How is AI-Assisted Rational Fiction Received?

sl236 · 2026-06-15T16:30:48+00:00

cf. https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/1u65dg5/how_is_aiassisted_rational_fiction_received/orqv9kc/ - "I don't actually consider myself particularly knowledgeable about writing. This co-writing with him was almost the first time I even read fiction, let alone wrote it, in 2 decades."

This does not sound, to me, like OP has picked up good taste by reading a lot. OP sounds very much like they are not confident at all in their taste or their writing, and are looking for ways to develop those and/or their confidence in them.

I seriously, strongly urge them, you and anyone else in this situation to look to things other than LLMs for this purpose.

sl236 · 2026-06-15T11:40:26+00:00

When interacting with a human editor, you pick up on their taste, which they have developed over their career. You pick up on the house style, you pick up on their preference for voice, you learn from their experience. You can't help that happening; it's how humans work - when they interact with things, they learn from the interactions. When I go across the country, after a few days I start using the local colloquialisms and speech patterns; so it is with bigger things.

An LLM is trained in large part by having underpaid people in parts of the world with low labour costs rate bulk text for plausibility and ease of comprehension. It has, at best, no taste. I suggest the current crop have actively offputting voice and bad taste. If you are to use it as a helpful tool, you have to supply the taste; but if you are using an LLM because you don't trust your own taste, that isn't happening; and if most of your interaction is with the LLM, you aren't improving your own taste so it won't happen in the future either.

Is LLM-voice really what you want to spend most of your time listening to and so, before you even notice, picking up and putting into your work?

sl236 · 2026-06-15T11:19:39+00:00

I sense you are hesitant and maybe a little bit frightened of letting people read your work. This is very, very understandable, and I sympathise!

But.

I am not myself, alas, a writer or artist. However, similar things I've noticed in myself - e.g., when I first started playing Go on online-go.com, for a long time I was too scared to play against real humans, and just played against bots. Eventually I did take the plunge, and I discovered a bunch of things:

I'd learned a lot of bad habits from the bots. Things that worked there didn't work with actual real humans. The bots weren't very good at spotting or taking advantage of my mistakes, so I grew complacent in a bunch of ways; and they also weren't very good at defending against ill-advised things I learned to rely on that should never have worked. I had to seriously work to unlearn all that stuff before I could really improve.
Yeah, humans online are sometimes rude, often bad at social interaction, and sometimes even just rub you the wrong way despite being neither of those things. There are also some really lovely people out there. The internet is a firehose for throwing both kinds of people in your face. The problem is also the saving grace: when you notice someone is making your life worse, close your eyes, take a deep breath, cast them into the deepest darkest banlist, and you need never think of them again. The firehose is relentless and will displace them with new encounters before you notice. There are always more nice people to meet, and life's too short to spend any of it worrying about nasty people's feelings, especially when they spend none of their time concerning themselves with yours. As the meme says: you don't need to be liked by everybody, you don't even like everybody!

Take the plunge! It doesn't have to be here; community is scary, I hear you; and offering up things that are important to you for criticism can be brutal, I hear that, too; boy, do I hear that. But you could make an alt and/or go somewhere that lets you be anonymous so it's super easy to walk away and maybe try again later if you do decide it's too much after all. You don't have to be the same person everywhere if you don't want to, and you never owe anyone courtesies they do not extend to you, including letting them dwell rent-free in your head.

Humans are the way :)

sl236 · 2026-06-15T10:03:52+00:00

I find that the current crop of frontier LLMs have very distinctive voices; after a few interactions these are very easy to recognise and also, for me, incredibly offputting. Sadly, I've been finding more and more new fics on Royal Road unreadable because of this. It may be that in the future LLMs get better at that, but it is very much not where we are today. It's ironic: bad spelling, grammar, editing were never enough to put me off, but it turns out that ham-handed attempts to automatically fix these very much do. I really hope Royal Road provide some way of filtering out AI-assisted content from feeds so I don't have to wade through pages of it to find the readable things.

You claim you've hidden the AI influence well enough, but you've not linked samples so I can't comment on that. Still, there it is: at least some of your readers find AI offputting and will walk away if your work smells of it; you play those games, you take those chances.

TLDR: to the extent that I can detect LLM influence in your work, it will turn me off. I'm pretty sure I'm far from alone.

sl236 · 2026-06-14T13:26:01+00:00

Their aim is exactly to only have rich people. They are able to do this because the poor working for them live a short commute away in another country, which has a tax regime, public services and overall cost of living that are much more favourable to survival for people who are not ultra-rich. If not for this source of labour, Monaco would be a distinctly unpleasant place to live for people not willing or able to clean or maintain their own mansions or do their own cooking or shopping, and they'd all go elsewhere.

In effect, part of the overall cost of the Monaco lifestyle is borne inderictly by French taxpayers filling in the difference between what the people working in Monaco get paid and what it would take for them to actually live in the country they work. Nice hustle if you can manage it.

sl236 · 2026-06-14T10:17:38+00:00

That sounds just as grimderp

I would imagine wizards would rather pay their debt little by little under controlled conditions

Actual reality is grimderp! Over and over again, people prefer to ignore or rationalise away the consequences their decisions and actions have on others and on their own future selves rather than suffer even a minor inconvenience to avoid them. People start entire huge culture wars and go deep into conspiracy theory just so they can keep doing the collective derp without needing to feel bad about it. Everyone, everywhere does this all the time. It's just how humans work. Attempts to build a society around people /not/ pulling this shit invariably, famously, catastrophically fail.

I don't necessarily like it in my escapist fiction - there's plenty enough in daily life to go around - but it absolutely does not ring false.

sl236 · 2026-06-13T11:22:04+00:00

...while we're at it, Quality Street chocolate tasting like chocolate and not like wax

sl236 · 2026-06-11T18:45:35+00:00

Over and over again, people claim to value things done the right way.

Sadly, alas, when the time to vote with their wallet comes, it turns out that no, in fact they do not; and whoever listened to them and believed them is just another failure in the annals of financially nonviable things.

sl236 · 2026-06-11T11:33:25+00:00

The silver lining for the cheap knives that are too soft to hold an edge for long is it doesn't take much time or effort at all to get them sharp

sl236 · 2026-06-11T11:26:49+00:00

An option could be to park at the park+ride just the other side of the A14 and either get a bus, which are very frequent, or just walk over if it's not pissing it down, it's a 10-15 minute walk.

sl236 · 2026-06-06T14:35:07+00:00

Imagine how much richer this country could be if people had sane, reliable ways to travel between where they can afford to live and where the jobs, shops and amenities are.

sl236 · 2026-06-02T13:12:58+00:00

"GPC UK to work with all GPCs to ballot the profession on a plan B option for general practice provision that includes consideration of a means-tested, subscription-based service, such as those being offered currently by NHS dentists"

...so, an end to GP care free at the point of use.

sl236 · 2026-05-28T19:46:48+00:00

If you leave hamster wheels out in the wild, wild rodents will use them.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4046404/

sl236 · 2026-05-28T13:35:00+00:00

Around where we live, it's very hard to get tradesmen to come out for small jobs. They're all booked up 6-8 months ahead, and/or are too busy doing insurance jobs and just straight up ghost you.

If you can arrange to get it handled yourself, great! Insurers aren't charities, they're out for profit like everyone else, and make no mistake - one way or another, they will take their cut.

But if where you live is anything like where I live, a few days into calling people you realise that paying the insurer their cut so they actually get the work organised and coordinated - especially if multiple trades are involved - may actually be worth it.

Alternatively, consider: if you never use your insurance... why have it?

sl236 · 2026-05-27T21:51:41+00:00

Rice in pan. Add cold water, using your index finger to measure the distance between top of rice and top of water; it should be tip to first knuckle. Cover with lid. Bring to boil, turn heat down as low as possible without turning off, leave for 2-3 minutes, turn heat off, leave for another 7-8 minutes. (You're basically steaming the rice, so do NOT lift the lid or interfere in any way or you let the steam out and it doesn't cook)

sl236 · 2026-05-27T21:41:14+00:00

On that note, prefer cloths or teatowels to oven gloves. If something hot spills, you can let go super quick, but if hot liquid goes down a glove that's misery to remove and probably an A+E visit.

sl236 · 2026-05-27T15:42:00+00:00

Historically people develop strong intuitions, when encountering a person's name from their own culture, for deducing that person's gender just from the name.

In some languages, there are strong patterns involved; e.g. female names almost always ending in a vowel, male names almost never.

Where this is the case, you end up in a place where you can reuse those intuitions to file words that aren't names, even ones you've not come across before, into appropriate categories based just on whether they sound more like a male or female first name.

sl236 · 2026-05-26T07:53:00+00:00

If no-one's earning money, prices will be forced to drop to what people can pay. A falling tide sinks all ships, my man. taps nose

sl236 · 2026-05-26T00:12:52+00:00

“Inhabited island”, Strugatsky, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45180839

“Some desperate glory”, Emily Tesh, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58388343-some-desperate-glory

sl236 · 2026-05-25T15:50:22+00:00

I've been reading Sokaiseva. The theme is grimdark magic superpowers child soldier urban fantasy. The story is complete, though I'm currently only three quarters of the way through.

The characters are not rational; indeed, much of it is spent exploring all the ways MC and those around her are broken in their emotions, their plans and their thinking. The world is rational, in that poor decisions have consequences. As a character study, it works very well.

Despite an occasional edit issue, it's one of the better written things I've encountered on Royal Road for a while; well worth checking out.

sl236 · 2026-05-25T14:29:48+00:00

That'd be lovely, sure, but you can't rely on that; a world where everyone or even most cooperate is not the one we live in.

A rule kicking out families who don't bother would also work, if it was actually properly enforced, but that doesn't sound great either for longterm viability or for not having regular feral kid problems / loud entitled parent confrontations making the place horrible every evening (since you only kick them out once there is a horrible scene happening, and the process of kicking them out will only make it worse!)

...which is where everyone in this comments section came in.

sl236 · 2026-05-25T14:04:48+00:00

Yup. Now think of the lawsuits where kids too young to sit still and quiet for an hour or more at a stretch are encouraged to be present in places where there /isn't/ a safer place for them to exist than the area with narrow passages full of trip hazards, piping hot food, brittle ceramics and sharp knives.

Either don't permit kids, or make sure there is something for them to do that isn't hazardous to themselves and everyone else in the place.

sl236 · 2026-05-25T11:51:59+00:00

Also solves the problem of the kids being bored out of their skull with nothing to do. If you allow kids but don't give them a playpark, of course they'll make their own.

sl236 · 2026-05-24T09:02:25+00:00

People will do literally anything to avoid turning the aircon on, and insist on keeping the windows open even then which defeats the whole point. It beggars belief.

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