’t think there’s a way to be absolutely certain that AI was or wasn’t used to make a story, but I still don’t think we should really say that AI is welcome either. Enough people will be deterred to make a significant dent in the amount of submissions, just like allowing it is making a dent in the number of non-AI stories are being submitted.

Imagine you’re a visual artist entering an art museum to show off your work, but to get there you have to walk through multiple rooms featuring nothing but AI images. Would you want to work with that gallery in the future?

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Ok, thank you for confirming that your posting was in fact nothing else but a threat.

And you wonder why my answer to you wasn’t all that cheery.

I think threat is a bit of a strong term. I was saying that the current AI rules don’t make me want to post here. With a stronger AI policy, I would be more than happy to post, but I understand if you don’t think it’s as big of a problem as I do.

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Maybe if you ran your post through an AI, you’d find out that it was written in a way to be easily perceived as a threat. Similarly, that it seemed like an attack of my post.

Let me go back to what my post was. I wasn’t attacking anyone. I wasn’t trying to demean or denigrate anyone or their efforts or their creations. I thought I was very balanced in what I said both about my own writing prior to AI, my writing with AI, and my current writing still without it. Because unlike what you’re saying, I don’t believe that all of “us” are one or the other, and that’s it (since it seemed your post was them vs us).

Maybe I’m speaking more for those who have embraced the fact that AI does exist, and will exist, and the point I made, that younger writers are GOING to be using it. I also find it curious that you believe that you’re going to go anywhere else and there will not be AI. That sounds more like a story itself than a reality to me. I also find it curious that if you believe your writing is so far superior that you would even care.

Perhaps the label should go to those fewer stories, like you’re writing, to say “Not AI Assisted”. That would reduce the amount of work the moderators have to put into finding those AI stories and labeling them, and worrying that they’re missing them, because surely yours would not in any way be a false positive. You want yours to stand out amidst the “slop” and drivel of the multiple AI vs the presumed solely human-created stories. Perhaps then, it would be better to flag those that are less common according to your statement/estimate and let people search for those. I mean, realistically, if there is a tag identifying the AI stories, then realistically one could search for them. You’re wanting YOURS to be found and read more than the AI-assisted/AI-generated stories.Therefore, perhaps the tag should be for the Non-AI stories; so, they can be searched by those readers who do not want to see any AI.

I believe at one point, there was a limit. I believe that was posted by one of the people earlier… that there had been a limit on how frequently AI stories could be submitted…how many of them could be submitted…and so forth. I didn’t complain about the fact that one couldn’t submit multiple chapters at a time. However, I will state that I had written some (now already a couple of years ago) and I was going to submit them at one time. But now, knowing that writing and submitting multiple stories bothers people like you, and perhaps the moderators who get overwhelmed, I haven’t done either way of submitting.

But quite honestly, if your work is superior enough, I don’t know why it bothers you. I don’t believe my work, either way, is the best on the site or would be. But then, I also don’t read only the best writers. I like to see other forms of expression and other levels of ability. I see plenty of people give positive constructive criticism or suggestions or encouragement to those writers. The same could happen if they read an AI-generated story or thought they did. Sadly, i’ve seen more destructive comments, and they aren’t always appropriately targeting.

I’m still of the belief that we are a small enough community that we should not be fighting and trying to decide who’s better than whom. Maybe it’s the fact that I lived through the first waves of AIDS to lose people in the community… whether we were close or not, or even liked each other, their loss still matters. It’s Thanksgiving in the USA. One of the networks played “It’s A Wonderful Life” on repeat for like multiple hours. “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?” I don’t believe that was AI-generated either; but I do believe it speaks to the issue of banning anyone, or demeaning them and lessening their value, or of someone bitching and leaving because they may not get it their way and/or somehow feel threatened by the other work that’s out there. There’s a lot of books at the library of congress, but only so many of them do any of us know. And that is because they stood out above all others…even their own imitators. Be THAT way. Show up all the rest. And, happily, take the Non-AI tag…and be searched for, found and read by those who think similarly. Stand out and be seen the way you want to be seen.

* of note, “It’s A Wonderful Life” was not considered a wonderful film. It was criticized heavily and basically was a bust at the box office. Ironically, it received 1 Academy Award/Oscar. Take a guess what it was for… it was for artificially simulating falling snow. That would be that era’s equivalent of artificially generating something. It received a handful of other nominations, including best picture, but that was the only one it won. It was little known or cared about until network television could begin airing it, which they did during holidays, after the copyright had expired.

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Just a side note to your post:

You can submit any number of stories and chapters at the same time, if you want, as I’ve implemented a mechanism that will spread out the stories automatically, so each new chapter in the same series is delayed for 3 days after the previous chapter, and all new series are delayed 14 days after the last series has been published.

This works in the author’s favor because it keeps their series at the top of the “new stories” list for an extended period.

And it also helps the approver team to be able to keep up with the amount of stories posted - and finally, it makes it impossible to flood us with an endless amount of stories, AI-generated or not.

But it’s not the author’s duty to deal with it. Just publish as your heart desires; the site’s code and the approvers team will handle it.

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