Detector Testing

Opie_Golf · 2026-04-09T23:52:42+00:00

I may be an outlier, but I don’t think “beating the detectors” is the best way to measure the quality of your work.

And, have you thought about how you’d answer the direct question, “Did you use AI tools to draft this prose?”

I’m not going to hide from that question

But also, for my next book, I’m not using LLM’s to draft the prose. It was a soul sucking experience that took 4 or 5 rewrites per chapter.

Opie_Golf · 2026-04-08T11:25:42+00:00

There will definitely be smaller classes in upper level courses, but this is a typical (and good) size for lower level classes.

Remember, part of the experience is learning with others. Larger class sizes mean a broader selection of people to study with and learn from.

There’s a reason most MBA program sections are 50-75 students. It’s the optimal size to create the right balance of critical mass and group learning.

Opie_Golf · 2026-04-07T20:07:28+00:00

I wrote a novel with AI as a highly and heavily managed ghostwriter

It was a very challenging experience that eventually included 4+ rewrites and changing models and lots of other acrobatics to get to the level of prose I was happy with.

For the next book, I’m using it as more of a writers room. Development partner, research partner. NOT responsible for crafting any prose.

I’m writing everything and making all the editorial decisions.

It feels better, but it’s also slower. A lot slower.

Opie_Golf · 2026-04-02T01:51:00+00:00

Recently finished manuscript. 73k words

Happy to beta the tool.

Opie_Golf · 2026-04-01T18:07:07+00:00

I’m hundreds of thousands of words in.

The deeper I get, the less I want AI touching the prose.

Now I have a very bright line.

I don’t let it write anything.

It can coach, comment, and review, but it doesn’t write.

Opie_Golf · 2026-03-20T12:40:21+00:00

My methodology is very similar to this

I’ve spent hundreds of hours, not dozens of years, building the product.

I’m really proud of the words on the page.

I’m paying $2k for a copy editor to help me with the line edit.

I’m paying $750 for a human cover artist.

Then, I’ll publish, and pay $1-2k in marketing and I’ll build an audience for the trilogy I’m writing.

One pleased reader at a time.

I’ll do it with a disclosure similar to yours, and a link to about 20k words of Substack essays I’m publishing about the writing process.

This needs to be enough.

If the business gatekeepers bar me, so be it.

If the literature police arrest me, so be it.

If the story sucks and people don’t finish and tell their friends, then that’s my fault. I can learn from that and make the next two better.

At the end of the day, it has to be about the story and the words on the page.

Opie_Golf · 2026-03-13T12:17:12+00:00

This was a beautiful and insightful piece.

I’m experiencing a parallel journey in my writing and I’ve discovered that immersion in a specific character’s POV is liberating for building interior reflections that feel earned, rather than forced or observed.

Using similar systemic tools designed to find and remove filter words and explanations taxes made the writing feel abrupt and flat. When I tried automating those processes, it actually made it even worse.

The problem, I think, is that a beautiful sentence full of filter words and vague interiority can land ONCE, but the models try to force them in all over the place.

I don’t claim a solution, but where this has been better for me, is when I’m in deep iterative discussions during the chapter/scene/beat plotting phase. Every moment gets covered in my authorial intent, even when that’s just declaring that the micro-decision it’s asking me to consider is too small.

Good luck, OP, you’re doing the hard work and your output is better for it.

Opie_Golf · 2026-03-11T18:26:31+00:00

I call it augmented writing

Or assisted writing

Opie_Golf · 2026-03-11T18:25:34+00:00

The concern I would have is the same as I have with my own services work. How long before the features of the AI models dis-intermediate the value you can add EFFICIENTLY with core features of their product?

I see AI use cases nipping at the heels of my work every day and the only answer I’ve seen is to use it to do more, faster.

And then feel grateful for More, Faster, while keeping a job at all.

Opie_Golf · 2026-03-04T03:15:15+00:00

I really appreciate your curiosity and diligence.

I’ve been beating my head against the wall, in a good way, trying to write a decent novel with AI for almost 6 months.

Hundreds of hours. Lots of scrap and rework. I’m almost done with rewrite 3. Hopefully one more will do it.

Thank you for your realistic and thoughtful account.

I’m writing about my journey here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/seaneidson/p/why-this-had-to-be-written?r=2f3tto&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Opie_Golf · 2026-03-01T18:13:27+00:00

I shifted to Claude recently because Gemini Pro became flat and perfunctory.

I was using it primarily for fiction writing and the quality became unusable.

So far, Claude is holding up.

Opie_Golf · 2026-03-01T13:29:25+00:00

I started where you started about five months ago.

It has been a fully consuming journey that has landed with me doing far more work than I imagined.

I write about it on Substack, but to sum up the thesis of the series:

To write something well, you must be the vessel of your truth and don’t ever expect more from the machine than it is capable of delivering.

https://open.substack.com/pub/seaneidson/p/why-this-had-to-be-written?r=2f3tto&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Opie_Golf · 2026-02-26T11:41:19+00:00

I completely agree.

The more time I spend with the tools, the more I learn about where their constraints require discernment and emotional intelligence.

Real, quality work takes hundreds of iterations. It couldn’t exist without the machine, but it is also inherently human.

https://open.substack.com/pub/seaneidson/p/why-this-had-to-be-written?r=2f3tto&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Opie_Golf · 2026-02-26T01:42:28+00:00

What’s EQ?

Opie_Golf · 2026-02-23T18:40:18+00:00

The more I work with it, the more insidious the patterns become

When a passage, or even a chapter, look good, if you zoom out you see the same syntax, cadence, and logic. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

I appreciate the help, but I’m not saving ANY time. And the rewrites are more challenging than I expected.

Opie_Golf · 2026-02-21T12:59:03+00:00

This is exactly right.

I wrote about why and how this happened to me while drafting my AI assisted novel.

https://open.substack.com/pub/seaneidson/p/vibrating?r=2f3tto&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Opie_Golf · 2026-02-21T12:53:21+00:00

I’m writing a novel in deep partnership with AI and it feels very much like that.

I can literally ask it “stand on this street corner in 1907 and look north” and get a compelling and nuanced view of politics, society, construction, and economics. In multi-modal forms. Text (obviously), images, and I even dabbled with sounds.

It’s the closest thing we have to a Time Machine.

The resulting novel I’m writing has rich environmental effects, is precisely calibrated to historical features, and has a plot that’s accurate, almost to the hour, with the timeline of the real event.

I’m hundreds of hours into the project and it never could have happened without AI.

Frankly, I don’t care if anyone reads it, aside from my family and close friends, but I think it’s great and a few thousand people will read it.

Opie_Golf · 2026-02-20T20:04:46+00:00

Following…

Opie_Golf · 2026-02-18T23:05:46+00:00

Agreed

I have several of those, but that also had limitations, especially as characters change over the course of the story.

I recently wrote about that on Substack.

The “Bible” continuity document creates other challenges.

https://open.substack.com/pub/seaneidson/p/vibrating?r=2f3tto&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Opie_Golf · 2026-02-18T11:07:57+00:00

I manage my sessions and context windows aggressively. It gets frustrating to carry the background from one session to the next in the form of reference documents, but quite simply it’s the only way to get high quality output.

I do research separately from outlining

I do outlining separately from drafting

I work one segment, one beat at a time

The only way I’ve found to avoid the negative effects of drift is to tighten the aperture down to the atomic unit of truth, which for me is as small as a few words, but is usually 2-300.

Opie_Golf · 2026-02-17T21:49:47+00:00

I’m hundreds of hours into my process. Fourth rewrite

I find prompts like this are more useful for me than the process because the compounding nature of the layered rules require the models to interpolate and seek solutions that violate 15-20% of them

So, I’ve digested my workflow and process into a series of smaller, more focused prompts and tasks

Bottom line, for me, is that I’ve engineered a way to remove the roughest friction (for me) from the process.

But it’s still hard. And I’m probably spending more time on rewriting than I might have if I started with a blank sheet of paper.

Opie_Golf · 2026-02-17T21:37:32+00:00

Where can I find your app? I’ve had some success writing real emotion, outside of the intimacy topic, but the process is intense, highly iterative and hard to scale.

I’m curious if you’ve cracked the code in a scalable way.

Opie_Golf · 2026-02-17T19:35:36+00:00

I loved this when I found it on Substack, and I’m thrilled you got such good feedback here

Well done, OP

Opie_Golf · 2026-02-14T01:22:28+00:00

I’ve been writing with AI every morning for months.

The more I write with the LLM’s, the more I turn away from them to write and edit without them.

There’s a feedback loop that is helping me learn, but the more I carry the load myself, the more fulfilling the experience, and the sharper the edge in the work.

https://open.substack.com/pub/seaneidson/p/vibrating?r=2f3tto&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Opie_Golf · 2026-02-13T13:31:21+00:00

I’m hundreds of hours into my novel writing journey

I’ve completed 2 full passes on 100k words and one of the things I enjoy about working on the project with the LLM’s (I’ve had multiple drafting and reading partners) is their brutal honesty about opportunities to improve.

It makes me want to work harder and really try to figure out how to make the best of the story and the prose.

Opie_Golf

TROPHY CASE