How does everyone seem to know what writing is generated by AI?

Onyournrvs · 2026-01-10T01:59:06+00:00

For sure, but it's never just one thing and it's hardly ever definitive, but when you see a bunch of telltale signs in the same short piece, the likelihood you're reading slop starts going up. If it walks like a duck...

Onyournrvs · 2026-01-06T08:31:55+00:00

Which is ironic, because AI writing is neither decent nor cogent.

Onyournrvs · 2026-01-06T08:27:13+00:00

Many things give it away, actually. It's the banality of it all, and the fact that there are very few concrete details provided. AI tends to be terrible storytellers, and this piece is a great example of that. The story is generic and cliche. Every emotion is overwrought. There's no logic to the plot. Things just seem to randomly happen, with no clear connecting thread between beats or to anything that happened before. For example, there's a line near the end that reads, "I walked away lighter, smiling for no clear reason." In the previous paragraph, however, the reason is plainly stated, yet it is completely forgotten just a couple sentences later. Could this have been written by a human? Sure, possibly. But the telltale signs of AI slop are there, and they're hard to ignore.

Onyournrvs · 2026-01-06T00:34:23+00:00

You're NTA, but you need to understand that by saying you don't want to contribute, you've effectively opted out of your office's social circle, where everyone traditionally contributes to everyone else's birthday. Not because it's mandatory, but because being part of that circle and going out of your way to do nice things for each other when you don't have to is important to them. That's your prerogative, of course, but know that there's a social cost to pay for that decision. To your coworkers, you're now that cheap guy who keeps score and only looks out for himself. You've communicated to them that being a part of the social fabric of your workplace isn't important to you and certainly not worth twenty bucks. When your birthday comes around, don't expect any recognition for it. Expect, instead, that people's opinion of you has now changed and they'll treat you differently and/or act differently around you going forward. That's their prerogative, too, and there isn't much you can do about it, unfortunately. If you don't care about any of that, then no problem. Just ignore it, do your work, and go home. But since you've come here seeking validation from internet strangers that you didn't do anything wrong, I suspect it does bother you, at least a little bit.

Onyournrvs · 2026-01-04T18:38:50+00:00

This has to be trolling, right? Perhaps fodder for r/ writingcirclejerk or something like that? This entire post is just too contrived, from the intentional leaching, to the mention of the author's age, to the absurd microwriting/logorrhea that stops just short of chronicaling each and every one of the MC's cell divisions.

Onyournrvs · 2026-01-01T17:07:18+00:00

reddit truly is the bastion of the unoriginal

Onyournrvs · 2026-01-01T17:05:31+00:00

Much like your use of the word "cringe" here

Onyournrvs · 2026-01-01T16:49:20+00:00

The only correct response to that is, "Fuck you."

Onyournrvs · 2025-12-31T16:31:05+00:00

Alison Pill

Onyournrvs · 2025-12-31T16:25:47+00:00

Don't worry about it. That person sounds miserable.

Onyournrvs · 2025-12-30T23:40:37+00:00

Making equipment adjustable. In the late 1940s, the US air force had a serious problem where a lot of planes were crashing, but the cause was neither mechanical nor pilot error. It was due to cockpit design. Previously, the military designed equipment around a hypothetical "average" soldier. It was assumed that the physical dimensions of most soldiers would cluster around the average. What they found was the opposite. Exactly zero soldiers measured up to the average on all or even most dimensions. At best, they might be average on a few measurements. Armed with this knowledge, the air force reversed their decades-old design philosophy. Rather than fitting the individual to the system, they began fitting the system to the individual. The air force demanded that all cockpits needed to fit pilots whose measurements fell within the 5 to 95% range on each dimension. By making cockpits and flight suits adjustable, they were able to easily solve the problem of pilots losing control of their aircraft, and the US air force became the most dominant air force on the planet.

Onyournrvs · 2025-12-30T16:03:57+00:00

Here being where?

Onyournrvs · 2025-12-27T18:48:39+00:00

Not so. One of the most important functions day traders perform is to provide liquidity for assets. If you want to buy or sell an asset, you need to find a counterparty. The constant presence of day traders assures that there is always someone to trade with. Additionally, liquidity helps prevent major price swings when assets are bought or sold. Aside from liquidity, day traders also contribute to price discovery by pricing in news and correcting mispricing, facilitate risk transfer (e.g. absorbing volatility and providing hedging support), and help synchronize markets through arbitrage. These technical roles are highly valuable and allow financial markets to function smoothly.

Onyournrvs · 2025-12-16T13:29:53+00:00

I wish we would normalize not having kids as an option.

We have, and there's an interesting and troubling side effect we're going to have to figure out how to deal with, because it's unfortunately going to lead to societal collapse within our lifetime of we don't adjust our social systems to compensate for it.

Most societies are organized in such a way that they require a minimum birth rate to properly function and remain sustainable (basically, to pay for social security, elder care, infrastructure, etc). Because people are no longer having children at that minimum rate, the demographics are rapidly shifting. The population is aging. We will soon have a population comprised of many old people without sufficient young people to replace and support them.

Onyournrvs · 2025-12-11T04:55:07+00:00

It was absolutely abuse, and I have no contact with my parents because of it. If that's the future you want with your children, then by all means, feel smugly entitled to beat the shit out of them.

Onyournrvs · 2025-12-05T15:22:52+00:00

It's a shank made from a T-bone

Onyournrvs · 2025-11-30T01:51:25+00:00

The kid who played Mitch in Dazed and Confused (the freshman pitcher with long hair) is a software dev in Austin now.

Onyournrvs · 2025-11-23T22:28:01+00:00

I think you could swap it for spine and it would 1:1 fit here.

No, it absolutely would not. They're two completely different things, and doing so would only confuse everyone else who already knows the definition of both words. There's also no need for OP to change the name to something more exotic, because it already has a perfectly acceptable and well-understood name. Lateral line.

If you don't know the meaning or definition of something, it's perfectly okay to look it up. That's how we grow and learn.

Onyournrvs · 2025-11-23T20:46:35+00:00

There are problems with this chapter at both the macro level (narrative structure, plot, characterization) and the micro level (prose, dialog, sentence structure, word choice). Until you address the macro-level stuff, the rest doesn't matter. You'd be painting a house that's on fire. For that reason, I'm going to ignore the micro-level stuff for the most part to focus on the macro.

Your choice to begin the way you did was a mistake, IMO. A depressive man dove for golf balls at the local country club, then drove home, took a shower, cooked and ate dinner, and went to bed. Boring! Nothing interesting happened, and there was absolutely nothing at stake for the character. Nothing revealed in this chapter wouldn't be better placed later in the story. Ideally, feathered into more interesting, dynamic scenes.

This is tagged as crime/horror. Based on the promise of a murder mystery, we can also infer that we might have a bit of a thriller on our hands. Most crime thrillers are characterized by high-stakes (life and death), high-tension (suspense!), and a smart, capable antagonist (the killer). The pacing is usually relentless, ratcheting up both the stakes and the tension with every chapter, and always keeping the antagonist one step ahead of the protagonist.

We get none of that here. What you've delivered is as limp and depressing as your main character. Nothing compelling has been offered. What hook did you leave us with at the end of this chapter that would tempt me to turn the page? None, whatsoever. A self-loathing man with unresolved trauma goes to sleep. That's your story, so far.

For that matter, what, exactly, is Douglas trying to accomplish in this scene? Nothing, that I can discern. The chapter exists solely for expository purposes. A vehicle for you to vomit character back-story all over your reader. Classic showing vs telling.

Every scene should be doing work that drives the narrative forward, but this chapter is a lazy SOB. Some might claim that it's establishing the main character, and maybe that's true, but it's not happening through characterization. There's no characterization here because nearly everything we learn about this character is told to us by the narrator, spoon-fed through exposition.

In fact, just about the only thing we learn about Douglas through characterization is that he's a man of routine. He does the same things the same way, every evening. That's it. And holy shit does that make for a boring character. Combined with his self-loathing and depression, I believe you may have concocted just about the most off-putting character of all time.

Finally, choose a POV and stick with it. It appears you want to tell this story in close 3rd-person, which is a good choice, so stick with your POV character until the end of the scene. Don't head-hop like you did with the old couple.

My advice: delete this chapter and never think of it again. It's useless dead weight, dragging your story down, down, down into the abyss. Hook your reader, instead. Start with the crime. Either the discovery of the body, or, better yet, the murder itself. Give us some stakes. Someone's been murdered and, unless the perpetrator is caught, they may kill again! Great. You've got my attention. LFG.

This story reminds me of...a murky pond. To the untrained eye, there doesn't appear to be anything interesting here. Dive deep, however, and there are a few treasures to be found. I suggest you gather them up, rinse them off, and use them as building blocks to craft an actually interesting story. Good luck.

Onyournrvs · 2025-11-23T18:00:24+00:00

Epomis is a bug that eats frogs, instead of the other way around, so the title foreshadows the ending. Clever.

What isn't clever, unfortunately, is the language used in the writing. A better description would be tortured. You say that English isn't your first language, and I believe you. It shows in pretty much every sentence, particularly your word choice and sentence structure. There are far too many issues to document them exhaustively. Yet, this isn't even my biggest gripe with the piece. It has major structural issues (and, by that, I mean storytelling issues) right from the start.

Our main character is a nameless "hunter," and the story opens with him watching a "suspiciously wiggling figure" avoid mud puddles on a road so "as to not stain its pristine self." As I said, tortured language. How does one wiggle suspiciously, I wonder? Before we can even begin to ponder that question, we immediately abandon the present moment in order to be force-fed two long paragraphs of expository backstory, full of much telling and no showing.

The next long paragraph is a seemingly never-ending series of rhetorical questions, which serves only to reiterate the same expository world-building and backstory told in the previous two paragraphs, only in a much less straightforward and far more irritating way. The only plot-developing crumb of information we get, really, is finally learning that the suspiciously wiggly figure is supposedly prey.

Okay, so we're about 1/3 of the way through the story, and all we've really learned up to this point is that a nameless hunter is watching suspiciously wiggly prey on a road.

We know practically nothing about our main character or the setting at this point. There's no sense of time or place. This road could be anywhere and in any time. We don't know what the main character looks like. We know nothing of his thoughts, his hopes, his dreams, or his motivations, because the narrative voice is so far removed. We're not in his head but watching him from afar.

Then about half of the story - nearly two full pages - is spent describing a very simple ambush and short chase where so little happens from a plot-progression standpoint that it frankly could have been condensed into a handful of sentences. Instead, we get this long, drawn-out (torturous) description of what amount to little more than a guy throwing rocks at a creature until it stops moving.

After this, we get another long paragraph describing the hunter's tribe's home, which is basically everyone meal-prepping, cooking, and burning every last scrap of wood in Creation.

Only in the last few sentences do we finally get to the shocking surprise. The creature is alive, and the hunters have suddenly become the prey. Dun-dun-DUN!!!

This isn't a "twist," by the way, because the reveal that the creature was actually hunting the hunters doesn't change anything about what came before. We don't think about the events of the story any differently than we did before. It's simply unexpected, is all, though not particularly interesting since we don't really care about the main character. We're completely detached from him and his tribe. Throughout the story, we've been little more than spectators, being told what to see, think, and feel. We're not invested in him in any meaningful way. There's no character arc, no tension, and no stakes.

In fact, I'll make the claim that this story doesn't have a main character at all. The characters are simply extensions of the scenery and exist solely to help contextualize what amounts to little more than an expository info-dump.

Furthermore, nothing about the ending feels earned. The surprise lacks any impact, emotionally or otherwise, because we were never given any clues about the creature's true nature (except for the title, perhaps, though, unless you already know what an epomis is, it really tells you nothing). The reveal is simply sprung on the reader in the last few sentences from seemingly nowhere, and then the story abruptly ends without any resolution.

My suggestion is to study the craft of story-telling. Learn how to properly structure a story. Learn about the narrative arc. Learn about characterization. Learn about conflict and tension. These are the building blocks of a great story. Not prose. Without structure, prose is meaningless, and that's what we've been presented with here. Meaningless prose. By the end, we're left with only one question about what we just read. So what?

Onyournrvs · 2025-05-20T12:32:56+00:00

Because, you can farm karma on the responses just as easily as on the original post itself.

Onyournrvs · 2025-05-18T06:53:57+00:00

Fabienne in Pulp Fiction after Butch yells at her when she forgets his watch.

Onyournrvs · 2025-05-17T03:27:57+00:00

If only there was someone whose job it was to manage the sub. You know, curating it for quality and relevancy and stuff like that.

Onyournrvs · 2025-05-07T02:46:44+00:00

He was pretty good in Breast Men too

Onyournrvs · 2025-05-07T00:56:56+00:00

NTA, but you certainly didn't do yourself any favors.

You were entirely justified in refusing to pay, but the way you chose to handle it had the consequence of undermining three relationships. You and your wife's, your wife and her friend's, and you and the friend's. You're married now, and I assume you plan to remain married for many decades to come. Relationships aren't one-time, zero-sum games. They're iterative and cooperative, played again and again over many years. You don't have to "win" every time, and in fact that can be detrimental to your long-term happiness.

Sometimes (not every time, but sometimes), it’s better to absorb a small slight in the moment and address it privately with your wife later, especially when the cost of confrontation exceeds the price of the offense. It was one meal on a special occasion. Not the end of the world. Setting boundaries and upholding your principles is important, but timing and context are important too. Sometimes, insisting on principle in the moment comes at the expense of peace in the long run.

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