it's about the yearning

By definition, fanfiction (or fanart) is created by someone who is a fan, or someone who has strong emotions about a piece of media, to engage with that piece of media. It can be done out of love, to stay and play with favorite characters, to continue the story, to expand the universe, to bring different beloved characters and worlds together. It can also be fix-it to overcome what someone thinks are shortcomings and missing bits from canon and it can be spite fic to deal with something you really, really dislike. Either way, it comes from a place of feelings, and it’s written for people who might have similar feelings about it. AI does not feel. So how can it engage with the source material in the same way we do? How can AI hope to create something that is so fundamentally rooted in feelings when it’s the one thing it doesn’t have? It’s no surprise, I think, that many people describe AI writing as soulless or cold. It’s also the question of the process. Writing is often called a labor of love. We love to write, and sometimes it’s easy, but it’s also always work. Work we love, work we hate, work that makes us despair and pull our hair out or makes us do little happy dances in our desk chairs. We take all our feelings for our little blorbos and we put them in words. It’s a struggle, but it’s worth it. It’s catharsis. It’s dealing with what’s going on inside of us and sharing that with the people who also love our little blorbos. Writing fanfic is only part of it, sharing it is the other part. It’s a communal thing. For many people, writing itself is also communal. Some people approach writing as a solitary task, which is absolutely valid, but many others have beta readers and plot brainstormers and prompt writers. Using AI for your fic is not communal. It’s not a person reading your writing for love of the game and thinking with you about your writing because of a shared passion. Using AI is having a machine string the most common words together dictated by an algorithm that was trained by absorbing millions of words on the internet. Sure, you can do that, but it’s not really what fandom is about. Fandoms grow and live and thrive because we love the same thing. AI has nothing of value to add to that. Sure, there’s more content. But content is not what fandom makes. A community of people is what makes a fandom.

Of course, some people use AI tools only to edit their fics, to spellcheck or to correct grammar. I think that that’s sort of fine, but your mileage may vary on that. I’m personally not a huge fan of it, because of the aforementioned environmental issues, but there are different tools for this, i.e. I think specific writing tools like grammarly are better than just putting everything into chatgpt, and I understand that people who struggle with spelling and grammar or who are not native English speakers appreciate the help. I’d always recommend getting a human beta reader instead, but I also understand that finding betas you jive with and making yourself vulnerable like that with other people can be a challenge. However, I’d also argue, if you want to improve as a writer, it’ll go much better with a person looking over your writing and not feeding it into an AI generator. (Disclaimer that fanfic is a hobby, no one has to improve or use a beta if they don’t want to, this is very much a matter of preference, but if you do want someone to look over your writing, please get an actual human being for that.)

All this does not even touch on the copyright issues and the inherent plagiarism of AI which was trained on everything on the internet without anyone’s consent. It also doesn’t consider all the biases rampant on the internet that AI picked up on, i.e. racism, sexism, homophobia etc. Which means by letting AI write fanfic, potentially it’s letting AI bring all of that shit in too. So it’s an issue of morality too.

The last, and ethical part, is directly in response to the AI accusations and people’s reactions to it in the HR fandom. Many people clearly do not want to see AI in fandom spaces, but some people also don’t care. In response to this, it seems, many authors are just lying about using AI. And that’s just fucked. If you use AI, just cop to it. Especially if you just use it for editing or research. But be fucking transparent. I’ve seen many people say, just tag your work so we can avoid it, and it’s fine, but apparently to these authors hits and kudos and comments are more important than honesty. And the hits and the kudos and the comments are more important than the true experience and community of fandom of caring about something together. Clout chasers in fandom aren’t new. People have always plagiarized works, have always lied for attention (and sometimes even money), but AI gives people a whole new tool to grab attention, to do it quickly and to do it often. And then to fucking lie about it. So the question is, how do we want to engage with people who create fanfic or fanart with AI? And that’s something that everybody needs to and should answer for themselves. Transparency is a good first step, but the thing about people is, they lie. We can call for transparency, but it might not make people be more honest and then in a quest to discover more AI in fanfic, we will remain in murky waters because not everyone leaves visible prompts or coding in their works. I’d argue that most people probably don’t. Especially now that it’s been revealed people will be more careful. People who only have very few instances of code left in their fics have probably already been careful. And recognizing AI by style alone is possible but not definitive. AI was trained on a lot of fanfic so the stylistic similarities are there. So there’s the danger of accusations without proof and an incredibly toxic climate in fandom that might discourage fic writers who don’t use AI from posting for fear of being accused. But we also need accountability. And honestly, when it comes to letting AI write your fics, shame. Insert the GoT shame gif here.

I don’t know if there’s a feasible solution for this. This might just be one of the pitfalls of fandom, one of the dark sides we have to deal with to enjoy the good stuff. Personally, I think using AI to write fanfic of all things, is fucking shitty, both for environmental and moral reasons and for it being the fucking antithesis to everything good that fandom stands for. I have no interest in reading what an AI generated about my favorite blorbos, I want to read what other people who love my blorbos have to say about them. I understand the rush of posting a fic and getting kudos and comments and positive feedback. I understand the pressure of finishing a WIP or the desire to post a new fic as quickly as possible. But at what price? It not being your own? Posting a soulless creation strung together by a machine that scavenged the internet for words that go together and drained a lake and destroyed a chunk of forest in the process? No thanks. I’ll take your slightly wonky, spelling and punctuation sporting fic with a weird premise and a charming execution over that any day.