red dit.c om/r/heated rivalryfanfics/comments/1uj ats8/megathread_claude_ ai_code_found_ in_fics/
watching this from afar but thought you might find this interesting...i personally don't use AI in fanfic bc well that's not the joy of it to me + environmental concerns but this is so fascinating to me - i didn't know how widespread ai use was in fic but also the fact that people feel like they need to use ai! and all the people in the comments who are either vindicated that they knew it was ai from the writing and the people who are very disappointed by it...i think this is going to result in witchhunting and fandom drama but i think we're going to see more of these posts sadly
god i'm sorry but i'm so sick of this shit. completely unnecessary and the endless disclaimers about "this is not for harrassment" and "we are just trying to help people make ethical choices" and the claim this is supposed to get people to tag their fics for having used ai combined with language about "ai corrupting fan spaces" is extremely fucking disingenuous lmao. you cannot in one breath use supercharged language about "corruption" and "real human connection" and then in the other claim you are not shaming people. the shame is baked into these moralised judgements about the "corruption" of fandom and "real" connection. this is exactly the sort of deeply slimy two-faced shit that i absolutely abhorr.
i am going to say several things now that i have been saying in private for months. i am going to sound judgemental, but frankly, if you're sitting on your moral high horse passing down judgements about people you can take it. you cannot talk shit without expecting to get hit (as i almost certainly expect to w this, tho obvs i am switching anon off in a couple of hours bc fuck that noise).
1) i genuinely and truly believe that call outs like this are far more corrosive to fandom than minding your own business or feeling sad because you got got by some mid claude generated prose. all this does is foster an atmosphere of paranoia, hypervigilance, increased scrutiny and systemised unpersoning & dehumanisation of "immoral" and "deceptive" others. in every single case i have seen where someone is deemed to have used ai to create a fanwork, i have only seen people gleeful that they actually finally have a "moral" target they can get mad about and rip to complete shreds sans consequence and sans repercussion.
2) this is the literally most counterproductive way to get people to tag their fics for ai use. once again, i point to the shrill insistence that fandom is about Real Human Connection and the language of "corruption" - do you think these are neutral terms? are you incredibly naive and foolish? these are words loaded with shame. the subtext of all these statements is: if you aren't putting your own real blood and sweat into this work of art, you are corrupting and poisoning fandom. in one breath you are invoking both the protestant work ethic and its moralisms and dirt/purity binaries in relation to literal humanness and being part of community. shaming has literally never worked in the history of anything to get people to adhere to something. if you want people to tag their ai fics, you, person who gets upset at the concept of being "tainted", have to manage your own big feelings and create a space where using ai is a morally neutral thing* and where engaging with ai created works does not make you a fandom outcast.
3) i do think some reflection is in order to contemplate why people even feel the need to turn to ai to create fic. what are the circumstances that produce such a feeling? let's think about this, for a moment, with some empathy. do people feel like they need to create something in order to participate in fandom? if so, why do they believe that? are there certain ideas that we entrench viz. artists and writers as "real" fandom and everyone else as "second class" members of fandom? (lbr, this statement is implicit in a lot of posts that go around about how authors deserve more comments. ask for feedback by all means; but the insistence that there is a "real" fandom and implicitly therefore, a fandom which does not matter, which is not productive, which does not contribute and therefore make fandom "real" are ideas which i simply think is point blank wrong. merely being in fandom IS fandom.) if people feel the need to create, why do they believe merely writing it out themselves is not enough? are they afraid of "failing" as writers? why? do they feel they're not good enough to make art? why? if they believe this is the only way they can make friends and have community? if so, why? the answers to all of these questions, in my opinion, at least partly indicts fandom culture at present and should call for some serious self-reflection!
4) genuinely WHAT harm is being done to you by the existence of an unlabelled ai fic? what actual harm? why does it hurt you so much? what are you feeling so deceived about? yes i get that you come to fandom for human connection, but what about a fic writer using an llm actually precludes there being a person behind the fic? what specifically is upsetting you? can you actually sit with your feelings and identify what specifically you're mad about?
5) now for my really mean and problematic opinion :) : i frankly believe half the "distressed" feelings about being "deceived" by ai use are because people have created a moral identity out of not reading or using ai which butts straight up against their tastes in fanfiction running heavily towards the kind of deeply ubiquitous ao3 house style fic which almost certainly underpins LLM data training sets. in making a whole moral personality out of something which directly implicates your taste, you fabricate an insecurity which must be excised: what better way than by turning it outwards to claim that you were deceived and taken in and therefore, that the deceiver has committed some unspecified crime against fandom and must be sent into the proverbial corner? there are exactly two solutions to this. either you become more confident about your taste and you own it and you also own the recognition that this kind of prose is pretty easy to generate using an llm; or you develop a taste for the difficult, which is currently more difficult to generate using an llm but most probably will not be in a couple of years (i'm not being a doomer here, but realistic. at some point llm capacity will cross the threshold of what even a canny reader will be able to identify).
6) i think we could all do with a good hefty dose of a) DON'T LIKE DON'T READ and b) MINDING OUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS
*i am literally uninterested in debating whether or not ai is morally bad, i do not believe that anti-ai politics is a real or meaningful politics. if you care about its environmental impact please go out and do something about it instead of yelling at people on the internet. if you care about labour rights, please go and do something about it instead of yelling at individuals on the internet. i care about economic extractivism, exploitation and imperialism, all of which ai is implicated in yes - but which a lot of other industries (most industries, ngl) are implicated in as well. merely removing "ai" will not solve any of the problems that we are facing. if you want ai fics to be filterable, you have to deal with the fact that the correct strategy is to make it morally neutral and to some degree acceptable, much in the same way that the noncon and underage labels on ao3 are morally neutral statements about the content of a fic. the question is whether or not you strategically want something or if you want your moral jollies.
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