With this sudden amount of conversation of AI-assisted fics and such, is there a specific fic or fics that people are talking about as being "super popular" but obviously AI written? I feel so out of the loop
(Feel free to send me this on anon if you don't want to comment something publicly. I won't publish anything that names an author / fic)
I believe the uptick in conversation is in reaction to this. The Reddit post links to a conversation/document that explains a specific html markers which proves that a piece of text has been copied + pasted directly from Claude AI, and then includes a rundown of how many of these markers were found in a subset of very popular fics in the Heated Rivalry tag on AO3, some of which are extremely popular and successful (as in, very high stats, are talked about and recommended a lot, authors have name recognition).
This marker only exists if text was copied directly from Claude AI into the AO3 text box. It wasn't originally identified in a fandom context and doesn't occur if the text was copied from Claude into ie a Word doc or if a different LLM was used. It also doesn't differentiate between text that was completely generated by Claude and text that was only edited by Claude for formatting or spelling.
The main takeaway from this experiment is, in my opinion, that AI use in fanfiction is widespread and ubiquitous and not detectable to most people. There is no reliable way to tell if a text was written using AI because of how LLMs work and what they were trained on, but a lot of people ARE using AI to write fanfiction and the results are good enough to make AI use rewarding.
The other thing is that it complicates the way fandom as a community talks about AI use in fic. Most people don't want to read fic that uses AI, which disincentivises writers from disclosing their AI usage. People have been using AI accusations to bully and harass authors, which is bad because bullying is bad, but also apparently a lot of authors are using AI and vehemently denying it when asked. Reconciling all of this in a way that satisfies all the different interests and ideals about fandom conversations is going to be really, really difficult and probably get really, really ugly.























