I will agree that wheezingwheeler did not deserve hate mail in terms of death threats or violence. BUT she DOES deserve scrutiny and to be called out for it. Why is the fandom so intent on sweeping criticism under a rug? It’s crazy to me that people are so willing to take her word for it when she lied about it before, and when there IS PROOF that she used AI and not in a pattern consistent with mere “grammar fixing” (more on that later) we need to get more comfortable sitting with the discomfort of fair and equitable scrutiny. No, I will not condone or incite violence but civil discourse and reprimand is sometimes necessary, especially when there is no other way to police this. I do not want to accept any amount of ai use in creative spaces, and so I won’t stay quiet about it.
I for one, do not readily believe wheezingwheeler’s explanation, and here’s why:
- It took her a long time to address this and she did it in a way that gives her a chance to minimize and polish her impact
- Her apology came out on the same day as a fic she’s known to be competitive about updates
- She didn’t update her tags to say something like “ai assisted” after unhiding her hidden work
- She didn’t solicit a beta reader when her fic was so popular that she could have easily found someone (one of her friends/mutuals perhaps) to check grammar
- She didn’t start using the “grammar” checker until after chapter 6
- Claude artifacts in question are used irregularly. If you are checking grammar you don’t suddenly decide to use a checker on random chapters. The pattern is not consistent with someone looking to check grammar for their entire fic because they are insecure about their grasp of the English language
- She reposted instead of deleting the story completely which is inconsistent with the claim that she “learned her lesson”. She ghosted all her accounts and turned comments off, cementing her claim as the number 3 byler fic on ao3 with no way to respond, reprimand, or demand accountability. It’s convenient when her statement gets to stand as the last word. So we are left with only the option of calling her out on fan spaces and educating each other
- Her initial dishonesty about Ai use doesn’t give me any reason to trust her now. And it doesn’t seem like an honest mistake when you lie about it, knowing that it’s frowned upon to use Ai.
I’ll also address the fallacies present in OP’s argument:
- Just because you can’t think of a reason for a fanfic writer to use ai doesn’t mean there isn’t one. (And I can think of several!)
- Claude artifacts in the coding didn’t show up in the fic until after the point Op stopped reading.
- Not everyone is claiming that it was entirely written by ai. In fact all the claims I have seen are that there were over 500 instances of copy/pasted Claude artifacts in the entire fic, which is verifiable. I went and looked at the html code myself and searched “Claude” in the finder and found that claim to be correct.
- Checking the code of an internet page html is NOT the same as running the fic through an ai checker, do your homework.
- I’ll state it again because OP was very passionate about the point that English as a second or third language writers need ai grammar checkers to improve their English: you do not need to run your fic through an ai grammar checker when the fandom is full to the brim with creatives willing to SPAG read for you for free, and organically. Also, if fanfic is a labor of love as OP claimed, I promise you don’t need to have a perfect grammatically correct fic to post. Hell, I’ve been in fandom for years and had mutuals beta check my work and STILL miss errors but it’s not the end of the world. I’ve even attempted to write characters in a variant of my language that I am not a native speaker of, and asked mutuals from that country to “britpick” my work. It feels so much better to say I did something myself and didn’t resort to ai, which is unethical, bad for the environment, and the death of creativity and critical thinking. I’ve read so much amazing fic from authors who don’t have English as a first language and it’s not always perfect or translated exactly to fit english customs or colloquialisms, but it’s still beautiful as it is.
- “Attacking people is completely unhelpful” it IS helpful to be critical if it’s to call out bad behavior and to make it clear that we as a fandom won’t merely perform outrage and then quickly sweep it under the rug.
