'A popular fanfic author stopped updating her fic because she said that the stress of being constantly falsely accused of using AI was a witch hunt and it was destroying her mental health to the extent that she needed to take a break from writing, leading to multiple online discussions defending her and debates about AI accusations and how You Can't Really Tell So Leave Her Alone, and then someone realised that there were Claude coding artefacts in her fics and that it was a super pervasive problem in that particular fandom, proven definitively by looking at the source coding of each work on AO3, and she denied it for a bit but then ultimately admitted that oopsie, she had been using genAI all along, and then she deleted all of her fics off AO3 and people got mad because they were being denied access to their favourite fics, even though they now knew definitively that they were genAI slop, and then it turned out that she'd actually stopped updating the fic on AO3 in the first place because she'd been shopping it around to agents and editors as an original work with the serial numbers filed off, and she'd been in conversations with a publisher which ultimately got dropped because she'd lied to them about her AI use' oh cool, so we're in Hell, then
Let me be clear: if you use AI to write fanfic, paticularly if you do so in the hopes of snapping up a tradpub deal off the basis of the popularity of your worthless slop, then you are an absolute grade A ding-dong, and may the vengeful spirits of our beloved Spirk Elders haunt you via the medium of perpetual papercuts forevermore.
I am unaware of who this is referring to and feel like a small fishing boat that just saw the dorsal fin of Leviathan off the starboard bow
That is so extremely valid, and truly I wish that I had not myself plunged into the depths and seen the truth of the Leviathan (a gigantic plastic fish effigy that's broken off a derelict Fish & Chip shop and washed into the Atlantic: a harbinger of doom in its own synthetic tongue)
So many lessons in fandom and life boil down to make your own works for love of the game, don't go looking for ways to be an asshole to people, don't lie when people ask you something that challenges you to be better, and don't fucking cheat.
and then someone realised that there were Claude coding artefacts in her fics and that it was a super pervasive problem in that particular fandom, proven definitively by looking at the source coding of each work on AO3
I.... hang on. Wouldn't looking at the source code of the work on AO3... just give you AO3's source code?
Like a coding artifact can be in a program. For vibe-coded stuff, it looks like GenAI's usual conversational flattery. But in a fic? A fic doesn't have any coding in it. Where are artifacts supposed to go? You wouldn't have to look at 'source code', they'd just end up as nonsense parts of the text body.
Looking it up and there's someone on Twitter who compared instances of editing via the Wayback machine? Is that's what's meant as "coding artifacts", specific phrasing that was later revised?
Like if the author admitted to it then that's a done deal. But be accurate in what sources information comes from, okay?
Why not look shit up with your own two eyeballs before spouting bollocks all over my own blessèd post like the world's premier bollock fountain?
I'll do the work for you, because you're clearly not someone who can be bothered with doing something as simple as 'basic due diligence' before trying to be snarky on main: copying text directly from Claude embeds specific HTML artefacts - for example, prompt and response markers - that become visible when you look at the AO3 source code of a fic.
To be specific, Claude labels all generated text output with a CSS class - font-claude-response-body - which essentially tells the word processor / text editor etc how to display the output. By inspecting the source code of a fic on AO3, these artefacts become discoverable and searchable, and serve as definitive proof that the fic was either generated or edited with Claude. These artefacts are only present if the text was copied and pasted directly from Claude into the AO3 text editor; they're not present if the text was copied and pasted into an interim text editor or word processor first. People have been caught out on LinkedIn in similar circumstances if they blindly copy and paste without realising that the artefacts are present in the output.
You could have discovered this by, ooh, approximately 10 seconds on your search engine of choice, but nope. 'Be accurate in what sources information comes from, okay?' is the most patronising way I've ever seen anyone phrase 'I'm way too fucking lazy to look this shit up, can someone please do it for me while I just posture for ten minutes instead?'



















