> I assume that AI assistance in creative writing is now mainstream, and an accepted tool for most writers.

It absolutely is not. In fact the Nebula awards just banned entries from having _any_ AI use involved with them whatsoever. You can't even use them for grammar correction.

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ghaff 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not sure quite how that works. Google Docs will suggest various changes which I take into account or don't. And they certainly correct misspellings. You can choose to decide that's not AI but it's a grey line.

For writing I've sometimes used LLMs to speed up some essentially boilerplate. Never used for something that's not pretty much routine that I could easily do but would probably spend some time doing so.

For anything that might be a Nebula submission, it's hard to imagine LLMs doing anything beyond the copyediting level (which may not be well-defined but seems a reasonable threshold).

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fallinditch 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The irony!

	▲	mikestorrent 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I get it; not very sci-fi. Well, they want to preserve a role for the editor; because the editor is not just checking the grammar but also the content, and weighing in with their relative objectivity on the current state of the story, what should be improved, what was good and what didn't work, etc. and if we have AI glazing us continuously we will just produce slop; it may look like good fiction but it will not read like it, and people can tell the difference!

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riskable 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not even grammar correction? That's lame and kinda evil.

When you submit your manuscript to a big publisher I guarantee they're using AI to check it (now). At the very least, AI is the only tool that can detect a great number of issues that even the best editors miss. To NOT take advantage of that is a huge waste.

It sounds to me like they're just trying to push out independents and small publishers. Because you know they're not going to ask big publishers if they use AI (who will likely deny it anyway... Liars).

FYI: AI is both the best grammar checker ever as well as the best consistency checker. It'll be able to generate intelligent lexical density report that will know that you used "evasive", "evaded", and "evading" too much (because it knows they're all the same base word). They're also fantastic at noticing ambiguities that humans often miss because they're like-minded and "know what you mean." (Our brains are wired like that to improve the efficiency of our repetitive tasks like reading words).

AI tools can help you improve as a writer and enhance your craft in a lot of ways. To not take advantage of that—to me—feels like burying your head in the sand and screaming, "LA LA LA LA! I don't want to think about AI because it can be used for bad things!"

I've chatted with many writers about AI and nearly all of them don't understand the technology and assume it's literally just taking chunks of other writers works and spewing them out one sentence at a time.

I literally had a conversation with a writer that thought you could take ten sentences written by AI and trace them back to ten books.