AI Just Can't Do It.

10 Aug, 2026

It can't write fiction for shit.

I have been on a wuxia novel craving recently after reading Reverend Insanity by Gu Zhen Ren and I Shall Seal the Heavens by Er Gen, and I made the unfortunate mistake of thinking that AI could scratch that itch by asking it to make its own.

Five "stories" later (if you could call them stories in the first place), I ended up disappointed, ashamed, and furious at the same time at the incompetence of the writing output the AIs have churned out: Gemini, Claude, both on their newest models like Opus 5 or Fable, still fall way way flat. It's either too technical, or the metaphors are vague: metaphors a human wouldn't understand, but that a machine would, in its own way, if you removed the feelings and kept the "logic." Take a look at this damned snippet of shitty writing:

They had come in through the service wicket and run the night gate down behind them, and the sound it made had been obscene in all that quiet — a long ratcheting shriek, then the bolt. You lock the door of the room you intend to kill something in. That was doctrine. Doctrine had a second clause nobody wrote down: the door locks you in with it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd like to bring your attention to this specific line.

You lock the door of the room you intend to kill something in.

Absolutely fucking amazing. I gasp in awe at the wittiness, at the passionate declaration of whatever the fuck this sentence — and by extension this paragraph — was trying to convey (I can't even use an em-dash now without judging myself as an AI user). Something for the reader to relate to, or like, or maybe even be entertained by.

You know what? I do fucking relate.

I also lock the door of the bloody room I intend to take a shit in. (It's called a bathroom, btw.) Or, for a more NSFW version, one can also lock the door of the room they intend to rub one out in (because privacy).

Where the fuck did AI Claude get the idea that this would be done beautifully? Now, I am by no means a great writer¹, but god damn this was bad. If you're a Conan O'Brien fan, this would probably be flagged not only as AI writing, but has Jordan Schlansky's approval all over it (in Italian).

Five stories. Several hours wasted inputting what I want in the world, the writing style, the characters, the setting, the rhythm of writing. All for shit.

Compare that to Chapter 38 of Reverend Insanity. It's crude, not in the writing sense, more in the grammar and translation sense. Take a look:

This world's heaven and earth is like a huge chess board. All lifeforms are chess pieces, acting in accordance with their rules and regulations. The four seasons have their own rules and regulations, rotating between spring, summer, autumn, and winter. The flow of water has its own rules and regulations, flowing from high ground to low ground. Hot air has its own rules and regulations, floating upwards. Humans naturally also have their own rules and regulations.

The prose is clunky. "Rules and regulations" shows up a dozen times in one page. But God damn if that isn't a nice way of making observations about the world he lives in, and we relate to it on some level because it does make sense — the laws of physics, power, the pecking order.

Dejected, disappointed, and embarrassed, I eventually put this desire to rest, in a place so hidden in the, I dunno, palace or crevices of the mind where you put those things that are even too shameful to reminisce: ideas that were so dumb, you're glad you didn't even think them out loud. (Whelp. But I did write this.)

Then I came across a YouTube video from languagejones about AI writing slop, which made me hate what I did even more.

I hate that it's reduced the value of metaphors² and the other writing tools good writers use. Just thinking about Tolkien, Sanderson, GRRM, McCarthy, Stephen King, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and others, makes AI look like a kid who recently learned of the power of literary devices and spams them to hell. It's never going to be human because they fall back to their statistical modes of use, and we do not write based on statistics, we write based on human experience, the zeitgeist, the product of the times the author lived in, history, fantasy, imagination, culture, etc. We've got so much material to write about or uh, describe into text that I am extremely disappointed at what AI tries to do.

LJ was right: LLMs don't actually think. They will always provide the statistically relevant answer based on the query we give them, in this case writing. I'm so frustrated that I'm going to study writing. I refuse, or would be insulted, to accept the insinuation that AI can "write better."

Fuck that shit. Even your run-of-the-mill, badly translated from Mandarin to English wuxia novel does WAY WAY better than the well-prompted AI writing pursuit. Humanity, in its imperfections, can perfectly write really great pieces of literature: whether it's an ode or poem of praise, or a litany of insults or threats, we ALWAYS find a way to make something boring seem interesting. This is the element that statistical LLMs can't really reproduce or process.

AI ain't got shit on writing. They're good for other things. But I'm not handing over the thinking, and I'm not spending a lifetime being outwritten by autocomplete.

I'm running out of steam. It's a nice, cold rainy day here. I'll mull this over a cup of coffee or tea and try to write. Or learn to.