So it has come to my attention that this post has made it to X and I want to just clear up a couple of things.
I am not a mod on AO3. I do not have any kind of power over other people's fics. I posted a comment on Vital Signs asking if the author used AI and when they played dumb I pointed out that it reads exactly like AI and they had posted 350k words of it in a month. To be clear, EvanHart deleted their own fic. I had/have no way to force someone else to.
My goal in confronting EvanHart was not to get their fic taken down, I just wanted them to tag it as AI generated work. So for people who still want to read it, and no longer have access, sorry. That wasn't really my intention.
I did not immediately smell AI and start campaigning to get the fic taken down. I did verify that the writing read as extremely similar to/identical to how AI writes prompted fanfiction with a friend who's much better at sussing that kind of thing out than me.
I want to walk y'all through a bit of the process behind how I knew the fic was AI:
The fic had a tendency to only write short, cut off sentences, and to repeat things that we had just learned. Or to repeat the structures of whole chapters - for example there were multiple completely interchangeable exchanges between Leon and his coworkers. And then the one between Albert and Jill could have easily been between Leon and Dana as well.
Every conversation ultimately started to feel the same. Especially all of the supporting cast seemed to be interchangable. They all had the same voice.
There were no grounding details of RESE that I would expect. Which is a really minor issue, but it was a supporting detail.
The rule of threes was consistently used in any long description, along with the "not just this, but that" that AI is so fond of. (He wasn't just patient, he was also steady, kind, and solid.)
350k words in roughly a month is not an output that I would expect anyone to be able to manage. (The author claimed they wrote it over winter break. So six months ago they wrote 350k in the span of two weeks according to the official story.) However, while the author was writing Vital Signs, they were also working on multiple other longfics for other fandoms. And at that point, it would be absurd to claim anyone could produce this much writing.
Most damning, my friend and I compared Vital Signs's writing style to EvanHart's oldest fic, and there's no comparison. They do not read like they're written by the same authors at all. While writing styles do tend to change, the older fics had a deep richness to it.
The fact that within 5 minutes of me calling EvanHart out on their AI use, they had voluntarily deleted the work (and a couple of others from what I saw) and even rebranded their account is just the nail in the coffin for me, because there's no reason an innocent person would react that way.
EvanHart, if you're reading this, you should have more faith in your work. What I read of your earlier fics was far superior to what a computer could ever make. I hope you keep writing, and take this as a lesson rather than the end of your career as a fanfiction author.
janainaart
areudirty
kianamaiart
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
vaporwave
romaincrisis
