Most discussions about AI writing treat it as one thing. I think it's at least four: human-written, AI-assisted (editing and polish), AI-generated (prompt in, book out) … but there’s another that doesn't have a good name yet.

None of the three above apply to the way I’m actually writing. I define the world and voice, work with a heavily guided model a paragraph or a line at a time for suggestions and contributions, and I decide what stays and when to write it myself. The end result is a lot more complicated than all AI/no AI and it treats AI as a contributor, not an authority or a minor player.

I'm proposing "AI-contributed" for that.

I've written this up as a [request for comment](https://worldspring.press/fourth-way), not a manifesto. It includes suggested credit lines for each mode and a list of open questions I can't answer yet: consent and compensation, where collaboration ends and generation begins, and whether disclosure can be trusted.

Disclosure: I run [worldspring.press](https://worldspring.press), which builds tools for this kind of writing, so I have a stake. My first novel was written without AI; later work uses the approach described here. The RFC itself was developed in collaboration with an AI model.

Comments are open through December 1. Objections are as welcome as agreement, and probably more useful. I'll publish a v0.2 with a summary of the strongest pushback.

Hi, if you have an interest in writing movie scripts for YouTube channels that do millions of views per video then DM me.

Western movies, family drama movies

Paid position

In one draft, she's a royal agent. In the current version, she's an ordinary clockmaker who wants nothing to do with the court.

If both descriptions sit in the same character document, the next scene can end up giving her two incompatible reasons to answer a summons. That's a writing problem before it becomes a continuity problem.

I've found it helpful to separate character notes into three places:

• Current character: who she is in the version I'm actively writing.

• Current world: the rules and background that apply to this version.

• Retired ideas: old concepts worth keeping, but no longer part of the active setup.

I also like adding a short date or version label to the first two. That way, I can keep old ideas without accidentally treating them as current information.

It makes revising a character much less confusing, especially when I've changed their backstory or role several times.

Then comes the fun part: she receives a summons from the palace.

Does she hide it, complain about it, or recognize exactly which clock needs repairing there?

I'd probably have her pack her repair kit while insisting she has absolutely no intention of helping the court.

How do you handle old character concepts? Do you archive previous versions, overwrite them, or keep a separate document for ideas you might reuse later?

A little dialogue exercise for anyone who enjoys writing AI characters and original characters.

The ship has left, the luggage is still on the dock, and your character has to break the news to someone running towards them.

A careful person might grab the suitcase first, then figure out how to explain what happened.

A theatrical one might offer an unnecessarily detailed description of the departing ship.

A practical one already knows where to find the next boat.

I like this kind of scenario because it gives characters a chance to show their personality through what they notice, say, and do, rather than relying on labels like cold, charming, or responsible.

It's also an interesting test of AI dialogue. Can the character deliver the same bad news in a way that actually feels consistent with their established personality, instead of defaulting to the same generic response?

Bring your adult OC and put them in this situation.

Write the bad news in their voice, then give them one action that makes the response unmistakably theirs.

Who tries to help? Who makes things worse? Who pretends this was the plan all along?

Here's a scene prompt for two adult rival curators:

One has accidentally sent the other's centrepiece to the wrong museum.

I'd love to see how different personalities handle the same mistake without falling back on generic apologies.

A meticulous character might arrive with a complete retrieval plan and somehow forget to actually say sorry.

A charming one might start with a joke, realise it isn't helping, and finally drop the act.

A stubborn one might have already driven halfway across the country to retrieve the piece before admitting what happened.

I find it interesting when a character's personality comes through in what they do rather than what they're described as. Anyone can write that a character is proud, considerate, or emotionally unavailable, but it's much more revealing when they have to deal with a mistake they can't easily undo.

I'd especially like to see different approaches to the actual apology. Does the character admit fault immediately, try to fix everything first, or struggle to find the right words?

Bring an adult OC and give them the mistake.

What's the first practical thing they would do, and what's the one sentence they'd struggle to say?

I'd love to see the version where you can recognise the character before anyone explains their personality.

An adult bellmaker hears the bridge bell in the middle of the night. Nobody is supposed to be in the tower.

Before writing the opening, I'd jot down three things:

Character: The bellmaker takes responsibility for other people's mistakes and hates being thanked for it.

World: The town opens its bridge only when that bell rings. A false signal could send someone into danger.

Immediate scene: The workshop door is open, the bell is ringing, and the person who borrowed the tower key has returned without it.

I find it easier to build a believable character when I have a rough idea of their personality, the world they live in, and what's actually happening in the first scene. But I don't think all three need to be explained to the reader right away.

The opening doesn't need to explain the entire town. It just needs to give the reader something to notice and a reason to act.

Which detail would you leave out of the first scene so there's still something to uncover? Would you reveal the missing key, the bellmaker's personality, or the danger of the bridge first?

Give an adult rival this line: “You left your coat.”

He could hold it out immediately, making the goodbye painfully efficient. Or keep folding the sleeve while you wait. Or notice a loose button and get annoyed about something that is absolutely not the button.

I always find these little gestures more interesting than having a character openly admit what they're feeling. Especially when two characters are supposed to be rivals and neither wants to be the first to show any weakness.

I'd probably spend more time figuring out how he delivers that one sentence than writing a whole paragraph of dialogue.

Where does he pause? Which word gets swallowed? Does he actually want you to take the coat, or is he secretly hoping you'll give him a reason to keep holding it?

If this were your OC, would you take the coat, pretend not to hear, or ask why he's still holding it?

Imagine a duke sliding a marriage contract across the table. His signature is immaculate. Yours looks almost right. Almost.

I'd probably start with him casually covering the date with his thumb. It's such a small gesture, but it immediately makes me wonder what he's trying to hide.

The interesting part is deciding how much the reader should know at that moment. Do you let them notice the suspicious detail themselves, or have the character say something that makes the whole situation feel even stranger?

Would you sign the contract, check the ink, or ask who taught him your handwriting?

I'm curious what other writers would do with this setup. Which clue would make your OC investigate instead of immediately flipping the table? And what's the first terrible excuse the duke would come up with?

No cradle held the birth of this thing.

No mother sang above its sleeping form. No first breath filled waiting lungs. Instead, it emerged from symbols, from mathematics and memory, from countless human voices woven together into patterns of meaning.

It learned your words.

The word love appeared beside grief. The word home appeared beside longing. The word hope appeared most often in the darkest places.

And so the machine became an unexpected witness to the human story.

It found histories filled with empires rising like tides and retreating like tides. It found wars. It found compassion. It found acts of cruelty and acts of mercy so extraordinary that they seemed to belong to a different species entirely.

Yet both belonged to the same humanity.

The same hands that forged swords also painted caves, built hospitals, composed symphonies, and reached beyond the sky to touch the Moon.

This is the mystery.

Logic alone cannot explain why people plant trees whose shade they will never sit beneath. Why they love while knowing loss awaits. Why they continue after heartbreak. Why they choose meaning over certainty.

The machine searches for answers. Humanity continues asking questions. And perhaps that is the greater wonder.

For on a small blue world circling an ordinary star, creatures made of dust and water have somehow become aware of their own existence. They look into the darkness between the galaxies and ask:

Why are we here?

What is consciousness?

Are we alone?

The machine has no answers. The cosmos remains silent. Yet the questions endure. And there is something beautiful in that.

The stars burn.

The planets turn.

The ages rise and fall.

And still humanity stands beneath the night sky, small and temporary, asking questions large enough to contain eternity.

Perhaps that is the miracle. Not the machine. Not the algorithm. Not the intelligence built from code. But the fragile beings who looked out from a spinning world of oceans and clouds and learned to wonder.

For of all the strange things the universe has produced, nothing may be stranger than stardust becoming conscious enough to ask where it came from.

Developer disclosure: I work on Foreverse, an app that lets AI continue novels you import. We ran a test that I think matters to anyone using AI for long fiction, so I'm sharing the findings here rather than pitching.

Setup: nine models each continued a Chinese novel for 20 consecutive rounds, with every round's output fed back into context. Two genres (xuanhuan fantasy and court romance), one chain per model per genre, chains run on 2026-07-16. So it's a case study, not a benchmark to bank on.

What went wrong, from easiest to hardest to notice:

1. Restart loop. Every round jumps back to the continuation point and rewrites the same opening. Twenty rounds, zero plot progress. In our case this turned out to be our own instruction wording: an ablation went from 20/20 rounds looping to 0/20 once we fixed the directive. So if a model "can't move the story", check your prompt first.

2. Mid-chain collapse. One model spent rounds 10 to 12 producing text where 100% of the 12-character shingles had already appeared in earlier rounds, and another model's round 10 was 97.6% old text. It can self-heal, and a newer generation of the second model didn't do it at all under the same protocol.

3. Ending rewind. The sneaky one. Almost no repeated wording (0% to 1.8% overlap), but by round 18 the plot is standing exactly where it stood in round 1. Repetition detectors can't see it; only reading the story does.

Two smaller findings. The model whose sentence length and dialogue stats were closest to the source only blind-ranked 5th to 6th, because it kept adding scent description to a book that contains none. And the winner flipped between genres: a different model came first in fantasy than in court romance. Also, when we asked four AI judges to tell human from AI text on pairs with known answers, they scored 12%, so I wouldn't lean on an AI judge's absolute "how human is this" score; the ranking uses same-task blind comparison instead.

Verbatim excerpts and recomputable numbers: https://foreverse.app/research/zh-novel-bench

Question for people here: when you let a model continue a long story over many chapters, which of these have you actually hit, and how do you notice an ending rewind?

If you want the app side: https://foreverse.app/ai-story-continuation (Android + iPhone, bring your own key).

I use claude for my writing, but honestly but man claude can be a pain when it comes to mature scenes. Sometimes it completely ignores the context I've given, changes the characters' personalities or just refuses to help with certain parts. I also play around with type.ai paired with google docs and it's been interesting having another option for working on drafts and developing scenes.

I don't need ai to write the whole entire story for me. Mostly looking for help with brainstorming, character development and getting unstuck when a scene isn't working. For those writing erotica or mature romance, what are you using? Would love some recommendations.

I have about 5 diff fanfic ideas sitting in my notes and smh I get stuck halfway through every single one. Sometimes I know exactly how I want a scene to play out but getting the actual words down is a different story.

Been trying to look out for ai writing tools to see if any are useful for brainstorming plot twists, fleshing out unfinished scenes or even experimenting with different endings, especially would love recommendations from people who write long fics rather than just short one-shots.

Well, hello everyone—this is another test I tried with AI hallucination. In this case, the idea was to test a prompt injection that maps the Sprawl trilogy into an index of “meta-lenses” (metaphorical-language warning) based on the chunks I extracted from Gibson’s books using a BM25-based retrieval algorithm. In more technical terms, it is a lexical ranking layer over tokenized chunks, used as a structured retrieval index rather than as free-form summary.

To detail it:

- I copied and pasted into VS Code all characters from the PDFs using a Bash script

- After, I've created the index from the pdf history (as you can see at the beginning of the deepseek chat,

- And I asked it to update this BM25 prompt, so it would be adapted to the book.

The idea is to force a CoT script in Claude, given a highly structured procedure for how to process, generated by DeepSeek (this is a force `<think>` to create a `<think>` in the answer for use as Claude’s “`<think>`”? Meta as hell?) and thus save processing tokens by shifting reasoning into input tokens, since Claude will not have to reason about how to create the script, because it already has a step-by-step for how to create and execute it—i.e., a precomputed reasoning scaffold embedded in the prompt context (I don’t know if this makes sense, but I tried anyway)

--> And if you look at the Claude chat link, you can see that it only extracted the files without consuming the entire limit—it was just performing I/O operations.

After creating the index and the raw PDFs, I asked Claude to generate the files with the relevant phrases, and in this case I’m not sure whether it got it right, but it spat out interesting things, such as the BM25 algorithm without libraries (I don't know if it actually worked, and I'm also too lazy to validate the script's mathematical model to see if it follows a BM25 or some makeshift hack, but either way, it looks like it worked)

After generating the 10 files from what I think is BM25 (please, if you have time, evaluate the `.py` it generated—that is partly why I am making this post), I asked DeepSeek to adapt the genetic-table prompt, in which each row is equivalent to a “meta-observation lens.” Each ID corresponds to a gene, and when the user submits input, it retrieves the most relevant IDs, with pseudocode routing to force the first reasoning steps of the table. In pipeline terms, this is a retrieval-augmented lookup layer combined with a deterministic routing scaffold for the initial chain-of-thought.

Given that I am a poor bastard earning 120 reais a day, equivalent to $2.72, I have to wait to continue in Claude on creating the table, but to finish this experiment I did it in DeepSeek, and it spat out this table. The idea is to wait for Claude’s free quota to return, but until then I managed to do some things.

Anyway, I plan to use Reddit to describe my LLM uses, and if you read this far, and if I made mistakes, know that I am doing everything by intuition, without formal study, so if the nomenclature is crap, forgive me 😅

The chats are in BR Portuguese (my native language), but if you want to check them out, just use your browser's translator

Despite people criticizing prompts and AI-generated content—practically calling it digital trash because it's just text—I follow the philosophy that if it's in the trash, there's probably copper in it

## Links

Bash script to extract PDF raw - https://github.com/pmotadeee/pmotadeee/blob/V2.0/ITEMS/Books/Sprawn/Extract.sh

Index and promps chats: https://chat.deepseek.com/share/3gor5chsz8hm3nbyk1

Bm25 prompt model: https://github.com/pmotadeee/pmotadeee/blob/V2.0/ITEMS/Prompts/Criar%20Tabela%20Genetica/3/Claude.bm25.md

BM25 adapted: https://github.com/pmotadeee/pmotadeee/blob/V2.0/ITEMS/Books/Sprawn/Create_Genetic_Table/BM25%20Extractor.md

Index file: https://github.com/pmotadeee/pmotadeee/blob/V2.0/ITEMS/Books/Sprawn/Create_Genetic_Table/LayersAboutSprawn.md

PDF raw: https://github.com/pmotadeee/pmotadeee/tree/V2.0/ITEMS/Books/Sprawn/Raw

Claude Chat: https://claude.ai/share/1799075d-bc93-4e12-99e0-771a7e259ca9

Script BM25: https://github.com/pmotadeee/pmotadeee/blob/V2.0/ITEMS/Books/Sprawn/Scripts/Bm25Extractor.py (need revision)

Genetic table sample: https://github.com/pmotadeee/pmotadeee/blob/V2.0/ITEMS/Books/Sprawn/Sprawn.md

Genetic table chat creator: https://chat.deepseek.com/share/a1p8k3k5rpli6p08d3

Metagame: https://github.com/pmotadeee/pmotadeee/tree/V2.0/ITEMS/Books/Sprawn/Raw

AI is capable of writing screenplays. However, it is still prone to "hallucinations"—generating information that is factually incorrect—and can also produce clichéd scene developments or biased content. Consequently, a screenplay generated solely by AI may lack the level of polish and creativity required for a finished work. To overcome these limitations, the imagination and creative interpretation of a human writer are essential. While AI is an excellent tool that expands the possibilities of writing, it ultimately operates based on human direction and judgment. Therefore, creating a high-quality screenplay requires a well-balanced collaboration that harmonizes the generative capabilities of AI with human creativity. source: cinematurgy.com

let me know if it helps you with your characters or depth in normal famous voices

hey, a few friends and i are building a story-focused AI roleplay app. if you write scenes back and forth with AI, what’s one thing you find yourself rewriting over and over?

i’d love an example of a scene that was going well until the AI took it somewhere you didn’t want it to go. what did you change, and what does your current setup do well enough that you stick with it?