OK so. The AI writing crisis came to a head for me this past week after "The Serpent in the Grove," a short story that was pretty clearly AI-generated, won the Caribbean regional title for the Commonwealth Prize. This felt like a big ole punch in the face after months and months of wading through Heated Rivalry and hockey RPF fics (mostly willmack) that were IMO clearly AI-generated, and also coming to the heartbreaking realization that some of my absolute favorites, upon re-reading with a more critical eye, were likely also AI-generated.
I have a whole lot of thoughts on this, and I want to break them down into a few different categories:
The etiquette of calling out/discussing suspected AI-generated fics.
The most common AI tells and patterns.
How to apply that knowledge productively instead of going off half-cocked and accusing someone of using AI when they've only used a couple suspect phrases or constructions.
The Etiquette of Calling Out/Discussing AI-Generated Fics
The first and most important rule is: please, for the love of God, do not confront the author directly and publicly in the comments of the fic or on their social media feed or whatever, unless they did something that removes all doubt like accidentally leave a prompt in the fic.
This rule exists and matters because you cannot know if you're correct. You can achieve some percentage of certainty but it's never gonna be 100%, and genuinely for something like this, the psychic damaged caused by a false accusation far, far outweighs whatever feeling of vindication etc. you may feel from calling out someone you feel is cheating the system and lying to people.
Like, I get it! I loathe AI with a fiery passion (I deeply regret my brief embrace of StableDiffusion a few years ago when it felt like a fun new toy instead of the curse it actually is). But nobody's actually committing an actual crime here? Being fooled sucks and so does stolen valor; I have ADHD and the strong preoccupation with justice that can sometimes tag along with that particular strain of brain bees, so for real, it feels bad for me, too, but also: have some empathy. Consider what it would feel like if you went nuclear on somebody and you were wrong.
As a corollary to that: don't be abusive. First of all, why do it? Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of being a bitch (literally was Internet-famous for this for several years!) but not for hurting people needlessly. If you need to let off steam, do it in your groupchat. And second of all, at this point I want people to admit that they're using fucking AI and tag accordingly, which means being both gentler and craftier in constructing your arguments. Getting people to stop would be ideal but yelling abuse at them directly probably isn't the best way to do this? And once again: what if you're wrong?
That doesn't mean you can't talk about suspected AI-generated fics. In my ideal world, it would be possible to have like, an evidence-based discussion on a space away from the author where you get to break down, piece by piece, why you think something is AI-generated writing. This achieves a few things:
It provides room for rebuttal and debate. People might view things different than you do! A lot of the work is pattern-recognition and learning how LLMs tend to construct sentences and stories, which inherently means a good sprinkling of Vibes.
It sharpens your critical reading skills. Having to justify why you think something is AI-generated not only helps you hone your detection capabilities, it forces you to confront things like: how strong of an argument can you make? Is this just awkward writing, or someone who's never experienced an ejaculating penis making some wild-ass conjectures, etc., or is this for real AI-generated prose?
Does this sound like work? I mean, yeah, it is. But if you're interested in stemming the tide of AI-generated fics, I do think it's important to put the work in. Sharpen your mind and your pen. (Or, uh, keyboard?) You're gonna need it.
Common AI Tells and Patterns
First of all, if you haven't watched this video about why the novel Shy Girl is almost definitely AI-generated, watch it now. It's detailed and instructive and it will expose you to the most common rhythms and patterns of AI-generated prose.
What follows below is by no means an exclusive list, but they are, IMO, the most common AI tells:
"Not x, not y, but z" sentences
This is probably one of theee most popular sentence constructions for ChatGPT and Claude. They exist in a few different variants; I'm pulling some examples from "The Serpent in the Grove":
Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound – as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there.
He speaks – not to saints or ghosts, but to a living listening.
Shame is a substance he felt on his skin. It itches. It doesn’t rinse.
Not for anything she did wrong, but for how exactly she fitted the life that fenced him in: the quiet chores, the patient hands, the unlit lamp.
This isn't even all the examples from the story! I found this by merely doing a CTRL+F for the word "not." (I'd previously read the story—attentively, even!—and in the process plumbed heretofore undiscovered depths of hater-dom in my heart.)
Paragraphs that are basically a phrase or two followed by an illustrative list
Bonus if the illustrative list contains some kind of inscrutable metaphor. This one's best defined by example. Here are a few from "The Serpent in the Grove":
His eyes narrowed against the glare outside and the darker glare inside him: old promises that never ripened, the ache where hope should live, a gnawing sense that land can own a man while making him swear the land belongs to him.
What burned there wasn’t begging. It wasn’t love. It was older, lower, a coal that hadn’t died in the poor ash of their marriage: a blue flame saying plain, I see you.
Halfway to dying, the big preachments – God, Fate, the Ordeal of Woman – gave way to small things: a child’s laugh chasing a yard fowl, how light falls on a cup, a line of ants crossing a bowl you meant to wash.
In one bright click he saw his future rearrange: Zoongie evaporating like sweat, rum courage scuttling, a policeman’s hand on his shoulder, a magistrate’s eyes not meeting his, a boy grown without a mother narrowing his eyes at the world.
Metaphors and similes constructed using "the way", "in the way that," "in a way"
It's truly instructive, IMO, to do a search for how often "the way" and "in a way" for a fic you suspect is AI. Note, however, that this is specifically for phrases that include metaphor and simile. Phrases that use "the way" to indicate direction, position, or compliance, .e.g., "She showed him the way out" or "He never did things the way he was supposed to," or even "She missed the way he used to kiss her" are exempt. Some examples from, well, guess where:
She wore the island’s mixed bloodlines like a crown – African in the hips, Spanish in the cheekbone, East Indian in the hair when the rain kinked it, Carib in the way her gaze could bless and warn at once.
Big in the way of women who never apologise to furniture, she had a laugh that shook dust from joists and a voice that could soften to coax a child from a ledge.
She noticed the fresh-cut path and the way land bore witness. People talk about bush like it dumb. But bush keeps memory the way hair keeps scent.
On the second haul, the board beneath her shifted the way a tired man shifts in his sleep.
It wasn’t the words but the way they split the day into before and after.
If you ask him, he shrugs the way men shrug when feeling places a hand on the neck and says be still.
A preoccupation with the rule of three
Listen, I fuckin' love a rule of three. I use rules of three all the time. But I do not love rules of three nearly as much as fucking LLMs do. Again, from "The Serpent in the Grove":
Inside, air clung thick as porridge skin: damp earth, woodsmoke, and the sour tang of fermenting cocoa.
He knew every root that tripped a foot, the snake-curve of run-off, the brittle crumble after drought.
No fan, no bulb, no hum – only the thin light slipping between warped boards and the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.
He could name the price of rice in the shop, the price buyers would give for wet cocoa, and how the distance between the two left a man short.
One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.
Hair tumbling wild, a dress that caught and released light, laughter with iron under it.
The rum made a spilled drink a signal, a brush of hand a promise, a sorry whispered near his ear an invitation.
This is just from the first third or so of the story! This story feels like 40% rules of three by volume. A bananas amount even for my rule of three-loving ass. I'd attempt a tally of exactly how many rules of three turn up, but I want to retain my will to live.
A love of certain words and constructions
This one's a bit tricky because these are all perfectly cromulent words that human beings like to use, too, but AI really really loves using them over and over again.
Hum. No, for real. Things hum all the time in AI-generated fiction. Everything from reasonable things (people, insects) to things that are a bit more of a stretch (appliances and objects that don't really actually make a humming noise) to intangibles (silences, distance, time, emotions, etc.)
Things being split into before and after
Large spaces (rooms, the ground) metaphorically tilting, usually only a little bit
Everything smells like something all the time. Hockey rinks in particular smell like something burnt, or popcorn, or Zamboni exhaust. Shout-out to the fic I tried to read one time that mentioned how the locker room smelled of stick tape. For real, stick tape??? Sid Crosby didn't spend decades cultivating his rotting jock for this kind of sweat-stink and rancid crotch erasure!!!
A preoccupation with bones. Something is felt in the bones, or etched, written, stored in them, or becomes bone, etc. etc. And yes yes who doesn't love a good bone metaphor but I've seen it often enough now in fics that are both confirmed and suspected AI-generated that too many figurative bone references make me scan for AI tells. A friend and I have also started seeing the nickname Bones showing up for OC hockey side characters, too, but TBD if that's a for real pattern.
Metaphors that seem beautiful and meaningful at first but rapidly fall apart as soon as you poke at them. Scroll up to the passages I've quoted from "The Serpent in the Grove" and you'll see an embarrassment of riches. "The breath of the hills holding their heat like a secret." Bruh, what?
The names Marcus Webb/Chen and Sarah Chen, as well as a handful of others (Elara, Volkov). Straight-up if the fic has a Marcus Webb or Sarah Chen, it's gonna be AI-generated, please trust. This is an immense bummer for me, a Chinese person who knows exactly how common the last name Chen is.
Bodies doing Extremely Weird Shit, and action, especially something that requires a lot of tracking of where things are in space, sliding into and out of focus chaotically. Sex scenes can be especially cursed; I've read a few where I had to continually back up and make sure that the limbs were still limb-ing and the positions were, in fact, where I thought they should've been.
To give you a concrete example: In "The Serpent in the Grove," there's a part where a character, Sita, falls down a well, and it is literally impossible to track what is going on. She moves the boards away from the mouth of the well so she can draw water, but then she stands...on top of the boards she's just moved...that are somehow still placed over the well...because that's somehow a sane and cool way to draw well water? Instead of kneeling on the solid ground next to the well, she's standing on some rotting boards placed directly over the giant hole in the ground? Later, when she's rescued, something happens to her leg, but it morphs from what sounds like a bruise to a cut/gash to possibly a compound fracture. It's never entirely clear. It's bad enough that it gives her a scar and lifelong limp, though.
Go ahead and read the story if you like, and if you can figure out what Sita's position was relative to the well when she fell and what happened to her leg, please enlighten me. I have been haunted by this since last week, and it has to rate as one of the stupidest things I've ever been preoccupied by.
This one's hard to articulate properly and thoroughly, but I'm gonna try anyway: there are a lot of weird mistakes at a big-picture level (continuity errors and bad blocking are the two big ones) but zero sentence-level mistakes.
You can't, in my experience, have one without the other.
Like. Have I accidentally written too many limbs during a sex scene? Yes. Have I forgotten what color somebody's eyes were supposed to be? Lol yes. Did I lose track of where somebody was in a room and accidentally teleported them to an entirely different part of the house? Oh you betcha. (Ey, check it out, rule of three! Not the first one by any means, but my wordiest.) But all of those mistakes were also accompanied by SPAG errors (dropping words, especially verbs, and swapping out words that sound sort of similar to what I want but are emphatically not correct are my specialty💅).
That's because these errors come from writing quickly or a lack of attention. SPAG-free sentences are the result of careful editing, but if you're editing this carefully, why aren't you catching how your character is lying flat on their stomach but somehow their nipples are visible to the person crouched behind them?
Like I said, this is by no means a complete list, but it will cover probably 90% of the useful tells for AI-generated fic.
Things that aren't, IMO, evidence for AI-generated fic, or at least are weak evidence at best:
Authors getting canon details wrong
Characterization you don't agree with
An overwrought style/purple prose
Writing that you don't enjoy
I really want to push back at this last point, actually, because I think it's currently the biggest obstacle for people detecting AI-generated fic. Immediately going "all AI writing is bad" (as in: something that you won't enjoy reading) handicaps your ability to spot AI prose in the wild. The fact is, a lot of human-written prose is terrible, which automatically makes "writing I dislike is more likely to be AI-generated" a horrible benchmark.
LLMs will occasionally generate pleasing or beautiful sentences. A lot of their metaphors are full-on uncanny valley terrible, but some of them will fucking hit—not only because of the sheer quantity of prose AI is capable of generating, but because of the inherent nature of subjective experience. Some people have a high tolerance for florid language or weird metaphor (it's me, I'm people). Others dislike it. That doesn't tell us anything about whether the writing is AI-generated or not.
Nobody wants to admit they liked slop, much less loved it so much that they recced it to everybody they knew. I had to go back on some of my recs and it was fuckin' painful.
If you've read extensively in Heated Rivalry and willmack, I can pretty much guarantee you that you've loved at least one AI-generated fic. It's not an indictment of our taste or discernment, but of the integrity of these assholes who are using AI to do their work and lying about it.
Also, I need to mention that detailed disclaimers in a fic about how it shouldn't be used to train AI mean absolutely nothing. Please, I beg of you, think about this for one second and you'll see exactly how meaningless this gesture is. You really think someone who's already passing off their work as human-written when it was AI-generated would hesitate to add an anti-AI statement?
How to use these AI tells productively
It's never about any one thing (except for the Marcus Webb/Sarah Chen thing. Also possibly an unhinged pace of writing sustained for many many months). It's about:
The frequency of these tells, and
It's circumstantial evidence all the way down, baby! Which means you need to amass quite a bit of it to make a case. "The Serpent in the Grove" reads like it was barely human-edited at all, hence the sheer density of AI tells. A lot of fics are going to be more subtle about it, especially the ones that have been edited to sound more human. It's infuriating, but there's truly no good way of detecting that particular class of fic. All you can hope is for the author to feel a hollow sense of achievement, knowing that their fic is popular, not because they've worked hard at their craft or are an actual good writer, but because they were willing to cheat wildly while making the planet just that much worse along the way—all for the sake of some fuckin' kudos and comments.
So yeah. The AI fics you can most easily pick out are going to be the low-effort slop pieces that people generated and threw up there with little to no editing. Lucky for us there are quite a few of those floating around AO3 🫠.
I hope this was helpful! It's been driving me crazy that the attitude towards AI-generated fic has defaulted to "eh just click away and move on" and "everyone who tries to point out AI tells is engaging in a witch-hunt." We need to talk about it, if only to educate people.
Read closely, read critically.
Don't engage with the authors directly if you suspect something.
It's (almost) never just one thing. It's about a whole bunch of tells stacked up such that it becomes increasingly improbable that the fic wasn't AI-generated.
If you feel compelled to make a case in a public forum, yeah, sure, make a case—but present your evidence, and brace yourself to be proven wrong.
