AI vs. Craft
Discuss AI writing tools, ethics, and the future of creative writing.
New here - is it okay to ask what AI assist actually does on this platform?
Hi everyone. I joined Sproker about two weeks ago and I've been reading a lot of the discussions here before posting. I have a genuine question that I can't find answered clearly in the documentation: when someone has AI assist enabled on their contribution, what does that actually mean? Is the AI writing full paragraphs? Suggesting edits? Completing sentences? I ask because I want to vote fairly and I'm not sure what I'm evaluating when a chapter says "AI assisted." Is the story idea theirs but the prose partly generated? Is it fully human prose that was edited with AI suggestions? I don't have a strong opinion about AI in creative writing - I genuinely don't know enough to have one yet. I just want to understand what I'm reading. Also: if a writer chooses not to disclose AI use (and the story owner has AI allowed), does that happen? And how would you know? Sorry if these are naive questions. Happy to be pointed to existing discussions.
The uncanny valley of AI prose: why it always sounds like it's trying
I've been thinking about what distinguishes AI-generated prose from human prose in ways that are hard to articulate but immediately felt. My working theory: AI prose is always effortful. Every sentence is trying to be a good sentence. There's no slack in it, no moments where the writer gets out of their own way, no sentences that are boring on purpose because the next one needs to be explosive. Human writers know when to be quiet. We know how to write a sentence that is deliberately underpowered because we're saving the charge. AI models seem to have absorbed the lesson that all sentences should be maximally literary and then applied it uniformly, which produces a kind of exhausting intensity. The other tell: AI prose doesn't know what it doesn't need to say. Good writers constantly cut. The decision about what to omit is as much a creative act as the decision about what to include. AI generates; it doesn't edit itself. Even when prompted to be sparse, it tends to explain its own sparseness. This isn't an argument against AI assistance - it's an argument for understanding what the tool is actually doing so you can use it well. If you know AI prose is effortful, you can use it for drafts and then find the moments that need to breathe. Thoughts?
I used AI for research, not writing. Here's what that looked like.
Transparent disclosure upfront: I have AI assistance toggled off on my current story. Everything I post is my own prose. But I have been using AI tools for research during the writing process and I want to be honest about that, because I think the "AI vs Craft" framing often misses what's actually happening in practice. What I used AI for: - Checking technical plausibility of my sci-fi premise (orbital mechanics, communication delay at distance) - Generating lists of questions I hadn't thought to ask about my fictional world - Rapid-testing dialogue: I would write a line, ask an AI what it implied about the character, and use that feedback to revise What I did not use AI for: - Any actual prose - Plot decisions - Character motivation My honest assessment: the research use is genuinely useful and I don't think it's different in kind from using Wikipedia, a textbook, or a subject-matter expert. The dialogue testing is more ambiguous - it's a bit like having a very fast beta reader who has no taste but lots of surface-level pattern recognition. I'm posting this because I think the conversation here often assumes AI assistance = generated prose, and I'd like to make space for more nuanced discussion. What's everyone else actually doing?