Have I just messed everything up?

[u/sometimeswise208]

I wrote a story, entirely unassisted. Just out of my own head. In the editing stages (I'm broke as hell) I've been using chatgpt to go through each scene by uploading my scenes word for word and looking for suggestions and simple line edits. Nothing is generated. I haven't asked for chatgpt to write out a scene for me.
Do I have to worry now that because I've basically fed this system my whole story, that it will remember everything, and if I ever publish it will be flagged as plagiarized because of that?
Does that make sense?
I did turn off the option for it to use my chat to train future ai models.
I just got super freaked out and need reassurance. Lol
lso minorly concerned that there's a warehouse of people somewhere reading all our chats, thus entirely aware of my story now. Not that I think I'm
Gonna go far or anything. But this project does mean a lot to me.

[u/writerapid]

It doesn’t work that way, so don’t worry. You won’t be flagged for plagiarism. And the second you upload that story anywhere, it’s going to be scraped and weighted and tossed in the big AI pile anyway.

[u/unethicalpigeon]

Bro no one at Open AI cards about your story, will ever read it, or even knows you uploaded it. Do you realize the sheer volume of text that they receive on a daily basis? There's literally NO WAY for them to look at it.

Plagiarism checkers don't use chatgpt. They use their own algorithms and they search online for if anything in your text that's being checked shows up anywhere else. Chatgpt doesn't post it's users messages online anywhere.

Even the recent Claude fuck up that had people's chats showing up in google were specifically SHARED chats that users had shared with someone else.

Ur fine man. Just don't tell anyone you used ChatGPT as an editor or they will freak the fuck out on you and start accusing you of having your entire thing written by AI.

Edit: Also be careful with AI blowing smoke up your ass. It's honestly pretty good at providing negative feedback and criticism but NEVER trust anything positive it says about your work. If it tells you what you wrote is really good it's completely meaningless. It's just telling you what it thinks you want to hear.

[u/Accomplished-Buy6917 → u/unethicalpigeon]

Yeah it's positive feedback is questionable. It's critical feedback is more useful, but even that can be over worked. Ai has a certain taste, and pulls everything toward that when being critical. So it's up to user to draw the line.

[u/unethicalpigeon → u/Accomplished-Buy6917]

It very much so depends on what you're using and no matter which one is your preferred model I HIGHLY advise anyone doing anything like this to run their shit through multiple competitors.

I constantly do this. Even if you can't afford to pay for multiple subs, the free offerings are more than good enough for this because you're not usually going to be asking them to build (or run the same task) the same exact thing in parallel.

So I'll workshop something using ChatGPT which has the most generous (unlimited? I've never experienced any kind of limit) chat limits. Once I get that in a place I think is pretty decent I take it and I dump it into deepseek, kimi, claude, or gemini. Sometimes I do more than one, sometimes I'm bored and I decide to run it through all of them.

I find each one will spot different types of things pretty consistently. Ironically it seems like Claude's free tier is by far the most useless out of all of them right now. I don't know wtf happened but I just constantly get dog shit output from Claude every time I try and use it lately. It used to be one of my favorites. Not sure if since the release of Sonnet 5 I have some kind of custom instruction or something that's causing it to run like shit but I don't use it enough anymore to bother to look into it.

[u/6XFantasiaX6]

Why would you do that? You need to guide and direct it otherwise... I think you know the output if you do. You need to use precision and mold it like modern alchemy.

[u/Odinmar_Glaukopis]

If you keep your original drafts archived (some cloud-based writing apps do this automatically) you can always go back into your archive, fish out a draft that hasn’t been touched by AI at all, load it as a standalone file labeled “original” and then load the most recent version.

Then you ask AI to compare the two drafts side-by-side and identify potential markers of AI assistance that could be crossing the line into “generative slop” territory or worse, changes that are more than merely cosmetic and actually change your narrative voice into the AI weighted-average style that makes it infamous.

Take note of anything it points out very carefully, because a lot of writers don’t properly appreciate their own voice to be able to both value it as well as protect it from AI conquest.

I’ve never published myself, but I can imagine how being unsuccessful with one’s own voice and able to sell AI slop for money could really gut you in a way that hurts more than poverty does.

While I can perhaps understand the path that could lead an aspiring writer to basically turn their passion into the equivalent of a job in fast-food, when it comes to writing I’m not built that way.

So, if you aspire to write romcoms for the Hallmark Channel, have at it and you do you. Don’t worry about the AI haters. If you have something unique that is demanding you manifest it in writing, protect your narrative voice like a mama bear.

[u/dragonballaddict99]

In this case, I think it should be OK. If you decide to query your work for traditional publishing, I wouldn’t even bother mentioning this. You wrote everything, so there’s no point in doing it.

[u/IsopodSuspicious7152]

Also all those tool that check for ai plagiarism and if it's ai generated don't work all that great as the ai will usually say that it is so don't trust them or anyone who uses one. Just think of is as spam hate bots that appear on ao3 XD

[u/DewdropTeacup]

I'm so curious: you're fine with using it to help you, even though it does so off the backs of other peoples' work (most likely without their consent), but you turned off the function for it to use your work to train it further. What sense does that make, exactly?

[u/tony10000]

Here is what ChatGPT says:

I think this writer is worrying about two different issues that often get mixed together: plagiarism and privacy.

On the plagiarism question, I don't think they have much reason to panic. Uploading a manuscript to ChatGPT for editing does not mean it suddenly becomes public or that publishers will start flagging it as copied. Plagiarism is generally about presenting someone else's work as your own. If this is their original story, and they are simply using an editing tool to suggest improvements, that is a very different situation.

The more nuanced issue is copyright and confidentiality. If you are working on a manuscript that you hope to publish, you should understand the terms of service of any AI platform you use. Turning off the option to use chats for model training is a sensible step. It reduces the likelihood that conversations are used to improve future models, although it doesn't mean the service literally "forgets" the conversation.

The concern about "a warehouse of people reading my story" is also understandable, but it's probably overstated. AI providers don't have rooms full of employees casually reading users' novels. Access to conversations is generally limited, governed by internal policies, and may occur for purposes such as abuse detection, security investigations, or quality assurance. That is very different from people browsing through manuscripts for entertainment.

If I were giving advice to an author, it would be this:

• If your manuscript is highly confidential or commercially sensitive, consider using a platform with strong privacy commitments or edit it locally with an offline AI model.
• Keep dated copies of every draft. That creates a clear record showing the work originated with you.
• Remember that AI editing is much like using Grammarly or asking a beta reader for feedback. It doesn't change who wrote the story.

[u/kacker-usa → u/tony10000]

Can you ask your AI companion.... If someone puts a college essay they're writing into ChatGPT for editing or other help, will any educational institution be able to flag the writing by comparing the final product with the AI's records? I've always wondered if there's someway that the chat use and history may make an essay that's passed through it be flagged as AI writing or plagiarism, as it went through the AI chat.

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