[bahbahbahbah]

I expect I'll get a lot of hate for this, and potentially deservedly so, but I've been doing something similar since late last year when Opus came out.

> Because romance sells, the professors thought it would be the genre most susceptible to A.I. intervention, but instead it was nonfiction...

I've been working mostly in erotica but have shifted to some nonfiction series lately.

I stopped for a while, but Fable and GPT 5.6 Sol have reinvigorated me.

I use Claude Code and other CLIs to manage the process, create first drafts, covers, research, etc. I heavily edit most things before I publish it.

The first question is probably one of profitability. So far I have made a little over $40, compared to probably $800 in AI subscription fees. So from that point of view it's been an absolute disaster.

If anyone is curious, I'd be happy to talk about any of it.

[Rygian]

Why?

What internal drive moves you forward?

What sense of ownership/pride do you feel when you consider one of your works as "done"?

What would you do differently, if you were back at the starting block and had a budget of $800 to spend on writing nonfiction?

[bahbahbahbah]

It started as a bit of curiosity: Can AI write good fiction? Can I create a process that produces better fiction? Will Anthropic even let me write porn? How do different models do?

It was another outlet to explore using AI outside of my 9-5 programming. I've experimented with building custom agents to write stories, custom memory storage methods, custom workflows, etc. I've also used AI to write content management systems and experiment with that.

Like with software, even if "slop", there's a particular joy to having an idea come to life very very quickly. I can start with a premise, a character, a few scene ideas, and get a workable draft.

For some of my ideas (outside of erotica), there are no books that I can find that cover what I'm interested in. So in another sense it's like using AI to do research for my own enjoyment, but I'm also tightening it up and publishing it.

> What sense of ownership/pride do you feel when you consider one of your works as "done"?

It's diminished compared to things I've done completely by myself. But it's non-zero and it's positive. I've actually shipped products rather than sitting on them, and there's joy and pride in that.

But I do still put a lot of work into it, both on the software side managing it, but also manually hand-editing it. I rewrite things until it doesn't feel like AI to me, even if I also use AI to make some of those edits.

> What would you do differently, if you were back at the starting block and had a budget of $800 to spend on writing nonfiction?

The lessons are very similar to other lessons on here around software projects.

Like with game development, don't spend your time on the engine. I'd spend less time building scaffolding and structure software.

I'd also be more patient and wait for weekly resets instead of bumping up to the higher tier.

I'd also stick to fewer projects more closely until completion -- I have a queue of about 80 some books to go through before I can publish them.

And then I'd say spend more time on the marketing side of things.

[TRiG_Ireland]

I take such a joy in putting words together that I cannot imagine even thinking about doing something like this.

[shimman]

It's easy, you just have to hate the human experience. It's not hard to connect the dots either when you have noted friend of Epstein, Peter Thiel, openly struggling on whether the human race should exist or not.

Which group of leaders do tech workers at big tech look up to again?

[bahbahbahbah]

I don't hate the human experience. My volunteering here to talk about it is in service of understanding, what I think of as a key component of the human experience.

My experiments with AI writing are additive. Nothing I do with AI prevents human writers from writing.

I do think there's an argument that AI floods the field and makes human writing harder to find, and overall diminishes the commons.

But I want to provide value and am trying to with my experiments. The market will decide over time.

[fatbird]

How much fact checking do you do on the research AI does?

[bahbahbahbah]

I have the same problem in this project as I do at work: how do you verify the output?

Human review is the bottleneck at my office. I think software will be more and more AI written but also more and more AI validated.

For my nonfiction series, I have attempted adversarial agent fact checking, and I rerun it with newer models as they come out.

So: little human review of citations. I didn't expect this thread to shine on me favorably, but perhaps it's interesting to some.

[mcphage]

> So far I have made a little over $40, compared to probably $800 in AI subscription fees.

> If anyone is curious, I'd be happy to talk about any of it.

So you've spent $750 to publish AI slop.

I guess my question is... why? Why are you doing this? Like, what do you get out of it?

[bahbahbahbah]

There's a preconception that all AI generated content is slop. But it's really a spectrum, just like with human generated content.

I take an iterative process where I get to experiment with the technology, building agent harnesses, building workflows and processes, adversarial critiquing, and of course I spend a good amount of time hand editing.

Everything I've published I find sincerely good and to have value. My most recent book (~200 pages), published last week, has been read exactly one time and has one 5 star review. So right now it's not a commercial success, but I both enjoyed making the book and I think I made a reader happy. That's joyful to me.

That book took probably 12-16 hours of work from me. Writing it by hand would have taken me weeks, if I had the skill to do it, which I don't. But I do have the skill to shape a draft into something nice to read.

So, why? It's fun to create. It's fun to publish. I think I'm providing value. I'm learning about writing and editing and I'm learning about how to best use AI.