Author's Note

Zerocrane-sama

Okay, bear with me as I have a BIG confession to make (hehe~) I underwent an experiment because it seemed interesting, and I was genuinely interested in how my story would look like when done this way, so that's exactly what I did. So, what exactly was it that I did? I used Claude Sonnet 4.6, yes an AI, to co-write Chapters 13 to 17. The process goes like this: 1. I fed the AI the entire plot from the very beginning, and then started feeding it in-depth storyboards for each chapter going from Chapter 13 to 17. I acted as the director, supervising every little thing in the co-writing session so that the story remains consistent with the Universe that I had created. I tried my best to make sure Claude is actually writing ZeroVerse, not anything else. 2. I went with a back-and-forth doing polishing and editing with Claude to make sure the final draft is palatable enough to human readers. 3. Did a human-only re-read. 4. Adjusted the AI-written chapters (human-only polish) so that they sound as close to my own writing as possible, while correcting potential plot holes along the way. So based on my own experiments, when it comes solely to writing based on somebody else's direction, it's probably safe to say that LLMs are, for the most part, capable of reaching a grade of maybe 85 to 90 (out of 100). In fact, Claude's output is so incredibly close to what I myself wanted to write that there was almost nothing for me to really change in terms of the plot itself. But yeah, that's where the good things end though. Even though Claude is widely considered one of the best writing and editing assistants around, it's still a computer at the end of the day. It will prioritize efficiency above all else. It wrote in a way that was too perfect, too mechanical, too efficient, and just... cold. Even though there's no problem with the story itself, Claude managed to take out most of the emotions that I pride myself in first and foremost. It loves using the fewest word count possible to achieve the goal, which also means keeping some things incredibly simple even though some things are meant to be expanded upon. The entire co-writing process with the AI resulted in me wasting twice the amount of time I would have otherwise spent just writing everything on my own, which goes against the promise of AI actually multiplying productivity levels and efficiency by, at minimum, 400%. In reality, I lost half of my efficiency rating simply due to the number of things I had to fix on my own, and now, even though I'd certainly prefer to rewrite everything, my lazy bum doesn't feel like doing it so I'll just be releasing the Chapters as-is. Keep in mind Chapters 13 through 17 are heavily edited by me personally, but the core output is still AI-generated. Chapters 18 through 22 (end of the Origin Lore) will be written solely by me the same way I used to do, because AI isn't quite ready to take the spotlight quite yet. I know how anal people can be with everything AI-generated, but please do note that Chapters 13 to 17 are genuine ZeroVerse chapters. The plot would remain largely unaffected even if I were to do a complete re-write. Mostly the tone, voice, and prose is what's going to change, since I prioritize emotions over efficiency. Yep! Even if it means going way above my original page limit, I'd still do it. In fact, one of my biggest problems when I was writing for my job was the page limit. If the director told me to keep the story within 5000 words, you can bet I'd hit 8000. It would take roughly 3 to 4 rounds of polishing to push it back down (and there was even one case when the director just accepted the draft as is. I guess they gave up lol.) I didn't want to lie which is why I'm saying this, but I hope you'll still enjoy the following chapters because I feel they are genuinely amazing nonetheless. The last remaining chapters of Origin Lore (18 to 22) will be written by me personally, and then after that we'll head on over to Nullbound Reagen. Speaking of Nullbound Reagen, I'm also preparing a prologue chapter that previously didn't exist in the original release. Thank you so much for the attention, and I'm sorry for the long-ass post-chapter note. I learned a lot during my co-writing sessions with Claude, and now, it's time to return to my roots while applying said learnings into my craft.