Tomato Novel Caps AI Writing After 104,000 June Rejections
Rest of World reported that Chinese web-novel platforms are adding limits after Tomato Novel said it rejected more than 104,000 low-quality submissions in June and Jinjiang restricted AI to research and proofreading.
ByteDance’s Tomato Novel rejected more than 104,000 “low-quality” submissions in June, including stories written with artificial intelligence, as Chinese web-novel platforms began limiting the high-volume fiction that AI tools make easier to produce.
The free reading app also capped the number of words each account can publish per day, according to a recent statement from the site.
The restrictions mark a shift for an industry that helped popularize AI-assisted writing.
China’s web-novel platforms, including those owned by ByteDance, Tencent and Baidu, make money from advertising, subscriptions and adaptation rights.
Their serialized smartphone fiction ranges from revenge dramas and time-travel stories to wuxia battles and romance plots.
Publication limits
Gordon Sheng, a 32-year-old civil engineer in China, used DeepSeek to outline a dramatic divorce plot before generating the story in five minutes with another AI writing tool.
Published on Tomato Novel, the short story attracted more than 5,500 reads in 10 days.
“No matter how bad the AI writing is,” Sheng said, “it does a better job than I would.”
He still had to repair basic errors.
In one passage, a father sent a text message to his daughter even though the two characters were standing next to each other.
Sheng said the values and logic behind the story were his own, even though AI produced the prose.
From writing aid to fiction system
China Literature, Tencent’s literature arm, introduced an AI tool in 2023 that generated character names and expanded rough plotlines into fuller stories.
Chief executive Hou Xiaonan compared the change with moving from human driving to assisted driving.
China Literature owns Qidian, which is popular with male readers, and Jinjiang, which is mostly read by women.
Both platforms earn revenue from subscriptions and adaptation rights.
The company also published more than 17,000 AI-translated stories on its international site WebNovel, whose top markets include the U.S., India and Brazil.
Tomato Novel launched an “author’s assistant” in 2024 to help writers research historical or scientific details and continue writing when they became stuck.
AI tools have since developed beyond single-use drafting prompts.
Junxian Ma, a developer in Beijing, built InkOS, an automated fiction-writing system powered by several AI agents.
An “architect” creates the outline, a “writer” generates chapters and an “auditor” checks for logical errors and overused em dashes.
A human author occasionally steers the plot.
More than 50,000 users have downloaded InkOS, Ma told Rest of World, and some have earned money publishing AI-generated stories on Tomato Novel.
Reader and copyright backlash
The spread of AI writing has unsettled readers.
On Xiaohongshu, users shared screenshots of prompts accidentally left inside novels.
Others said they suspected AI whenever they encountered strange metaphors or phrases such as “it’s not … it is …”
“It’s a waste of my time reading something that’s produced very fast,” software developer Yang Zhou, a fantasy reader, told Rest of World.
“But if a novel is written and updated slowly over time, I would take my time appreciating it.”
Authors have also raised copyright concerns.
In 2024, web-novel writers protested after Tomato Novel required them to hand over rights to their work for AI training.
The platform later allowed authors to opt out.
Some AI tools now promote features that extract the plotline of a popular story and rewrite it into a “new” novel.
Where platforms draw the line
Jinjiang founder Huang Yanming told authors in a 2025 statement to use AI only for story research and proofreading.
He also asked readers to report novels they suspected contained AI writing, while acknowledging that determining how much of a story was generated by AI remained difficult.
Xiang Ren, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney who researches China’s digital publishing industry, said platforms were trying to balance AI’s productivity benefits against the risk of losing authenticity.
Free-to-read services such as Tomato Novel are generally more tolerant of AI writing than subscription platforms such as Jinjiang, where readers pay for higher-quality work.
For Sheng, the technology remains useful because it helps people turn an idea into a readable story.
“Many people have the spark for a story, but don’t know how to express it,” he said.
