To be clear I don’t really think we have that big of an AI problem at the moment and I’m happy with the current rules BUT I think a big part of why writers seem so concerned in this thread is due to the mixed messaging we’re receiving. The rules say that there are certain restrictions on AI and that readers will remain informed about its usage, but then the people making the rules are also in this thread loudly announcing that they think AI is inevitable and it does great work and that people who want to avoid it are annoying and demanding and actually don’t have any right to ask for anything. It doesn’t exactly instill confidence for how things will evolve down the line.
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I appreciate this change. I am a writer by profession outside of writing erotic fiction, and I have to deal with near-daily accusations of AI usage, even though I generally avoid it for this exact reason. AI checkers are quite faulty and prone to false positives, and it is such a headache having to defend against AI-usage accusations when you know you haven’t used it! Plus, with things like Grammarly offering suggestions on rewriting certain sentences, each change makes it more and more likely to be flagged as AI-written. Just a nightmare all around.
I had a chapter on Literotica that they wouldn’t publish for ages because they said it read as AI-generated. I ran it through five detectors myself, four of which said no AI, and the fifth of which said was almost entirely AI! I had to rewrite almost the entire thing just to pass this one checker. And as if that weren’t insult enough, the parts it said were AI were mostly graphic sex descriptions. As if ChatGPT would be writing that part of the story anyway!
I agree that readers are smart enough to judge a story for themselves. I read a super hot story the other day where the author clearly used AI to write the setup. It was a bit of a bummer, but I forgave it because I read his stories for the sex, not his thoughts on the “wistfulness of an old man who’s seen many years go by.” Letting readers come to their own conclusions is the smart thing to do. We will embrace stories we like and skip the ones we don’t.
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I must genuinely admit I don’t understand where you see mixed messages. All of these things (apart from the points you simplified too much) are true, nothing is mixed.
I’ll try to clarify:
There are certain restrictions on AI
Yes, we will ban the worst uses of AI
Readers will remain informed about AI usage
Not in a perfect way, but yes we will actively and strongly encourage authors to disclose its use and provide the tools to do so. There are many good reasons for them to do so, and we will make sure they understand that.
AI is inevitable
I think it’s clear that it is, but if you have access to any study or article that shows there is any chance whatsoever that it could be going away, please tell me
AI does great work
I don’t know why everything has to be so binary. It can do passably good things, usually only when it’s helping someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s crap at doing things all by itself however.
People who want to avoid it are annoying and demanding
Only if they demand that people do stuff they don’t actually have to do, especially for free. Otherwise, I see no issue at all with people who wish to avoid AI.
People actually don’t have any right to ask for anything
Well, they have a right to ask for sure, but they don’t have a right to know how an author created their free stories or a right that certain policies be adopted on a privately owned site unless it contradicts the law. Of course, we’re talking about legal rights, in the law, otherwise it’s just futile, what’s the use of a right you can’t enforce? Rights cannot be just made up, they have to be codified in law.
This thread is about new rules, explaining them and the philosophy behind them. It is not a debate on AI or a declaration of the site’s position on AI as either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. If it was the latter, then yes, I can understand the mixed messaging conclusion, but I think it’s clear we don’t want to do that.
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Ok I’ll bite on this 
correct me if I’m wrong , but I see two aspects to this debate.
There are concerns people have as readers of stories , mainly that more and more authors will stop self tagging stories as containing AI patterns and their won’t be consequences if they do stop (side note I can’t think why anyone would do that when the community is so welcoming and tolerant )
also some readers would like more info on how AI stories are put together before deciding if they wanna read them ? ( one question I would ask is don’t all the tags on a story , kinks etc , inform ones choices of what people wanna read ? )
The second aspect Is concerns of authors , this where I’m a bit more confused,
from what I understand it isn’t about reading stories , but a fear that the change of rules will result in a explosion of stories being submitted . ( remember there is a 2 week break for new stories and a 4 day break for chapters , which is intended to stop a frequent turnover of stories on the site)
The other issue for authors is a view that apparently if people are not tagging as AI , then what ? Is it they might get credit they don’t deserve in the eyes of those with concerns? Cos surely that goes against the idea that stories using AI patterns must of been created in five minutes with no love or care . surely their stories would stand out among those stories .
None of the above is a judgement , and I certainly understand if people genuinely desire to avoid AI because they are worried about the future . Human jobs and all that .
i don’t think I’ve mentioned this before if I could take the pages and pages , thousands and thousands of words that I typed myself, which were put into AI tools to help me make my stories and Instead hand them to a commissioning author and pay them to make it into something better I would in a heart beat but the truth is I feel my kinks is niche and I wouldn’t wanna inflict them on a writer who doesn’t share a love of those kinks even if they got paid for it . At least doing what I’ve done , people can choose if they wanna read them or not . I didn’t do it to be hailed as a brilliant writer , I just wanna make people happy , 
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Pardon, but I think you’re reading words into my text that I did not say.
And don’t think you’re better than anyone else because you believe you only “get off” to stories written by humans.
I did not claim to be better than anyone else, nor did I say disliking AI was morally or ethically superior. I expressed that some people had reasons (some of which were matters of ethics) for disliking it and tried to articulate why I believed the tagging is important?
In fact, I ended my post saying I understand the rules and think they’re reasonable?
I’d like to echo @Chris_Pyre and @Mostly_Ghostly - while I feel the rules themselves are fine (or are at least reasonable given the current constraints), the tone of this discussion has been frustrating.
Well, then ask yourself where this tone started from. It was definitely not Mafisto or me. Read the thread. Read it from the beginning. And try to put yourself in our shoes.
People DEMAND that all stories with AI NEED to be tagged. They DEMAND to be able to block them.
It doesn’t matter that this is technically impossible. They don’t care it’s putting a lot of responsibility and fights on other people’s shoulders. They don’t care that it’s just about THEIR convenience and that they have NO idea what this actually means.
But they still DEMAND it.
Do you HONESTLY not see how offensive and elitist this sentence is?
And you really WONDER why I react on this? Seriously?
And then this:
Deeply concerned that things do not go YOUR way? That YOU don’t get what YOU demand?
I feel my anger bubbling up, and I really fight hard to control myself, not to write what I think about this hypocrisy you’re showing here.
And YOU say this discussion is frustrating? Because you don’t get your way?
I think stories that use AI in any substantial way should be tagged as such. The tagging system works both as a way to find stories, and to filter them out.
I hate 2nd person narration, i blocked the tag, i have no moral opinions on the tag, i dont like to read it. And i think i also blocked ai created. I have no obligation to read 2nd person stories, or AI stories even if some of them are quite good i’m sure. Is AI going to be banned altogether from the site, no, almost certainly not but for a while we were being absolutely flooded with ai stories, the main issue is the sheer quantity of them.
Ultimately, i think the point that Corin is trying to make about AI is that if someone lies about using Ai, what can you really do about that?
The mod team is a collection of individuals and we all have our different opinions on the ethics of AI. Am i particularly bothered that people use AI on the site? Not especially but i do understand that there are issues around how they are trained and the resources to use them.
I dont really have anything to add to the discussion but it is a fascinating read 
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Just to clear up any misconception, there might still be:
Stories that would be classified as “AI-created” are now banned from the site entirely.
Suppose we (or you, as a member of the approver team 
) see a story that we suspect was written with some AI involvement (but still obviously not just AI slop, which would be banned, see above). In that case, we’d ask the author to either tag it with “contains AI patterns” or at least that he’s adding a disclaimer if and how AI was used (yes, that can also mean that the author promises that he didn’t use any AI when he wrote the story!).
Because we cannot prove or disprove the usage of AI, there’s just no other way to deal with this.
I hope that’s ok with you.
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I think we understand each other perfectly.
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I definitely think “contains AI patterns” is way better wording to satisfy more people than “AI prose”! I think overall this conversation has been pretty fruitful in seeing where everyone’s worries and fears lie but also areas where hard stances need to be taken. I appreciate so many people having this discussion too from both a writer and reader’s perspective; it’s going to be a discussion from now on that’ll come up consistently in the world, so it’s good to be able to have civil discourse about it when when people have hard stances one way or another.
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AI is inevitable
I think it’s clear that it is, but if you have access to any study or article that shows there is any chance whatsoever that it could be going away, please tell me
I’m aware this is a tangent so I’ll make this brief, but all you have to do is look at the bottom line of any AI company’s financials. Ed Zitron does great independent-journalism blogging about this. Financially, we are in a massive bubble that inevitably will pop when the venture capital runs out, the vast majority of these companies and their products will go out of business, and what’s left will have to turn to expensive subscriber models instead of being free or cheap to use. AI will be, at least for awhile, a thing of the past to anyone who isn’t wealthy enough for the premium-priced survivors.
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That’s interesting. For sure, the capacities of AI are vastly overhyped. As one familiar with its inner workings, I can attest to that, it’s really not as useful as what these companies sold their investors on. So the scenario you described is in the realm of possibilities. However, there are a lot of open source models right now that one can run on AWS privately, and they discovered that bigger isn’t always better, that some very compact models that can run on local computers can be quite powerful. So even if these companies fail or put a very expensive pay wall around their services, anyone can still start up a service very inexpensively. But the point you bring is quite valid, the business model is likely to change drastically when the bubble pops, and it will.
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Continuing the aside, yeah … there are a lot of opinion articles that have made it beyond the financial news about whether this is going to be like the dot com bubble of the late-1990s / early-2000s. I agree that it likely is, though there are well educated people in those fields who disagree … but I think they are in the minority.
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is that what is detected as AI? the thorough sensory experience immersing the reader into the environment and the moment?? if so, that would be my writing style & maybe why my stuff was detected in the online tools I used?
I was using it as an example of something I’ve sometimes noticed. Extremely few authors are good at emphasizing all five senses, almost all exclusively focus on sight for the majority of the prose. Even though writers are trained that sight is just one part of things. So in my experience, text that frequently emphasizes all five sentences every couple paragraphs is more often (in my opinion) AI-generated. Like anything else, it’s not a 100% thing, and I try in my own writing for the full sensory experience (though I often fail). But, it’s a flag for me, especially if it’s something that’s not important or seems silly to be describing that way (e.g., a hallway shouldn’t have a taste, unless it’s stone and you’re a geologist who likes to lick their rocks).
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I may be misreading… but it seems that the people taking hard stands about not wanting to have their writing share space with someone else’s that used AI…are also making this type of comment as well. And that completely ignores what I said and I can’t believe is not the experience of others as well. It DOES NOT happen that I can write something in a few hours with a few prompts or whatever. I literally spent a FEW HOURS just writing a few paragraphs the other day because the AI kept going a different direction or perceived something it found objectionable. It is not as easy as some of you want to make it sound. And I am not trying to be combative as someone said about another’s comment that I did not see any combat in…but, some of these stellar writers who command the language so well that they are writing like Shakespeare and are offending by the peasants with AI… are you actually reading what you are writing? Some of these comments are reductive, dismissive, even derisive in how they are talking about people who use AI, to any degree other than spellcheck (and even that seemed questionable it seemed).
I still would propose rather than putting the Scarlet Letter on the writers who use AI, why not put the “fully human” label on the ones who actually want a label and want to stand out from the lower forms of writers as they see it? It sounds like they believe they are in the minority anyway, so it would make their writing much easier to directly search for as well. And, that also gives them the badge of recognition of their work and also avoids what is beginning to more and more read like outright discrimination-type comments relegating the AI works to the back of the library instead of the bus. If anyone is thinking I am overstating or being harsh, I really suggest reading the comments from the view of someone other than yourself or someone sharing only your view. I have been trying to do that… but as I said, it is becoming a repeated refrain as well as seeming to be repetitively ignoring what others have said about the actual AI experience.
[I appreciate @astrolub recognizing what I said in regard to what I wrote prior to ever having AI.]
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well now, come to think of it, licking rocks doesn’t sound all that bad **And please everyone take this as humor!!! : That sounds like a heckuva good prompt…. I want to write a story about a hallway made of stone and a geologist tasting the rocks, but please include what happens when the rocks get off ….” — I’m sorry but I can’t continue this conversation. — and then I tell the AI, oh yeah… we’ll see about that! hahaha — sorry, but licking rocks made my mind think about what the site really is about, and that is enjoying erotic and niche things, and a refuge to do it, even if it is a tasteful hallway made of rock 
@astrolub On a serious note, thank you for that reply. I really don’t know what it does that is detected beyond the same annoying phrases it always seems to find a way to say when I use it. And yeah, my writing style… I try to incorporate senses and description to make the reader feel they are right there experiencing it with the characters. I sometimes do what someone else said they didn’t like which is narration or 2nd person (I took that to mean someone else’s viewpoint besides the agent at the time, maybe). Anyway… thanks
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See every day is a school day , it wasn’t until I read your post that it really occurred to me but now you mention it that , it was something that AI does is when I give it my paragraphs , one of the things AI will do to it is add descriptions of smells , tastes etc like you said , the more stories I’ve done the more I learned when those descriptions are really needed , like if it’s a musk or pheromone type deal and when it just not needed so a lot of the time I’ll just delete stuff or reword stuff . for some reason it loves everything smelling of Jasmine lol 
it’s like the dash thing someone mentioned as well , I tend to remove them all , I don’t know if they are supposed to be there .
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Not saying that people don’t put effort into it but I do feel like the work that goes into coercing an LLM to produce the exact kind of porn you want is a very different kind of work than just doing your own writing. They can reach similar outputs, but the paths there are not created equal.
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