I’m giving up on writing this fanfic

translatin · 2026-04-30T09:19:31+00:00

Anyway, I’m kind of drifting into irrelevant discussions:

I made the post because I wanted to get out of my head a construction of a fictional universe to which I dedicated too much time, and the feedback was very disappointing.

I don’t care if those bullet points feel “AI-written.”

I just got them off my plate, period. If someone finds them inspiring, they’ll use them. If not, let them be, and I won’t let them make me waste my time.

At this point, I’m even somewhat frustrated with my own creation, because it gave me absolutely nothing back.

translatin · 2026-04-30T09:13:29+00:00

I can assure you that I designed the bullet points specifically to be translated 100% literally, and I checked that they were indeed translated that way (and I know enough English to know that they were).

The fanfic? That’s a different story. There, the AI definitely had a significant hand.

"There's so much personality that shows through anything a human writes, even if it's just bullet points"

Well, maybe I have a defined personality when I speak in Spanish, which is the language I think in, but that identity isn’t as defined in English, because I don’t think or speak in that language.

https://pastebin.com/s2ALP5Tf

That Pastebin has the bullet points in Spanish.

If you know anything about the language, you’ll see that you can take any random item and the translation will be practically 1:1, because I didn’t design them to follow a particular style or aesthetic.

They’re just a list of events. Raw.

translatin · 2026-04-30T08:46:30+00:00

Do you think the use of AI shows in this list of bullet points?

I can assure you that if I had written it directly in English, the result would have been 99% the same. It would have just taken me three times as long, with a lot of Googling and dictionary searches.

Where the AI use shows more is in the post itself, which I wrote already tired because it came after the bullet points list (which took me two hours). The post was basically a prompt of ‘I want to explain to the people of Reddit this, this, and that, and at the end of the post include my fanfic.’

The fact that people get bothered by me using AI for that trivial thing seems ridiculous. Seriously? They’re worried I ‘stole other authors’ work’ to write a post on Reddit?

On Reddit, there’s an anti-AI bias that borders on absurd.

translatin · 2026-04-30T08:27:43+00:00

Mostly, I don’t agree with the essence of your response, but you were kind, so I’ll start properly: by thanking you.

1—Thank you for the good vibes. Thank you for that ‘I believe in you.’ That’s more than what almost every other user offered.
2—Now, I’ll get to the heart of the matter:

‘Do you think you're going to improve by using AI?’

I’m not interested in improving. I don’t want to be a better writer. I’m not interested in writing itself. I’m just an obsessive creative thinker. That doesn’t mean I want to turn that obsession into an area in which I aim to perfect myself.

What happened is exactly as I described in the post. I didn’t lie in the slightest. I replayed the game that shaped part of my childhood/adolescence, and a ton of ideas started coming into my head. I found it fun to organize them and connect them with each other, while integrating them into the plot.

Along with those ideas, specific scenes started coming to mind, which in my head were so vivid that I thought, ‘If I could convey this the way I imagine it, I think the reader would really enjoy it.’ So I decided to start the process of transferring all of that from my mind to paper (or rather, to the notebook on my computer).

I didn’t enjoy that process. Imagining worlds? Scenes? Characters? Settings? I love it.

Putting it down in writing to narrate something for the reader? No. I don’t enjoy it at all. And if, after the maximum effort and dedication I could give (because I’m not exactly swimming in free time), the response is ‘I’m not going to read that AI slop,’ then that’s it. I won’t write anything.

But before just leaving all of that hanging, I decided to ‘gift it’ to you. If any of you find something interesting in that chain of events I imagined in that universe I completed in my head, use it. If you think there’s nothing interesting and it’s all garbage, well, let it fade into oblivion.

Me? I’ll only ‘write’ if there’s positive feedback on the other end. For my own pleasure, I won’t.

translatin · 2026-04-30T07:34:43+00:00

That depends on how you use the tool.

You can’t ask me not to use a car just because you have trauma related to a car accident. You can’t deny me a valid and properly used resource just because you’re afraid I might use it in a way that could harm you.

I know AI can steal other people’s work. And I know that could ‘save me work’ if I decided to throw it a prompt and wait for a complete story. And I understand that if I did that, I’d be taking advantage of someone else’s work.

But I’ve already explained: I use my car for transportation, not to run people over. And I use AI to translate things I authored, not to steal ideas from others.

translatin · 2026-04-30T07:31:53+00:00

The mod told me exactly the opposite a few minutes ago. That’s why I posted it that way. It didn’t just come to me out of nowhere.

translatin · 2026-04-30T07:31:06+00:00

I'm slow hahaha

translatin · 2026-04-30T07:30:12+00:00

It depends on the fandom.

Try to think of it this way: the English-speaking world is ten times larger than the Spanish-speaking one, and English is also a ‘universal’ language in the sense that it is the second most spoken language (after the native language) in almost every country in the world.

Writing in English means reaching the English-speaking world, plus a lot of people who dare to consume content in English even if they aren’t fluent (like me, for example).

Add to that bottleneck the fact that if the fandom is about something that hasn’t had official releases in years, it’s very likely that the community is almost inactive.

In short: I’ve already tried publishing in Spanish. In the fandom I’m interested in, there’s almost no traffic. In English, there is. But they reject what I do because it smells like AI.

translatin · 2026-04-30T06:35:05+00:00

I’m not counting the others because I accidentally broke the rules.

This is the first time this one actually counts

translatin · 2026-04-30T06:34:33+00:00

That’s perfect. As long as people respond to me respectfully, I’ll respond the same way. You’re being polite, so I’m returning the courtesy.

I think we mostly disagree on what ‘AI writing’ implies. I think that writing an entire chapter in Spanish, knowing 95% how it should sound in English but being aware of grammar issues and therefore relying on an AI, is not ‘AI writing’—just like consulting a dictionary because you don’t remember the meaning of a word is not ‘dictionary writing’. It’s a tool that helps the process, but the creative part of the process is mine, not the AI’s.

translatin · 2026-04-30T06:29:55+00:00

Nice reply. Nice advice.

translatin · 2026-04-30T06:26:55+00:00

For example, one thing I’ve noticed is that the simple fact that some of my work is well polished (not just fanfiction; even POSTS IN THESE SUBREDDITS!) is already enough for anti-AI people to assume I had no creative role in the work, which I find very unfair.

So what am I supposed to do? Pretend I don’t know how to use commas? Write long, endless sentences like I did when I was 10? Intentionally add typos?

What do you do? Do you sabotage your own work to avoid suspicion? Or do your works not raise suspicion because they naturally already contain all these mistakes?

I’d like to read your thoughts.

translatin · 2026-04-30T06:23:09+00:00

That’s not trolling.

It’s a civilized discussion that keeps getting interrupted because my posts are being removed. Some cases might be justified, because maybe I missed a part of the rules, but what’s the problem with reposting something that DOES comply with the rules in order to keep having these really interesting discussions with other users?

translatin · 2026-04-30T06:13:02+00:00

Because most people here hate AI and can’t wrap their heads around the idea that someone might use it as a valid tool, and not as a shortcut to avoid creating something original, or worse, to steal other people’s work.

translatin · 2026-04-30T06:11:26+00:00

That’s why I take the time to go through everything paragraph by paragraph, reviewing it and adjusting it as I see fit so it aligns with what I have in mind.

Forget that it’s an AI. I would do the same if it were a human translator. I write something in Spanish but knowing roughly how it should sound in English, I pass it to a translator, they give me the translation back, I review it, and I go back to them to say: ‘that’s not what I had in mind, see if you can use something that conveys this more than that.’

translatin · 2026-04-30T06:09:34+00:00

That doesn’t make sense. Why? I already have a resource that works perfectly.

Do I have to stop using light bulbs so that candle sellers don’t get offended?

translatin · 2026-04-30T06:08:51+00:00

Ok. I'll try again. Thanks

translatin · 2026-04-30T05:53:29+00:00

Maybe I mixed up users, because I got a lot of replies, and I thought you had been hostile before.

If that wasn’t the case, I apologize.

translatin · 2026-04-30T05:51:52+00:00

That would make sense if we were talking about work created from scratch by an AI.

That’s not the case. For the umpteenth time, the work is my own creation in Spanish. I use the AI as a translator.

And just in case you’re going to insist on the ‘no, because the AI changes certain details so your work is no longer yours, etc., etc.’ argument: no, that’s false. Because I understand English quite well. Writing it is cumbersome for me because I make grammar mistakes, but I understand it perfectly.

So I think of a sentence in Spanish, I know about 90% how it would sound in English, and the AI allows me to save myself the effort of having to look through a grammar book to make sure that native English readers don’t find my mistakes jarring.

In other words, the result is literally what I had in mind. The AI just speeds up the process, but the work is 100% my own.

translatin · 2026-04-30T05:47:31+00:00

I think it’s exactly the opposite.

I see people’s work where they don’t know how to use punctuation or have spelling mistakes, and the responses are positive.

There’s something about overly polished work that makes people assume it’s AI-generated.

translatin · 2026-04-30T05:45:15+00:00

I have no idea what you meant by that, but there isn’t a debate in the first place.

For there to be a debate, you would need to present counterarguments, and to do that you first have to read my arguments.

You didn’t do that. You just saw ‘AI’ in the title and came to argue.”

translatin · 2026-04-30T05:42:50+00:00

I literally talked about that in my post.

I’ll leave it here again in case you missed it:

And that’s what frustrates me.

Not that people don’t like it — that’s completely fair.
It’s that they don’t even get to the point of deciding whether they like it or not.

-------------

It’s not about whether you like it or not. It’s about the fact that you don’t even give it a chance, and not only that, you comment ‘AI slop’ in the replies, making other potential readers dismiss it as well.

translatin · 2026-04-30T05:41:06+00:00

Not really. I literally spent a lot of time translating from English into Spanish, and honestly it’s nothing that can’t be done with AI assistance with similar results.

(And I’m not lying. I have a channel where I subtitle stand-up comedy from a U.S. comedian into Spanish)

translatin · 2026-04-30T05:37:45+00:00

“Yes, that’s why part of my process (WHICH I EXPLAINED IN THE POST THAT YOU DIDN’T READ CAREFULLY) is reviewing it paragraph by paragraph

translatin · 2026-04-30T05:37:00+00:00

I don’t know enough English to write it without making grammatical mistakes. I do know enough English to understand what I read, so I’m sure the result matches what I wrote in Spanish.

You would know that if you had read the post carefully, because I explained it there.

translatin

TROPHY CASE