PSA for people who might not know: @glimmerfics is a site that uses AI to produce choose-your-own-adventure fics. an author on the site writes a little bit, and then AI slop fills in the rest. a reader gets some free ‘turns’, and then they have to pay for more. Glimmer profits both off of fanfiction and AI slop.
Glimmer claims to partially ‘offset’ the environmental harm through purchasing carbon offsets. they claim to care about artistry and cite sharing the concern of AI in fandom, but immediately throw it away with some bullshit excuse about only using AI as a ‘tool’, because they ‘don't believe machines can replace human creativity’. they also claim that their goal of butchering man-made art via injecting randomized AI slop into it is because they ‘want to live in a world where more people are making art, not fewer’. sinisterly hollow sentiments, all of it.
i am sick of AI-shills co-opting accessibility arguments to justify causing harm. art is HUMAN MADE. across ages, across abilities, across every single human variable, art can and does persist. this language spits in the face of every disabled artist. every poor person creating in the spaces between. every marginalized person crafting art under oppression. AI does not make art accessible, because it does not make art period.
AI is not a tool, it is a miserable disaster and a despicable weapon. it wreaks havoc on local communities where data centers are built. people dying at rapid rates from cancers and other preventable illnesses directly related to air, water, and land pollution. it is forcing states to go into droughts from stealing all the fresh, drinkable water. it is kicking people out of their careers and preying on vulnerable populations to work for them. it is stealing and scraping people's work, and stealing people's REAL art, including other fanfic authors who do not consent. it is also wildly inaccurate. it also sends people into psychosis and causes them to end their lives.
sites like Glimmer normalize all of that violence, and how they try to wrap it in a velvet bow further normalizes, erases, and justifies it. as an artist who sits at the intersection of many of the identities these AI-proponents claim to be helping, I am appalled. i know many others are too. it's imperative we call out leeches like these in creative spaces.
i don't give a fuck if Glimmer responds and says whatever PR statement they think will be ‘transparent’ and help weasel their way out of real accountability. i don’t care if they say every bit of money goes back into developing the site: any site that uses generative AI in fandom spaces should not exist. especially not with charging users money in direct exchange for fanfiction. it puts the entire fandom community at risk. it mocks and endangers what they insist they care about.
i don't care what reasoning, anecdotes, placation, loopholes, dismissals, or logical fallacies they may employ to rationalize their platform in their potential response to this post. the entire foundation of their business is actively causing harm to the world and the community they claim to love. unless they stop using generative AI entirely (and stop monetizing fanfiction), whatever they say is hollow. these people know they can get away with it, they have users who either don't know the damage AI causes or don't care, and have people singing the praises of the platform. a lot of people applaud bad things. it doesn't make them any less bad.
there are valid ways to create ACTUAL choose your own adventure fics that do not perpetuate violence and oppression (like Twine!). Glimmer can dig their heads in the sand and pretend they're paving a path all they want, but it's a path to hell.
FUCK AI and fuck opportunists. please repost to spread the word, because i've even run across some of these 'fics' and their posts in the wild and been swindled.
With all the AI-generated writing flooding AO3 (in some fandoms more than others) and the Internet in general, I'm curious if readers can distinguish between human-written prose and AI-generated prose. Of the four options below, one is a chengwei fanfic written by me, and the rest are written by AI.
Can you tell which one is human? Poll at the bottom if you'd like to vote!
Option A
Chi Cheng woke to the urgent pressure of his bladder and the pale gray light of early morning. He fumbled out of bed, still half-dreaming, and shuffled down the hallway in his rumpled sleep shirt and boxers. His eyes were barely open, his thoughts formless and slow.
The bathroom door was closed. He leaned against the wall to wait, scratching absently at his stomach.
The door opened. Suo Wei emerged in a cloud of steam, hair damp and skin flushed from the shower. He stopped short when he saw Chi Cheng.
"Morning," Chi Cheng mumbled, moving to step past him.
"Wait." Suo Wei's voice came out strange—thin and stretched tight. "Chi Cheng, I—"
Chi Cheng blinked at him, wondering distantly if something was wrong. Suo Wei looked odd. His hands were clenched at his sides, knuckles white. His jaw was set in that way it got when he was forcing himself through something difficult, like the time he'd given that presentation with food poisoning, or when his mom had been in the hospital and he'd insisted on going to their exam anyway.
"What's wrong?" Chi Cheng asked, sleep falling away.
Suo Wei's throat worked. His eyes were fixed somewhere near Chi Cheng's collarbone, refusing to meet his gaze. When he spoke, his voice shook despite the obvious effort to steady it.
"I love you."
Chi Cheng stared at him. The words hung in the narrow hallway between them, incomprehensible at first, like hearing a familiar phrase in the wrong language.
"I love you," Suo Wei repeated, quieter now. His breathing was uneven. "I'm—I'm sorry, I just needed to tell you. You don't have to say anything, you don't have to—I know you don't feel the same way, I just—"
He was trembling. Actually trembling. Chi Cheng had known Suo Wei for eighteen years—had seen him break his arm falling out of a tree without crying, had watched him stand up to bullies twice his size—and he had never seen him look this terrified.
"Wei-ge," Chi Cheng said softly, but he didn't know what came after that. His mind was still catching up, still processing. Love. Not friendship-love. Real love. The kind that made Suo Wei's voice crack and his hands shake.
The kind that changed everything.
Option B
Chi Cheng woke to the dull gray of early morning and the insistent pressure of a full bladder.
He groaned softly, dragged an arm over his face, and lay there for a few seconds trying to convince his body to go back to sleep. No luck. The pressure only got worse.
“Ugh…”
He rolled out of bed, hair sticking up in several directions, and shuffled toward the hallway in a pair of loose sweatpants. The apartment was quiet. Too quiet for Suo Wei to be awake, which meant Chi Cheng could pee in peace without having to listen to him ramble about some random video he’d watched at three in the morning.
Half-asleep, he pushed the bathroom door open—
—and immediately collided with a solid body.
“Oof—”
“Ah—!”
Chi Cheng blinked blearily as Suo Wei stumbled back a step, grabbing the doorframe to steady himself. Suo Wei was fully dressed—jeans, hoodie, sneakers tied. His backpack was slung over one shoulder like he was about to leave.
At… six in the morning?
Chi Cheng frowned. “Why are you—”
“I love you.”
The words dropped into the quiet hallway like a brick.
Chi Cheng blinked again, slower this time.
“…What?”
Suo Wei looked like he’d just jumped off a cliff and realized halfway down that he couldn’t fly.
His shoulders were stiff, his hands clenched tight around the strap of his backpack. He wasn’t looking at Chi Cheng—he was staring somewhere near Chi Cheng’s collarbone, breathing like he’d just run up five flights of stairs.
“I—” Suo Wei’s voice cracked. He swallowed and tried again. “I love you.”
There was a faint tremor in his voice. Not dramatic. Not loud. But unmistakable.
Chi Cheng stared at him.
It took a second for the words to actually process.
Then another second for the meaning to catch up.
“…You mean like—”
“I know.” Suo Wei rushed the words out immediately, like he was trying to outrun them. His fingers tightened on the backpack strap. “I know you don’t. I know. I just—”
He finally looked up.
His eyes were bright with something that looked a lot like pure, unfiltered terror.
“I just needed you to know.”
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Option C
It came out of nowhere as Chi Cheng, eyes still bleary with sleep, lumbered down the hallway to the toilet to take a piss:
“I love you.”
Startled by the way Suo Wei had accosted him, Chi Cheng said intelligently, “Uhhh… Okay. I love you too?” After a beat, he asked, “You’re not dying, are you?”
Suo Wei had never, ever been the type to say I love you to his friends. At least, not to Chi Cheng. Chi Cheng cast his mind back weeks, months—even years—trying to recall a moment when Suo Wei said I love you to him, and came up with nothing. So the only reasonable conclusion he could arrive at was that either he was dying and didn’t know it, or Suo Wei was. Or maybe this was some sort of prank.
But this was no joke, and the way Suo Wei was looking at him should have tipped him off. Suo Wei stood with his shoulders squared, chin jutted up in challenge, fists clenched so tightly at his sides that his arms shook with the tension. Suo Wei had sweet boyish features, with round eyes and soft cheeks, but right now, his dark eyes gleamed with intensity. A flush rode high on his cheeks. His jaw was set with determination, the muscle there ticking. Chi Cheng had never seen his best friend like this: face so sharp and hard that he looked carved from marble. Jesus, Suo Wei looked ready for a fight, like he was two seconds away from busting Chi Cheng’s nose.
“I love you as in: I’m in love with you,” Suo Wei said. His voice trembled. “As in romantic, sexual love.”
Chi Cheng blinked. The sleep-rusty gears in his brain creaked painfully as they turned, one slow click at a time.
Suo Wei continued, “I’ve loved you since we were in middle school, and I thought my feelings would go away, but they haven’t. It’s gotten worse since we started rooming together, and I can’t ignore it anymore. So, this is me confessing to you.”
Chi Cheng’s mind had abandoned him. Not a single thought clanked around in his skull. He could only stare at Suo Wei—who was looking at him expectantly, awaiting his response—and think, Huh???
Option D
The 6:00 AM sun filtered through the dusty blinds of their shared apartment, hitting Chi Cheng square in the eye. He groaned, the sound muffled by a pillow that smelled faintly of Suo Wei’s laundry detergent. His bladder was making a more compelling argument for consciousness than his brain was, so he dragged himself upright.
Chi Cheng stumbled down the hallway, his gait a heavy, uncoordinated trudge. He was still half-ensnared in a dream about a giant sandwich, his hair standing up in a static-charged crown. He didn't even notice the light was already on in the bathroom until he was nearly at the threshold.
Suo Wei was standing by the sink, a toothbrush in hand, but he wasn’t brushing. He was staring at his own reflection with the intensity of a man facing a firing squad.
"Move it, Wei-wei," Chi Cheng mumbled, eyes barely slit-open. He reached out to shove his friend aside so he could reach the toilet, his touch casual and entirely platonic—the way it had been for fifteen years.
Suo Wei didn't move. He felt rigid, like a statue.
"I love you."
The words were quiet, but they hit the tile floor and shattered the morning silence. Chi Cheng froze, his hand still resting on Suo Wei’s shoulder. The fog of sleep didn't lift so much as it was scorched away.
"What?" Chi Cheng blinked, finally looking at his best friend.
Suo Wei looked sick. His knuckles were white where they gripped the porcelain, and his chest was heaving in shallow, jagged hitches. He wasn't looking at Chi Cheng; he was looking at a spot on the wall as if expecting it to swallow him whole. His bottom lip trembled—a tiny, betraying twitch that made Chi Cheng’s heart skip a beat out of pure confusion.
"I’ve loved you since we were ten," Suo Wei choked out, the terror in his voice so thick it was almost tactile. "I can't... I can't keep it in the room anymore. It’s too crowded."
Chi Cheng stood there, hand hovering in mid-air, the mundane urge to pee suddenly the furthest thing from his mind. He looked at Suo Wei—really looked at him—and realized he had no idea what to do with his hands.
Which one was human?
Option A
Option B
Option C
Option D
Voting ended onMar 15
Update: March 15, 2026
Results from Twitter poll:
So the vast majority of respondents mistook AI-generated writing for human writing! These results are both terrifying and fascinating, and prompted many thoughts from me, which I will definitely be posting about later.
I pasted these same scenes into gptzero.me (not to be mistaken with zerogpt.com) and found that it accurately clocked AI-generated writing. There seems to be a lot of skepticism surrounding AI detectors (which is fair—no AI detector claims to be 100% accurate, anyway), so I plan to play around with them a bit more to see which ones are most (in)accurate and easiest to fool.
So option c was HUMAN and written by me! It's actually a fic I wrote back in 2019, with the names changed and edited to suit my current writing and fandom of interest.
Link to the fic: Give Me A Chance To Be Yours
Update: March 25, 2026
So I did actually end up testing GPTZero a bit more, along with other AI detectors. In my own testing, I found GPTZero and Pangram to be very effective at clocking raw, unedited AI generated creative writing (keyword being creative).
You can see some of tests I ran on this Twitter thread. I plan to write more about AI detectors and how humans can identify AI writing later, but for now, I encourage folks to run their own tests with GPTZero and Pangram. Try running writing through it where AI generation or AI assist was disclosed. Test your own human works, if you feel comfortable. Or even test mine! I tested probably a couple dozen AI generated creative writing pieces, and GPTZero and Pangram correctly flagged them as AI every single time. What I'd like to know is if anyone was able to find an AI fic or generate a piece of writing that GPTZero and Pangram failed to detect, or if they declared false positives.
Based on the results of the polls, I'm inclined to believe that AI detectors like GPTZero and Pangram are much better at clocking AI than humans. Again, no AI detector promises 100% accuracy, so I would hesitate to treat these AI scores as gospel. That being said, if GPTZero/Pangram flagged every single scene in a piece of creative writing as 50-100% AI, I would be suspicious. From my experience, if a piece of writing is entirely AI generated, or if AI had a role in generating large chunks of prose or heavy editing, GPTZero and Pangram will catch it.
Stylistic ai elements that may aid in identifying ai-generated writing
Some AI Style examples (found from BTS tumblr authors):
Music doesn’t just play—it pulses.
Every step deliberate. Every breath measured.
Not dramatic, not loud, just real
Not dramatic, not commanding, but real
Morning comes too early
Spring arrived quietly
Autumn arrived the way healing often did—quietly, without ceremony, without asking permission.
kiss to your cheek—brief, soft, grounding. Not a promise. Not a declaration. Just affection, freely given.
he doesn’t answer. he just exhales, slow, steady, measured like he’s bracing himself.
Too many CHOPPY / STACKED sentences (some examples from different 'authors' below)
Example 1:
Still beautiful. Still home.
He shouldn’t have said it.
Yes, I still love Mommy.
But lying to her felt worse than telling the truth.
Because he does.
Every damn day.
Example 2 (from a verrry popular BTS author who has one of the most famous Jungkook fics out there - this example is not from that famous fic, but from her newer fic) :
Your pulse spikes despite yourself.
“Yeah?” you manage, your voice tighter than you’d like. “What did I walk into?”
There’s a beat.
Short.
Deliberate.
Then—
“A place you don’t belong,” he says quietly, voice low and steady, right by your ear.
No hesitation. No explanation.
Just fact.
His grip tightens slightly, not enough to hurt—just enough to remind you he’s still in control.
Example 3:
Her hand brushed Jungkook’s arm when she laughed, casual. Practiced.
A clone.
YN felt something in her chest crack—not loudly, not dramatically. Just a quiet, traitorous fissure.
hey ally, I was going to drop by to say hello and see how you are doing but then I saw the AI rant and I thought I would say something about it as well. I read a lot of fics, especially with Charles and Max. I also read from other fandoms but I have encountered a lot of AI fics in the Lestappen tag. Like a concerning amount. As a reader, it's getting truly difficult to differentiate from AI and genuine human work because of how well it has been trained or prompted.
There's this fic I was reading and the latest chapter felt a little off to me, like how you just know that the writing style has been changed? It feels so polished and not human. So I copied the text that was off to me and checked it with AI detectors. Multiple ones. Some of them flagged it and some of them did not. However, I was not sure about the accuracy of those detectors so I checked it with my own work (not AI) and almost all of them said human except a few. Now I know for sure that I didn't use AI but then why was my work flagged? Concerning, right?
How does one even avoid AI users these days? My own work was flagged despite never using it. Just me and my angst fuelled thoughts at 5 am in the morning which produced that work. It's kind of sad isn't it? As a reader, how can I stop interacting and encouraging the people who use AI and do not declare that? When called out, they deny it. If anyone sees my comment on an undeclared AI work, please know that I was not aware of the work being AI. It's just so difficult to spot it when it has been so cleverly used.
Usage of AI defeats the whole purpose of fanfiction. When will people get that? I apologise for venting in your ask box 😞
Knowing who is AI and who isn't is a very uncertain, painful, and difficult topic. No AI detector is completely true, and this is also something people need to be aware of before they simply go around deliberately accusing someone of being AI. Be calm about your work; if you know you didn't write AI, and yet an online detector accused you of something, it doesn't mean anything. I really advise against submitting your stories to any detector just bc it says is a detector because even AI detectors feed things to the AI itself indirectly. These sites aren't completely safe, okay? If you write your fics, thats what matters. The truth in you.
Above all, you need to understand that AI doesn't think; it replicates. All of our work online isn't protected, and this mainly creates an opening for people to copy, upload, and change character names with the AI, and from there, the AI was fed OUR work by someone else. I have my reservations, but for me, this was the behavior of one of the plagiarists of my and Nicole's fics. And what many AI authors have done. The Invitation (my collab with Random and posted as lestappen) was copied in large parts and posted in the cycling fandom as a Tadej/Jonas story. @chock-and-bates lestappen fic was copied in entirety and posted in the cycling fandom also as Tadej/Jonas. In the end someone feeds the AI with stories of ours and other real people. And from that, other authors create their own AIs.
The example is ridiculous, but it's like: if you write in your story that there's a orange (the fruit) that is purple, and several of your readers paste your story into the AI, when an AI author asks for a story with an orange, the AI might write their oranges as purple, because AI learned that somewhere somehow oranges can be purple. That's what AI is. It doesn't think; it repeats patterns. And even patterns are eventually noticed. We never know who knows grammar and everything perfectly and who doesn't, and it's not right to judge a writer as an AI just because they know how to write well. For fucking sake, i always hated wattpad fics bc they are so ugly and unwell written. Imagine obligating yourself to read a unwell writen fic just bc this way you are 100 sure its not AI? come on, no no, thats not how it works.
But you can also notice behavior. AI doesn't remember information, so if you notice an exhaustive repetition of actions that a character has but suddenly, throughout the story, they simply no longer have, or it's as if each chapter is a new thing somewhat disconnected from what happened in the previous chapter, and so on… well, rethink whether this content can be or not. But don't forget to give it a vote of confidence.
There are many writers just starting out in the fandom; they don't deserve to be dismissed just because there are some trash around. Trust your intuition, read the content. If it causes you genuine discomfort or constant distrust, ask other readers. The F1 fandom is dealing with a lot of shit lately, but if there's one thing we can be, it's united. After reports like mine about the pitlanelover, many came to me and said how suspicious they were about this user. I myself was shocked to find out about GingerVS, who, despite never having read this user's stories bc (dont judge me) i normally only read wips near the end (i am anxious, clearly) and gingervs was always posting and posting and posting that i was like wow, their are fast... But yeah, even so we interacted here on Tumblr with games and blogs, so i never would expect them to be AI.
Your last comment say exactly the whole point: why would writers post stuff they didnt write? The time they lost teaching a machine about what it can write, why they dont FUCKING WRITE AND ASK SOMEONE TO BETA READ AND HOESTLY HELP THEMMMM
I don't think my first fics were as good as the ones I write today, and I owe that exactly to the fact that before I only posted, without a beta reader, without friends to tell me what could be improved. And I have these people who help me nowadays. I tried to be that person for pitlanelover (when they were madameleclerc) and even so they deceived me and plagiarized me. In the end, sometimes they don't even really want to be helped, they just want kudos and someone to stroke their ego.
I sat down and read AI fics so you don't have to...
So I got curious about how difficult it would be to tell apart AI writing compared to regular fics, and I've seen people be concerned about how to distinguish the two. So I read some fics across multiple fandoms, with different lenghts, popularity and ratings.
Here are my main take aways:
Continuity and logic:
AI is terrible at remembering what it has already told you and make it make sense with what's to come. Many examples of X said this in the first paragraph, and then further down the line it was suddenly Y who said or did the thing. The longer the story gets or the more characters it contains the worse this problem becomes.
Physical placement:
Suddenly people are in a different room, not as close to the thing or closer to each other than previously described. Are they holding a cup or not? Where the heck did their hands suddenly go? who knows. The robot has glowing eyes when everyone in the fandom knows it ain't the eyes that glow on robots in this fandom🙃
The mood:
Wtf on this one. The moods are so strange and there is a severe case of telling instead of showing. I've read some that were clearly prompted to give a certain mood which meant that it was mentioned at times that just didn't fit. Like "there was tension in the air between them" when absolute zero things have happened to create this tension. Or quick shift from comfortable -> tense -> comfortable in one paragraph. Yikes.
Generalizations:
AI uses whatever it can find to fill in the gaps. Example: if you're writing about someone in a certain profession it will just grab whatever it might have picked up about said profession and fill in wherever it can. So you end up with strange descriptions that might fit a stereotypical person from that career, but certainly not this particular character. Makes for some real out of character descriptions.
Conversation:
The individual lines might make sense, but the overall conversation doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. Or the things they say are so vague and unspecific that it's meaningless. Think "I'm 13 and this is deep" kinda things. I also saw plenty of cases of a child/teen/college student would not talk like that.
Word choice:
You know how some authors use different words than what you might expect, but it just works? Gives a funny, quirky or heartfelt vibe? AI does basicly the opposite. The word choice in many of these fics made me stop and reread multiple paragraphs because it really didn't suit the setting. You would think it would be easy to make it pick the right choice between formal and informal language, but if it also needs to fullfill other criteria simultaneously it gets messy. If it's a subject that is usually talked about in a formal tone, but in this case shouldn't be... the poor thing can get confused.
Repetition:
This one surprised me, but I'm pretty sure it happens from poor prompting that doesn't have enough info to go on. So damn many repetitions of the same word or almost same phrase popped up in many of them. I know we're already telling nothing with these stories, but come on how many times to we hear about the lamp on the shelf?
Pacing:
Either too fast and skipping parts in a way that doesn't make sense (see above logic problems) or sloooow where it really shouldn't be (see above repetition issues). Makes for an overall either confusing or very boring reading experience depending on which direction it went in.
-
To avoid all of these mistakes, you have to be a somewhat decent writer to start with. So if you think "I'm a bad writer AI will be able to fix it for me" - Yeah, no. It can help with grammar, but it cannot write a compelling story as it is now.
The worst part was that some of these stories were based on ideas that I would like to read about. But the AI execution completely killed the story.
Op shut off reblogs but i genuinely want to share this (photo id underneath cut)
[image one description: screenshot of the original post:
My god my girlies
MY GIRLIES. I am still crying, I am still crying about this. Every day I cry about this.
You bitched so hard about being forced to read 1984 in school when it’s so problematic (tm)
Maybe you should have actually paid attention when you read it
Because all these AI fics
You are LITERALLY MAKING THE GARBAGE NOVELS FROM 1984 that are written by machines
You have literally recreated the worthless soulless machine-made books
Literally,
Literally. Every once in a while it hits me in a fresh wave of disbelief and anger. You have literally created the dystopian book from the dystopian story about why dystopia is bad, and you are passing it around like it’s this amazing thing. I’m crying, I’m crying.
Image two: a screenshot from Nineteen Eighty-Four with a comment underneath
"Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor... She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces."
- From 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four), by George Orwell. Published by Secker & Warburg in 1948.
