Gordon Sheng, a 32-year-old civil engineer in China, spent two decades reading web novels before using AI to write his own. He used DeepSeek to outline a dramatic divorce plot, then generated the story in five minutes using an AI writing tool. Published on Tomato Novel, the short story drew over 5,500 reads in 10 days.
“No matter how bad the AI writing is,” Sheng said, “it does a better job than I would.”
Originated from China’s internet forums in the 1990s, web novels are typically serialized stories designed for people to read on their smartphones, featuring adrenaline-pumping plotlines about revenge, time traveling, wuxia battles, or romance dramas.
Tech companies including ByteDanceByteDanceByteDance is a Chinese internet technology company that owns TikTok and Douyin, a Chinese version of TikTok with a successful e-commerce arm.READ MORE, TencentTencentBest known for its super-app WeChat, Tencent is a Chinese technology conglomerate and a major player in the video gaming industry.READ MORE, and BaiduBaiduBaidu is a Chinese technology company that operates the country’s biggest search engine and video-streaming service iQiyi.READ MORE own China’s most influential web novel platforms. They generate billions of dollars a year in advertising and subscription revenues, and pay individual authors based on readership. Chinese companies have also launched similar reading apps in the U.S.
Authors are now turning to artificial intelligence tools to bulk-produce viral stories. While platforms initially encouraged writers to boost productivity with AI, they are now under pressure to crack down on AI-generated writing that threatens creativity and risks driving readers away.
Steering the plot
Web novel platforms were pioneers of AI writing. In 2023, Tencent’s literature arm, China Literature, unveiled an AI tool that could generate character names and turn a rough plotline into a fuller story. “It’s like going from human driving to assisted driving,” chief executive Hou Xiaonan said at the time. China Literature owns two major Chinese web novel platforms: Qidian, popular with male readers, and Jinjiang, mostly read by women. Both make money from subscriptions and selling adaptation rights.
China Literature also published more than 17,000 AI-translated stories on its international site WebNovel, which counts the U.S., India, and Brazil as its top markets.
ByteDance’s Tomato Novel, which is free to read and profits from advertising, launched an “author’s assistant” in 2024 to help writers research the historical or scientific background of their stories and keep writing whenever they get stuck.
AI tools have since grown more powerful. Junxian Ma, a developer in Beijing, recently built InkOS, an automated fiction-writing system powered by a group of AI agents, including an “architect” that builds the outline, a “writer” that generates the chapters, and an “auditor” that checks for logical errors and overused em dashes. The human author occasionally steps in to steer the plot.
More than 50,000 users have downloaded the system, and some have earned money publishing AI-generated stories on Tomato Novel, Ma told Rest of World. “Now humans have more time and energy to think about what kind of stories they want to tell,” he said.
“A waste of my time”
The proliferation of AI writing is angering some readers. On social media site Xiaohongshu, people shared screenshots of AI prompts accidentally left in the middle of a novel. Others said they suspected AI use whenever they encountered strange metaphors or phrases like “it’s not … it is …”
For some readers, the telltale signs of AI are a turn-off. “It’s a waste of my time reading something that’s produced very fast,” Yang Zhou, a software developer who reads fantasy novels, told Rest of World. “But if a novel is written and updated slowly over time, I would take my time appreciating it.” Authors are also concerned that AI is enabling copyright infringement. In 2024, web novel writers protested against Tomato Novel after the platform required them to hand over the rights of their work for AI training. Tomato Novel later allowed them to opt out of the program. Some AI tools even enable plagiarism, promoting features that can extract the plotline of a popular story and rewrite it into a “new” novel.
How much AI is too much AI?
Platforms are now clamping down on AI-generated work. In a 2025 statement, Jinjiang’s founder, Huang Yanming, told authors to use AI only for story research and proofreading, and asked readers to report novels they suspect contain AI writing. But Huang admitted it was difficult to determine how much of a story is written with AI.
Tomato Novel has capped the number of words every account is allowed to publish each day. In June alone, the platform rejected more than 104,000 “low-quality” submissions, including those written with AI, the site said in a recent statement.
Xiang Ren, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney who researches China’s digital publishing industry, said the web novel platforms are trying to strike a balance between AI’s potential to boost author productivity and its threat to authenticity. Free-to-read platforms like Tomato Novel tend to be more tolerant of AI writing than subscription-based sites like Jinjiang, which need to maintain higher quality for readers to pay, Ren told Rest of World.
Those who embrace AI say the technology is helping them overcome a lack of professional training in writing. Sheng said that although AI did the writing for him, the values and logic behind the story are his own. He also needed to fix the “bugs” in AI writing. For instance, he discovered that a father in his short story had sent a text to his daughter, even though they were standing next to each other.
“Many people have the spark for a story, but don’t know how to express it,” he said. “AI has closed that gap for us.”