Comment by garyrob
16 hours ago
I wrote a short story based on a similar scenario. (Caveat, I did it with AI help, but my ideas and many iterations and me doing final editing to get it the way I want).
https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/18/everyone-who-will-ever-b...
Without wishing to be unkind, this reads a lot more as 'one-shot with AI' than 'many iterations'; if you truly did that much editing, you didn't put it where it showed.
You've got all the AI favourite names and rhythms at once in the second paragraph, for example.
Yeah, I think the AI probably shows. But in fact it is the result of many iterations.
But what I was trying to get across are the ideas, not the language. I think it you were to read the whole thing, you'd probably find it interesting. But if not, feel free to let me know.
But my hypothesis is that there are people with skills for ideas that have the potential to be interesting stories, but not necessarily great prose skills; I don't think those necessarily line up in the same person. Up until now, to write a worthwhile short story you had to be among the best at both.
Maybe AI can help change that, and maybe (I hypothesize), that would be for the better. I understand that such a hypothesis would be controversial, but to me, it feels worth exploring.
The reason I did it the way I did is that I believe that Fable writes better prose than I do. I could write it so that people would be less likely to think it's written by AI, but I wouldn't think it's as good.
So, I'm happy with it as-is; I think the ideas are good and deserve to be out there. I think it just needs a context where people will be more forgiving about AI prose because they are interested enough in the ideas that are conveyed.
But of course, the challenge with creating such a context is that one person with an AI could spew out 1,000 crap stories a day and submit them all...
Not bad! Did you ever read Stephen King’s short autobiographical story on how he sold his first few stories? He had to be persistent as could be, just years of writing and submitting to publishers and getting rejected. It is a good read.
What does the short story have to do with the scenario exactly? Seems completely unrelated.
And OMG, you need to edit the AI slop way way more. This is unreadable.
It involves one life, drawn at random, from human history. I can't imagine how you could miss that if you read it.
But I am realizing that AI writing is so offensive to many people that if they get that vibe, they just won't read it, and therefore won't have any idea what is being attempted. Maybe there could be a context where that wouldn't be the case, but HN is probably not it.
I read it all, and the central theme seemed to be more about collecting random thoughts/memories rather than "lives", with a final twist about the apocalypse or something like that.
You really need to stretch quite a bit to find similarities between this post and this short story.
And since you incorrectly assumed that I didn't read it, I'll give you more unsolicited feedback. Yes the writing is horrendous, but the idea itself is not novel or thought provoking. The general idea has been done many times in the classics like Dick, Asimov, Chiang and others. And the twist at the end ("Oh my god! They couldn't see things in the future because there is no future!!!!!") is immediately predictable when they can't get samples in the future.
That being said, keep writing and enjoying yourself but 1) try to dial down on the AI assist, it really makes for a poor experience for the reader, 2) don't get on your high horse when someone points it out.