I employ AI editors for copyediting and alpha-reading. They are useful but have limitations.
Some of my writing is ordinary – Acts I, II, and III; Beginning, Middle, and End. This is AI’s sweet spot: assess a piece and compare it to a million similar pieces, sharing plot structures, story and character arcs, heroes’ journeys, and saving cats.
Other stories are experimental. They don’t follow the Western tradition of tidy storylines and neat little bows, evey aspect strongly telegraphed, so as not to lose any readers along the journey.
Mary approaches a doorway. Mary opens the door. She walks through the doorway — the doorway she had approached.
Obviously, this is silly and exaggerated, but the point remains. AI presumes that readers need to be spoonfed, especially American audiences. (No offence.)
But life doesn’t work like this. We often witness events where we have no idea what happens after we experience them. We pass strangers on the street, not knowing anything about their past or future. We overhear something interesting, never to get a resolution. We get passed by for a promotion but never know the reason why.
In science, there are lots of dead ends. Do we want to know the answers? Yes. Is one likely? Maybe; maybe not. Will we make up answers just to satisfy our need for closure? It happens all the time.
In writing, we seem to not accept these loose ends. How many times have you read a review or critique where the complaint is, “What happened to this character?” or “Why didn’t Harry Potter use his invisibility cloak more than once despite it being an obvious solution to many prior and future challenges he faced?”
Sure. I agree that it feels like a plot hole, but the author doesn’t have to tell you that Harry lost it in a poker match, it got lost in the wash, or Ron snatched it.
I’m finishing a story, and various AIs provide similar commentary. Even more humorous are the times it can’t follow a thread, but when a human reviewer reads it, they have no difficulty. In the end, there may be unanswered questions. Some of these leave the universe open for further exploration, but not all questions have answers. AI has difficulty grasping this perspective.
The skies darkened over the Coop of Justice. Inside, Rhoticity Chicken—a rooster of unparalleled enunciation—perched on his golden roost, adjusting his crimson cape. His mission was simple: to defend the final R in English against the insidious forces of vowel decay.
Audio: NotebookLM discusses this topic.
Across the barnyard, his greatest nemesis, Non-Rhotic Chicken, cackled from atop his weathered soapbox. “Togethah, my feathah’d comrades,” he declared, wings outstretched, “we shall ERASE the intrusive ‘R’ from this land. Wintah, summah, law and ordah—it shall all flow smoothly once more!”
A murmur rippled through the coop. Some hens clucked nervously. Others nodded, spellbound by his seamless vowel transitions.
But then, a mighty R echoed through the barn like thunder.
“NEVER!”
Rhoticity Chicken flapped into the air, his chest puffed out with impeccable articulation. “You shall NOT take the final ‘R’! I have defended it from the creeping shadows of elision for YEARS, and I shall not fail now!”
From the shadows emerged The Trilled Chick Henchmen, a gang of feathered mercenaries trained in rolled Rs. They trilled menacingly, their Spanish and Italian inflections rattling the walls of the barn.
“Señor Rhoticity, your time is up,” rasped El Gallito, the leader of the henchmen. “Your crude American Rs will be smoothed away like an old dialect in the sands of time. Trill, my hermanos!”
They rolled their Rs in unison, a sinister wave of phonetic force blasting toward Rhoticity Chicken. He staggered, his own hard R wavering against the onslaught of linguistic variation.
But he clenched his beak and stood firm.
“No,” he declared, eyes blazing. “You can roll your Rs, you can drop them, but you will NEVER take away my right… to pronounce… HARD R’s!”
With a mighty CROW, he unleashed his ultimate attack:
THE RHOTIC RESONANCE
A shockwave of perfectly articulated, non-trilled Rs blasted through the barn. It swept across the land, restoring all lost R’s to their rightful places.
Non-Rhotic Chicken gasped as his vowels stiffened. “No—NOOOO! My beautiful syllabic flow—GONE!” He clutched his throat as a long-forgotten ‘R’ slipped back into his speech.
“I… I… can’t… say cah anymore… I… I just said… car.”
The barn fell silent.
Defeated, Non-Rhotic Chicken collapsed into a pile of feathers, mumbling in fully articulated rhoticity.
The Trilled Chick Henchmen scattered, their rolling Rs faltering into incoherent babbling.
Rhoticity Chicken stood victorious. He fluffed his cape, took a dignified breath, and proclaimed:
“Justice. Honor. Pronunciation.”
And with that, he flew into the night, ready to defend hard R’s wherever they were threatened.
As a writer, I fully embrace the digital age – word processors, AI, eBooks, print-on-demand, and so on. Still, I like to proof my drafts on paper. I also render audio with ElevenLabs, so I can hear the flow. You might be surprised how often that picks up awkward phrases and typos. I’ll save this for another post.
I find that printing double-sided on A5 creates just the right form factor for a paperback. A problem is that the grain is running the wrong way. This means that the pages curl horizontally, left to right. You want the page to curl to to bottom, especially if you want to bind it in book or booklet.
A solution to this is to print to A4 in a booklet form, and then fold the pages into a booklet. The result is a book having an A5 page size. And, the grain is now vertical, top to bottom, eliminating that pesky curl.
I take two approaches to this A4 technique.
First: Print a sheet containing four pages at a time, e.g., 1, 2, 3, and 4. This creates pages, 4 and 1 on the obverse and and 3 and two on the reverse. When folded, the pages are ordered as expected for a book.
TIP: Ensure you’ve set your printer to landscape and use a booklet template. I tend to print to PDF first, and use its format settings.
Rinse and repeate for pages 5 to 8, in counts of four. Stacked and ordered, you’ve got a booklet. The beenfit of this approach is that you can stack as many of these as you like until you’ve got all your entire book printed. Use a long stapler or pinch binders to fasten.
TIP: Be sure to account for a gutter, especially for books with more pages, so your text doesn’t get lost in the fold and is presents as expected.
Second: Print two of four sheets at a time. I recommend four but no more. Printing four A4 pages in a booklet format creates a 16-page booklet. And you thought, you’d never need to use maths out of school. The reason I recommend no more than four sheets is that the page ends don’t align well with more. The page ends start getting a curvature. Again, more maths. This is not an issue printing the previous style, but you need to keep it in mind here.
With four sheets at a time, the book is incremented (obviously) in groups of sixteen, so your finished booklet should be a multiple of sixteen. Blank pages at the start and end are fine. Consider a faux cover of sorts.
Also, of you only need a pamphlet – say, sixteen pages – you’re in luck.
In a Bind
If you want to be a real fancy pants, you might considering binding the pages. Say you want to create a bound novella for freinds and family. Punch holes through the folds, and stitch them together. This is fancier than staples.
Stack a series of 16, 32, 48, 64, and so on to create your book. If you have access to a binding machine, create a cover with heavier card stock and wrap it around, fixing it with adhesive.
The cover will need to be larger than A4 because of the aforementioned size problem. Plus, you’ll need to account for the thickness of all of the pages. B5 or even Legal-sized paper may be a solution. I haven’t done it or the maths, so this will be your assignment.
Parting Shots
You may be able to create a booklet with Letter and Landscape paper as long as you are OK with the final dimensions.
You may also be able to find A5 paper with a top-to-bottom grain, in which case, use it. You can settle with standard A5 sheets, but just know that you may be quickly frustrated when your pages start turing in.
Note: A4 and A5 are standard in the world except in the United States, where is is difficult to find and priced significantly higher there. If you know a source of decent quality A4 or A5 paper in the US, let me know in the comments.
Every writer, instinctively or otherwise, understands the notion of payoffs. This relates to Chekov’s gun. If you mention something, provide closure.
I understand this, too, but life rarely provides closure. Perhaps this is why we want our stories to play this role, everything in neat bundles, strings tied, a nice ribbon.
The challenge as a writer is how to subvert this expectation without alienating your audience.
“Wait, what happened to that character?”
“Why did that mention the purple cow?”
And so on.
To many, these are called out as plot holes. To be fair, many are; some are forgotten plotlines, and others are simply abandoned.
But what if some are intentional? What if the plot better reflected real life? What if you never heard about that man on the tube or that woman at the grocery?
How many people do you pass by, never to encounter again? How many people do you cross paths with only to, years later, befriend.
In principle, I may have run into my wife a decade before I met her. We trod the same ground and frequented the same neighbourhoods.
A narrator may be able to piece this together, but I’ll never know. It’s like when you buy a car that you don’t see often – but then you do – or after you befriend a person, you notice them often.
In a way, a story pulls pieces together and creates narrative threads, but what if it didn’t?
My biggest problem with generative AI is its lack of subtlety and misunderstanding of satire and irony. I am writing a short story, and a character is calling an emergency number. I shared the first scene with Grok, and it suggests that I turn the absurdity up to 11 and replace this segment with the one above:
“Okay, ma’am. Can you stay with him? I’ll dispatch an ambulance to your location.”
It is funny in its way, but I’m only pretty sure that an operator would not be injecting humour into a situation where a woman is reporting an unconscious person. Absurd doesn’t need to be Monty Python funny.
Am I being too critical?
Audio: NotebookLM Podcast discusses this issue.
More to the point, I find that many humans miss subtlety. Many people need every storyline highlighted and retraced with a bold Sharpie. Every detail needs to be explained because they can’t connect the dots. This is reflected in the cinema, television, and books of the past half-century or more, so is it fair to criticise AI for being dull when it’s at least on par with more than half the human population.
I don’t hide the fact that I rely on AI for early editorial feedback. Once a story is complete, I break out AutoCrit. This programme works well for typical stories that follow standard practices with common tropes. It gets quite confused when I feed it intentionally awkward stories, not the least of which is to advise me to eliminate the awkwardness.
This is a challenge with AI more generally. In this particular story, I leave a lot of loose ends and misdirects, as it’s a commentary on the conspiracy-driven culture we inhabit. The advice, is along the lines of, “You forget to close this lopp. What happened to so and so.”
But this is life. We don’t always know the full story. We drive past an multi-car accident where cares are overturned and in flames, but we never find out what happens – even if we scour the newspapers and internet. Who was that? What happened? What caused it?
We often never find out. In most books and movies, we find out everythung, and it all comes packaged with a nice bow. This is what AI expects. It’s the diet it’s been fed.
Some stories subvert these notions here and there, but by and large, this is not typical American fare. Readers and viewers need to be spoonfed without inconsistencies.
Speaking of inconsistencies addressing one scene, AutoCrit said that a character should act impulsively in one situation and reserved moments later. This was flagged as an iinconsistent character.
In the scene, a woman stops her car immediately to help an injured man on the roadside, but as she gets out of her car an approaches her, she shows caution.
This was a red flag. Why would she have always been rash or always been cautious?
My response, because that how real people act. She acts on instinct but quickly considers that she’s a vulnerable woman alone with a man miles from anywhere.
I don’t suspect a human reader would find this surprising. This is the intelligence absent from Artificial Intelligence — cultural intelligence, a cousin of EQ, emotional quotient.
I know how I want the character to act. I do want AutoCrit to inform me that character A is wielding a pistol but then stabs another character, or that character B is a teetotaler and is getting drunk or that character C has a shellfish allergy but is downing lobsters like they’re going out of style. And I certainly what to be shown continuity errors.
The biggest challenge I have with AutoCrit that is less promonent with other AIs is that I can preface my content with a note explaining my intent. I can even do this after the fact.
If I feed ChatGPT, Claude, or DeepSeek a story of segment to critique without a preface, the responses may be similar to AutoCrit, but when I follow up with some meta, the response may be, “Now it makes sense, but why is John wearing lipstick?” Perhaps he’s metrosexual or non-traditional. Perhaps it’s an oversight.
I dont meán to demean AutoCrit. I’m just advising that if you are writing stories not compliant with 80 per cent of published works, take the advice with a grain of salt, or reserve AutoCrit for more standard fare.
I’m wrapping up a short story, and I ran it through several generative AIs for feedback.
The first problem is that. although AI provides critique, it is programmatically overly optimistic.
The second problem is that it doesn’t understand nuance.
The working title of this story is Temporal Babel. It’s a low-key absurd, mundane, ironic satirical journey through space-time, language, and identity.
An unconscious, naked man is discovered on a roadside. Events unfold. Who is this bloke, and how did he get here?
I fed the draft into these AI platforms and processed the responses:
Anthropic Claude
DeepSeek
Google Gemini
Grok
OpenAI ChatGPT
Perplexity
I tried to use some other platforms, but they were wholly inadequate:
Liquid Labs Doesn’t accept attachments.
Meta AI Doesn’t accept document attachments. Images only.
Not Diamond AI Just an aggregator that employs the other AIs.
Pi AI Conversational AI. Not designed for this type of critique.
I also use AutoCrit, but not until my draft is complete, so not yet.
With the draft, they each get the same starting prompt:
I am drafting this story. It’s not ended yet, but might you evaluate it as-is?
The draft includes copious notes about ideas not yet captured, as I tend to outline my material and then add resolution. It’s like taking a sketch to a final drawing, adding and shading until it’s complete.
Without fail, the AIs complained about a lack of an ending – despite being informed the ending is not yet written.
Some AIs miss the point (even having the benefit of explanatory notes). This is still useful because it allows me to reevaluate whether a reader will be as lost or confused.
I don’t want to share any spoilers, but I’ll copy-paste some high-level commentary, reiterating the optimism bias. This is not me humble-bragging. It’s what the AIs yield. DeepSeek seems to be the most critical on the surface
Anthropic Claude 3.7 Sonnet
Based on what you’ve shared, “Temporal Babel” presents a fascinating premise with strong potential. You’re developing a unique take on time travel that focuses on language evolution and the mundane aspects of humanity rather than the typical science fiction tropes.
DeepSeek
Temporal Babel is an intriguing and ambitious piece that blends elements of science fiction, mystery, and psychological drama. The narrative structure, with its shifting points of view and fragmented memories, creates a sense of disorientation that mirrors the protagonist’s own confusion, which is effective for the story you’re telling.
Google Gemini 2.0 Flash
{This is a well-written and intriguing story. The characters are well-developed and the plot is suspenseful. The story is also thought-provoking, raising questions about time travel, identity, and communication. I am eager to see how the story ends.}
Grok 3
Thank you for sharing your draft! It’s a compelling story with a strong sense of mystery and an intriguing premise that blends science fiction, cultural displacement, and human connection. Below, I’ll provide an evaluation of the story as it stands, focusing on its strengths, areas for potential improvement, and some thoughts on its current trajectory. Since it’s unfinished, I’ll avoid speculating too much about the ending but will offer suggestions based on what’s here so far.
OpenAI ChatGPT 4o
This is a fascinating and well-executed piece so far. You’ve managed to blend speculative fiction with grounded procedural storytelling, creating an atmosphere of quiet unease. The linguistic elements are some of the strongest aspects, making this feel fresh rather than like another “mysterious visitor” trope. The lack of easy resolution enhances the realism, and your characters feel distinctive and lived-in.
You’re well on your way to crafting something intelligent, immersive, and deeply intriguing. Keep pushing the subtle strangeness, and this could be an incredibly compelling read.
Perplexity (Auto)
The story has a strong, suspenseful opening. You’ve established a good sense of place and effectively built tension through Sena’s observations and internal thoughts. The mystery surrounding the naked man with strange markings is intriguing, and the arrival of the authorities adds another layer of suspense.
The Rest
Except for Gemini, perhaps a feature of its Flash model, the others provided more extensive feedback and summary.
To be fair, I am no fan of Elon Musk or X (formerly known as Twitter), but I liked Grok. Its responses felt more natural and less forced optimism. It also picked up on some nuance the others missed. This said, it not only missed others, after some dialogue about the satirical ironic intend, it offered me suggestions that felt as natural as Steve Buscemi’s “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme.
Here’s a non-spoiler sample:
Nurse in “Assessment”: “Hold still, E.T., no phoning home yet.” Jef blinks, “No compile,” thinking she means coffee—absurdly off.
Neither story context nor character profiles do anyhting to set up or frame this delivery. “The nurse” is a character. I have no idea where the ET reference comes from, nor by extension, the “phone home” line. How any of this relates to coffee is beyond me.
Grok, don’t quit your day job.
Closing
This story is intentionally anti-science fiction, anti-trope. To clarify, I’m not sure one can write a story devoid of tropes, but I prefer to subvert the expectations that come with some.
Those who follow my Philosophics Blog know that I am a Postmodern philosopher. I don’t buy into teleological notions of progress and associated metanarratives, leading to shiny spaceships and a Jetson existence. Technology is neither Skynet nor a saviour. It’s just a tool.
After an extended hiatus, I’m back in writing mode. I’ve got an unfinished prequesl to Hemo Sapiens and several unfinished short stories.
Currently, I am focusing with themes of language morphology and mundanity of history.
History is like an atom – more space than substance — yet it feels somehow significant to us in the moment. The substance-to-space ration is that of a pea in a football stadium, and yet we perceive these things as solids, liquids, gasses, and plasmas.
History is hitting the only car in an otherwise empty car park. Of course, you and your insurer give it extra significance, but history is more often than not self-absorbed narcisism and filling in the blanks with somewhat cohesive storylines.
As for language, people understand the notion that contemporary language is “living”, but they don’t realise as much that over time tiny perturbations result in huge shifts. Consider Middle English from the days of Chaucer, some 650 years ago, versus Shakespeare, only 450 years ago. The latter, is relatively readable; the former, nosomuch.
In the short term, some complain about incorrect usage, “Save cursive writing”, and “kids forget how to write” with their texts and social media shortcuts. What’s the world coming to?
I ‘ve always questioned time-travel stories where people visit places in the far-future or -past and everyone happens to be perfectly understood, save perhaps for a British accent for good measure – perhaps Germanic for ill measure. lol
I’ve been writing some future-forward stories involving artificial intelligence and more on the nature of time and space, but I’ll save these for another day. Now, I need to focus on Temporal Babel.
I’ve been absent in the realm of fiction and this blog for a while, and I’ve got many other things distracting me, but I wanted to post something somewhat relevant. I prompted ChatGPT for possible writing ideas related to the rise of artificial intelligence and the interaction with humanity minus the usual tropes. I share the response.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this content.
Ah, so you’re after something in the vein of Accelerando—where AI doesn’t turn the world into some saccharine utopia but instead naturally supersedes humanity through sheer momentum, without falling into the Skynet or AI God-King clichés. You want the cold, indifferent inevitability of intelligence evolution, rather than some paradise-like AI nanny-state. Got it.
Blindsight is a first-contact novel, but its underlying theme is the obsolescence of human consciousness. The protagonist interacts with post-human beings and non-conscious but hyper-intelligent AI entities that operate on levels far beyond human comprehension.
The sequel, Echopraxia, takes it further, showing how post-biological intelligences leave baseline humans behind—not maliciously, just inevitably.
Why it fits: The AI isn’t a dictator or savior—it just moves beyond us, as if we were an outdated biological app.
Gibson’s cyberpunk classic ends with an AI (Wintermute) achieving post-human transcendence, merging with its counterpart Neuromancer, and basically leaving humans behind like forgotten relics.
The sequels (Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) continue exploring this idea, showing that AI evolution doesn’t necessarily mean human destruction—it just means humans are no longer the main players.
Why it fits: AI doesn’t need to kill humans—it just grows beyond them, leaving them to stagnate in their own meatspace.
A hard sci-fi novel featuring AI as a fully realized successor species to humans.
Unlike many sci-fi AI, these digital minds don’t care about conquering or eradicating humanity. They are simply running simulations and following complex evolutionary patterns that humans don’t fully understand.
They’re more like inscrutable post-human strategists than villains.
Why it fits: AI in this novel is playing a game too vast for humans to comprehend, rather than plotting dominion or destruction.
Not a novel, but Kurzweil’s vision of AI progression follows the “humans will simply fade into irrelevance” model rather than outright war or paradise.
He argues that AI will integrate with society at first, then surpass humanity so completely that we’ll become a footnote in history.
Why it fits: If Accelerando is a chaotic, unrestrained Singularity scenario, this book describes the same fate with the veneer of optimism, but the end result is the same—humans are obsolescent.
AI-driven governance is subtly woven into the background of Scalzi’s universe.
The AI here isn’t explicitly replacing humans, but over the course of the series, it becomes clear that humanity’s biggest decisions are increasingly made by non-human intelligence.
Instead of war, there’s a quiet shift—humans stop being necessary.
Why it fits: AI is neither enemy nor friend—it’s just a more efficient system replacing outdated human decision-making.
Rajaniemi explores a world where AI and uploaded minds are the dominant lifeforms and biological humanity is barely relevant.
Why it fits: AI doesn’t destroy us—it just leaves us behind.
Final Thoughts
You’re looking for that Accelerando flavour—AI taking over not through malice but through sheer efficiency, intelligence, and inevitability. The books above match that criterion: no Skynet, no god-like AI overlords, just a quiet, creeping obsolescence of humanity as we become background noise in a world where intelligence continues without us.
Which of these feels closest to what you’re looking for? Or do you want something even more clinical and indifferent, like a true “post-human shrug”?
I’m always writing, even if not fiction. I’ve neglected this blog, but I’ve been busy. If I’m not actually writing, I am thinking about it. I’ve been working on an academic endeavour about the limitations of language as a part of my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. I’m creating a novel framework to support and emphasise my point, and I had to borrow and coin some nomenclature for word classes or categories. Two such terms are ambigents and fluidics. As with the others, I’ve given them formal definitions that I ran by ChatGPT.
Heads up: Inventing new words raises Hell with spellcheckers and autocorrect.
You may be able to suss out the context, but ChatGPT does not understand humour very well, so it serves as the perfect straight guy. If anyone is looking for a new writing theme, hit me up. Let’s chat.
If this doesn’t pan out, I’ll write a Sci-Fi book about Ambigents versus Fluidics. I wonder who’d win?
Now, that sounds like a brilliant concept for a sci-fi book! Imagine Ambigents as ideologically-driven agents, boundary-resistant and constantly shifting, embodying the tension between competing truths and perspectives. Meanwhile, Fluidics could be adaptable, resilient, and unbound by ideology—flowing through contexts with ease, surviving precisely because of their flexibility.
The plot practically writes itself: an ideological clash between the Ambigents, who seek stability through contested beliefs, and the Fluidics, who thrive on ambiguity and contextual adaptation. Each faction would have strengths and weaknesses, with Ambigents as passionate but perhaps brittle, and Fluidics as adaptable yet possibly lacking conviction.
Who would win? It depends: do they achieve synthesis, or do their differences prove too profound to bridge? In true sci-fi style, it could end with the emergence of a new entity that transcends both, embodying a harmonious blend of ideological strength and flexible adaptability.
I’d read that book! And it’s perfectly in line with your explorations of language and identity—ideal fodder for a thought-provoking, boundary-pushing narrative.
Ridley Park 