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princessofgeeksI am sad and discouraged because I have been told that one of the stories I rec'd this summer may very well be yet another story where AI did a lot of the writing.
I have barely followed the AI controversy so far in fanfic circles; actually I have been trying to ignore it, but the whole entire fucking thing breaks my heart.
Look, I would never use AI to write anything. Anything. Fiction or nonfiction. I wouldn't use it for anything, even to organize my notes of a meeting I'm taking minutes of. I have been doing all this writing the old fashioned way, for love and for work, since I was 18 years old. I'm a good enough copy editor that I barely use spellcheck and I don't know how to use Grammarly. I mean, I've heard of it. But AI for fiction? I don't see the fucking point. I'm not in fandom for the kudos or the recognition. Most of my stories get very little attention. I write because I love it and I am happy when my fic finds an audience, however small. If I have pleased one person, that's enough for me.
But also I know that people do use AI. It's out there now. We, like society, have to figure out how we are going to deal with it as a fanfic community, at a time when fanfic has broken containment and is now EVERYWHERE and VERY WELL KNOWN and MAINSTREAM and TOTALLY A THING THAT EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT. Which still seems very weird to me. I'm starting to wonder how much fanfic fandom is even a community any more; and I want to hang on to community, I want to do my part.
BUT: I will never write with AI because THAT"S NOT WHY I WRITE. I do not want or need any help. I want to do it myself. I want to drink down all the incredible influences from writers I adore and our fantastic sexy canons and incubate all that in this amazing crucible of creativity that none of us logically understands and then DO THE THING. I want to wake up in the morning with a fic movie playing in my head. I want to daydream and turn the daydreams into words. I want to be in conversation with fanfic writers I admire and with our wonderful flawed canons. I want to create transformative, derivative works and give credit to all my influences when I recognize them. I mean, I barely use betas, for god's sake.
So I do not understand the motivation of someone who would use AI to write a fic any more than I understand the motivation of the people who plagiarize others' fic. I have written several sentences theorizing here about people's motivations who do these things and deleted them all, because I do not understand it.
But also, I now doubt my ability to recognize good fic; well written fic; fic that comes from a person and not a machine. Reccing has been a joy for me in Heated Rivalry. I would like to continue existing in that joy. Sigh.
I'm going to keep going with reccing but I hate it when something happens to make fandom Not My Happy Place. Sometimes real life things intrude into fandom or fandom must confront its own issues (I was around for racefail; I learned A WHOLE FUCKING LOT) but I really want fandom to be my happy place and today I am not happy. Have I been burying my head in the sand about AI in fanfic fandom? Yes. Have I already had to take notice that two of the WIPs I adored in Heated Rivalry and for which I was hovering over the AO3 updates, like a rat hoping for cocaine when it pushed the lever, have been implicated as AI-assisted, one of which has been pulled from the web and about which I still daydream, the other which I fully expect to be deleted any day now? Yes.
Does this make me really sad? Yes.
So I am not nearly educated enough in this area of discourse to have any meaningful opinions. I am just sad.
Love you all. Hang in there. Fuck.
I have barely followed the AI controversy so far in fanfic circles; actually I have been trying to ignore it, but the whole entire fucking thing breaks my heart.
Look, I would never use AI to write anything. Anything. Fiction or nonfiction. I wouldn't use it for anything, even to organize my notes of a meeting I'm taking minutes of. I have been doing all this writing the old fashioned way, for love and for work, since I was 18 years old. I'm a good enough copy editor that I barely use spellcheck and I don't know how to use Grammarly. I mean, I've heard of it. But AI for fiction? I don't see the fucking point. I'm not in fandom for the kudos or the recognition. Most of my stories get very little attention. I write because I love it and I am happy when my fic finds an audience, however small. If I have pleased one person, that's enough for me.
But also I know that people do use AI. It's out there now. We, like society, have to figure out how we are going to deal with it as a fanfic community, at a time when fanfic has broken containment and is now EVERYWHERE and VERY WELL KNOWN and MAINSTREAM and TOTALLY A THING THAT EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT. Which still seems very weird to me. I'm starting to wonder how much fanfic fandom is even a community any more; and I want to hang on to community, I want to do my part.
BUT: I will never write with AI because THAT"S NOT WHY I WRITE. I do not want or need any help. I want to do it myself. I want to drink down all the incredible influences from writers I adore and our fantastic sexy canons and incubate all that in this amazing crucible of creativity that none of us logically understands and then DO THE THING. I want to wake up in the morning with a fic movie playing in my head. I want to daydream and turn the daydreams into words. I want to be in conversation with fanfic writers I admire and with our wonderful flawed canons. I want to create transformative, derivative works and give credit to all my influences when I recognize them. I mean, I barely use betas, for god's sake.
So I do not understand the motivation of someone who would use AI to write a fic any more than I understand the motivation of the people who plagiarize others' fic. I have written several sentences theorizing here about people's motivations who do these things and deleted them all, because I do not understand it.
But also, I now doubt my ability to recognize good fic; well written fic; fic that comes from a person and not a machine. Reccing has been a joy for me in Heated Rivalry. I would like to continue existing in that joy. Sigh.
I'm going to keep going with reccing but I hate it when something happens to make fandom Not My Happy Place. Sometimes real life things intrude into fandom or fandom must confront its own issues (I was around for racefail; I learned A WHOLE FUCKING LOT) but I really want fandom to be my happy place and today I am not happy. Have I been burying my head in the sand about AI in fanfic fandom? Yes. Have I already had to take notice that two of the WIPs I adored in Heated Rivalry and for which I was hovering over the AO3 updates, like a rat hoping for cocaine when it pushed the lever, have been implicated as AI-assisted, one of which has been pulled from the web and about which I still daydream, the other which I fully expect to be deleted any day now? Yes.
Does this make me really sad? Yes.
So I am not nearly educated enough in this area of discourse to have any meaningful opinions. I am just sad.
Love you all. Hang in there. Fuck.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-07-17 01:18 am (UTC)I have an AO3 account so I can read stories that are locked to AO3 members, but I don't write fiction, including fanfic. I wouldn't ask the plagiarism engines currently being called "AI" to write for me, because that would be asking the computer to steal the work of human writers. But there are a lot of people out there who don't recognize this as a problem, unfortunately.
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Date: 2026-07-17 02:42 pm (UTC)I seriously do not understand it and I'm honestly not even going to try.
Yeah, the way the LLMs were trained was quite unethical, I think.
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Date: 2026-07-17 02:22 am (UTC)it's awful and making us all worse.
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Date: 2026-07-17 03:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-07-17 02:43 pm (UTC)As others have said downthread, I don't want to have to be the Fandom AI Police. That is not what i signed up for around here.
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Date: 2026-07-17 03:59 am (UTC)I don't have any solutions! It's very sad to think that people want kudos more than they want to actually have written the story.
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Date: 2026-07-17 02:44 pm (UTC)I don't have any solutions either.
HUGS
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Date: 2026-07-17 04:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-07-17 11:41 am (UTC)HOW DID THAT IDEA GET STARTED OMG NO.
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Date: 2026-07-17 05:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-07-17 02:47 pm (UTC)Well crap.
I expect Wolfbird to be deleted any day now and I love that story so much and I want to read it, dammit.
Blech.
I do not want to be the AI Police. I guess in some people's eyes that makes me part of the problem, IDEK.
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Date: 2026-07-17 05:39 am (UTC)I don't get why anyone who is serious about writing would turn to AI and hobble themselves from learning the craft. But that's a them problem. I'm going read stories in good faith and recommend the stories I liked.
I still hope AI crashes and burns when the venture capital runs out of money, and regular people are still too broke to pay the true cost for these tools.
I feel like the AI companies are like drug dealers, giving out the first doses for free, then once you're hooked they'll start charging.
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Date: 2026-07-17 11:42 am (UTC)Especially the part about AI companies crashing and burning.
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Date: 2026-07-17 06:29 am (UTC)God I hope it dies.
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Date: 2026-07-17 11:43 am (UTC)Also thank you.
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Date: 2026-07-17 06:35 am (UTC)But the thing is -- NO ONE can reliably recognize AI writing. Those who accuse others are going by gut feeling, and we know how reliable *that* is. This article lays it out --
AI Learned to Write Like You. Detection Is Mathematically Impossible.
My understanding and take from the article --
It is not possible to reliably tell AI writing from human writing. The best a machine can do is 50/50 -- no better than flipping a coin. Despite their "gut feelings," humans are no better.
The reason -- AI was specifically trained to mimic human writing, and it has improved in recent years. *Every*thing we consider a mark of AI is *also* a mark of human writing.
Bad grammar? Been around since forever.
Repetition to drive home a point? A common human technique.
Awkward phrasing? Join the club.
Single words and short sentences interspersed in the writing? Very common, as a technique to "punch up" the narrative, and (hopefully) keep it from being boring.
Too many analogies and inflated language? I've seen those since the beginning of my fanfic reading -- 27 years ago, long before AI was available.
In short, the fic that has irritated the AI-accusers *may* have been written with AI, but it just as likely was a total-human production.
Just as we are not required to post a "warning" about poor grammar or thin plot-lines, we are not required to label whether we used AI to help us over the rough spots or to write the whole fic. BUT! The reader is not forced to continue with a fic that does not meet their standards, whether of spelling or grammar, or suspected AI. The sad thing is, those authors who are being chased out by accusations may be legitimate non-AI-users. But just as it's not possible to prove AI-use, it's not possible to prove non-AI-use, and it's awful hard to stand strong when you're (they're) being attacked from all sides.
When we make recs, we're saying, "I liked this fic for x, y, z reasons, and you may also enjoy it." We are not required to be judge and jury of *how* the fic was written. Readers of our recs may or may not agree with said rec, for a variety of reasons. Suspected use of AI is just one possible item in the read/don't read computation. If they don't like the fic, that's not on you!!!
So, yeah. Keep liking what you like, and recc'ing what you want to rec, and ignore the AI stuff. It'll all get sorted out eventually.
(((((hugs)))))
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Date: 2026-07-17 02:48 pm (UTC)I will keep reccing. I can't be expected to research each story I read just in case it might be AI-generated in whole or in part.
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Date: 2026-07-17 08:28 am (UTC)hugs So sorry this makes you sad. I always really enjoy your recs whether I read the fics or not. I'm glad you'll keep on making them. Fuck AI, fuck it to death as a wise man once said.
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Date: 2026-07-17 02:48 pm (UTC)It's been super fun to share a fandom with you after all this time, also!!!
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Date: 2026-07-17 10:35 am (UTC)I'm not in the fandom, but have been following the controversy in passing and it's such a bummer.
I've added some stuff to my main AO3 skin that indicates the more blatant ones (html tags that are created when stuff is generated by AI are in the text).
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Date: 2026-07-17 02:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-07-17 10:40 am (UTC)1. Nobody should be coming into your space and telling you that a story you recced is AI-generated.
2. If you enjoyed the story, you enjoyed the story. And that's 100% okay regardless of the method of its creation.
3. I've been reading some of the threads on FFA about the Heated Rivalry AI scandal and the sheer obsession some of those people have with determining whether every single thing they're reading might be AI seems . . . unhealthy at best to me. Like, I don't want to spend my life agonizing over whether a fucking fanfic is "pure" enough to read. If I like it, that's fine. If I don't, I back click. There's some sort of unholy glee about it all that's weird to behold from the outside.
4. There's no surefire way to tell that something's AI-generated. There's just not. I decided a while back that I was not going to kill myself trying to figure out if students were doing it, so why would I do that for some fic where Bilbo goes back to the Shire secretly pregnant with Thorin's baby? Often AI-generated work doesn't really meet the criteria of an assignment, includes hallucinated quotes or plot points or "research," and allows me to fail assignments based on that criteria. I don't have to stress myself out trying to prove that it's AI generated because it's a mess, and I can grade the mess.
5. A lot of the examples of AI-generated writing posted in those threads sound fine to me. I 100% don't see what's wrong with most of them.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
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Date: 2026-07-17 11:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2026-07-17 11:38 am (UTC)It feels like there's no way to win anymore. Like you, I would never use AI in my writing, because that's not the point of fandom. Why skip the part that's fun? Let me know when AI can clean my toilet and take my garbage out, and then I'll start being happy about it. But on the other hand, is it our job to be vigilant all the time for any sign of it? I don't think it is.
I guess... I'm with you in being sad. I want to say 'just enjoy what you enjoy and don't worry about it!' but I'm not in any big fandoms right now so I'm not being hit with this where it really hurts. It's a problem and it sucks, but what can we do but keep on tring to love the things we love?
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Date: 2026-07-17 11:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-07-17 01:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-07-17 02:52 pm (UTC)I just don't like it when people seem to assume that if I am reccing something I should be policing it for AI.
I am not capable of doing that and from what others have said in the thread, it may not be possible. It's so new that people are experimenting with it all over the place and I for one am not interested in experimenting with it and I am also not interested in being the one to write the ethics about it.
I do think the way LLMs were trained on people's copyrighted work without compensation was shitty.
But the rest of it feels way above my paygrade and I appreciate your listing of what may well turn out to be gray areas.
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Date: 2026-07-17 01:45 pm (UTC)If it can be of any consolation I have recced...I think 3 stories so far, that have turned out to be AI.
I too was very bummed to find out. I absolutely do not want to endorse or advertise in any way writing made with AI.
So, I've tried to read a lot on AI writing tells and I've got better at recognising it and have stopped reading a few stories I recognised as AI. But AI is evolving quickly and I doubt I'll be able to keep on top of it. I also wonder if it is sensible to try and keep my anti-AI stance. I dunno. It makes me sad because writing is like art and I really want something human made... but if I can't tell the difference what's the point?
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Date: 2026-07-17 02:54 pm (UTC)I appreciated the comments in this thread from others who have read up on it way more than I have. And apart from the traces left in the code, their consensus is that there is really no way to look for "tells" in the writing itself, especially fiction.
Dead giveways in academic writing or other nonfiction are the hallucinated facts and the fabricated citations, but that doesn't come into play in fiction.
*clings*
I love your recs and dive into them eagerly every time. Thank you for doing it.
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Date: 2026-07-17 03:41 pm (UTC)For them, the fun isn't in the creation, it's in the consumption, with a healthy dose of dopamine for little effort if they get positive feedback from readers.
It's not your fault if you don't catch that something is AI written. They're created by running human written text into a digital woodchipper, so all the supposed tells of AI are also tells of humanity. I have no interest in reading something regurgitated by a computer, but I no it's going to happen, and I very likely won't know it, and can never truly be sure unless the author says so. I love the recs list, because HR is such an active fandom I can't keep up otherwise.
From what I'm reading, AI models are starting to hit walls. The investors that have kept them afloat want a return on investment. The public is getting irritated by it on principle. Even businesses who thought they could fire most of the humans and have AI do the job found out that (a) computers fake it worse than humans, which means the humans have to figure out the mistakes, and (b) the cost for AI is often more than the human employees. The market is not not manifesting in a way that's going to make the kind of money they've promised, so I expect to start seeing bankruptcies and mergers soon. [fingers crossed]
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Date: 2026-07-17 04:34 pm (UTC)So glad you are enjoying the recs and thank you for the work you are doing on the comm!!!
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Date: 2026-07-17 04:31 pm (UTC)Still, I have a lot of people in my life and at work who use AI for writing business stuff and also for writing personal things because they struggle with english. I use it a lot at work to draft and rewrite work things where I give no damns about the work and it is the equivalent of mass-produced sandwiches. And right now I'm trying to get B. to practice for his exam and for his english writing in general and he's used AI and we went over using AI *after* writing first to help mark it, but never to write the first draft because then he won't learn as quickly as he needs to. There's a huge thing coming with people not learning things because it's easier to use the machine - and just like we have calculators, we still gotta understand arithmetic as little kids first before we get them.
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Date: 2026-07-17 04:38 pm (UTC)The thing that seems to be helpful to them and not counterproductive is when they feed THEIR OWN CONTENT into the LLMs for a specific purpose. Not just using all the slop that is out there that the LLMs were trained on. It's all very over my head but I have learned a lot listening to them about the upsides of this software.
For fanfiction I truly don't see the purpose, and I appreciate others' speculations about what motivates writers who use it. Your metaphor of the styrofoam cake seems perfect!
Thank you for weighing in; you are definitely an expert here and I appreciate your persepective very much.
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Date: 2026-07-17 05:39 pm (UTC)I have no intention of using it, partially because it wouldn't write like me, even with tuning, and mostly because the fun of fan-creation is in the creating, not in how swiftly it gets to 1,000 kudos or similar.
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Date: 2026-07-17 08:28 pm (UTC)I have not followed the discussion on fail fandom anon about all this but apparently it's intense.
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Date: 2026-07-17 06:12 pm (UTC)If I'd written my stories last year instead of 30 years ago, I'm certain that someone would find my em dashes, sentence structure, and vocabulary choices suspicious. The likelihood of witch-hunting is real, especially when the accusers are unsophisticated readers (to put it charitably) and are looking for easy and infallible tells.
I posted a very enthusiastic rec in another fandom a few months back, and I was told by a reader that it was "definitely AI" because the author had joined AO3 just a few months before posting. That's the first time I've heard length of AO3 tenure cited as evidence of AI use! Everything in the author's subject matter, structure, style, and execution (to my editor's eye as well as my reader's eye) denoted originality and skill, and I HATE the idea that the author is being disparaged.
To quote Amalthia, "I'm going to read stories in good faith and recommend the stories I liked." I hope you'll continue to do the same. Hugs.
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Date: 2026-07-17 08:30 pm (UTC)I cannot and will not start policing the fic I read. I can't take that on. I take no pleasure in the whole discussion. I just want to read about Shane and Ilya and have fun.
New people join AO3 all the fucking time!!! FOR THE PURPOSE OF POSTING THEIR FIC. WHICH THEY MAY HAVE JUST STARTED WRITING BECAUSE OF FALLING IN LOVE WITH A NEW OR OLD FANDOM.
JESUS CHRIST ON A POGO STICK.
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Date: 2026-07-17 06:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-07-17 08:31 pm (UTC)There are alot of thinky and helpful replies in this thread and that is making me feel better.
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