Removing AI Contamination
I have completed the process of restoring Flight of the Heretics to a version that contains as little of the text created using generative AI as I can.
When I started writing the story, I was not thinking of publishing it and was relying heavily on SudoWrite, specifically the “Dialog Reviser” plugin. By the time I considered publication, I was feeling unsure about my writing abilities without either a human editor—which I could not afford for a 20,000-word novella that I planned on selling for the lowest possible cost—or the AI alteration. Additionally, the process I had used to write it did not create an original version. So I ended up releasing Flight of the Heretics and then compounding my misdeeds by writing and releasing The Prey’s Rebellion using the same techniques.
After that, I was forced to quit relying on SudoWrite, but I continued to write my Randall stories without its assistance. The more I wrote, the more those first two stories bothered me. As I have been looking into the Furry Fandom community and its population of graphic artists, I have an even deeper understanding of their dislike of generative AI. I cannot say if that has reduced my sales. Amazon does not make my AI usage information highly public on the listings, but I admitted it in the afterword for both Flight of the Heretics and The Prey’s Rebellion. So anyone who read that far in either novella would have learned about it, potentially stopping them from reading the stories later stories where I did not use SudoWrite.
It was with this motivation that after completing the first draft of the still unpublished seventh Randall story, The Cougar and the Quest, I started the process of creating a second edition of Flight of the Heretics that is as free of AI contamination as I can make it.
The first step in this process was to poke and prod at the SudoWrite user interface until I found the “Document History.” This is the listing of the periodic saves the website makes for any given document. However, I discovered, much to my chagrin, that it does not save before one triggers a plug-in or other AI function. So, in many cases, the only text available through this was already replaced with the text generated by the AI tools. However, I still used this text to create a base version of the story in Scrivener, my primary writing tool. I put each block of text into its own Scrivener text card—which is also how I have been formatting my new stories.
After I had this base version, I went through the more easily accessible history for the document in SudoWrite—the history of plug-in and other AI tool interactions. The output and input for each interaction are available in reverse chronological order—the newest interactions are at the top. However, I ran into two big issues getting the original text out of this history.
The implementation of SudoWrite’s web interface is such that one cannot use a mouse or similar pointing device to select part or all of the text used as t to the plug-in. I did discover that I could select text to be copied if I used the cursor keys on the keyboard to position the cursor at the start and then the shift-cursor keys to highlight the text.
This led to the second problem. The primary plug-in I was using, “Dialog Reviser,” is highly effective—and highly tempting to continue to use—because it will pull in a large amount of preceding text. With Flight of the Heretics, which in its AI-modified version ran over 24,000 words, the entire novella showed up when I looked at the modifications for the last scene in the story.
The process of extracting the original text took nearly two days to complete.
Once that was done, I was able to restore the chapters to their original places. I then did an edit pass where I looked for grammar and style issues and made a few updates to make the details align better with the newer stories.
I am not quite ready to release the second edition of Flight of the Heretics. I am looking at creating new covers. If my current investigation on the way to create covers for these books works out, then I will be able to release both the updated text and the updated cover at the same time. I am aware that sharing this post will hurt my sales of this story as potential readers may wait for the revised edition. I will accept this if removing the AI from the story increases my overall readership.
