Don't be a prick

There is a Bagginshield series on AO3 right now that is only gaining more and more views by the day that was written with AI and as far as I can tell, none of its readers know.

And for as far as I know, those who found out are being deleted and silenced.

AO3 & Tumblr user Kerningster is writing fics with AI, and she's not even hiding it all that well.

Last night, I was browsing the Bagginshield tag on AO3 (as you do, lol) and I came across a somewhat recently completed fic, dating to around the end of March. When I clicked on it, I realized it was the 2nd part of a series, so I went to go check out the first fic.

To my surprise, both fics were completed & created around the same time, about two or three days apart from each other. This came off as a little odd to me, but people upload finished fics all the time, not everyone writes a new chapter after every update. Right?

So I decided to give the first fic a chance, sincerely hoping it was just a new gem of a fic I found at the right time. However, once I got to Chapter 9 of the fic, my fears became true.

Look at this screenshot:

Do you notice anything off about it? Anything that stands out in particular while reading? If not, I'll point it out to you.

This particular paragraph, this particular line. This stood out to me, it completely halted me from continuing further. Movie-Thorin? What did that mean? It got me thinking, and I realized it had to of been written at least with the help of AI, more importantly probably getting tips on how movie-Thorin vs book-Thorin's personalities would differ, or something along those lines.

This was a shock to me, so I immediately of course went to the comments, and I saw nobody else mention it throughout any of the other chapters. I decided I'd be the first to say something, there was only one other comment on the chapter, so I figured I'd be answered relatively quickly.

I tried to be respectful about it, afterall even though I thought it was true, I wanted to give the author a chance of explaining herself. After I commented this, I closed the fic and went to sleep.

Today, after going back to the chapter and checking to see if I had gotten a reply, I was met with my comment being deleted.

And the chapter being edited, completely removing the movie-Thorin line. In fact, completely removing the entire paragraph it happened in.

This immediately raised red flags to me, so I went to the authors account, and checked her profile. On it was a simple strawpage link, which I clicked and scrolled through, and found none other than what I suspected.

Right there, in her socials page, was the link to AI. If she's willing to use CAI as far as she has, I'm willing to assume she'll go so far as to use AI to write for her.

I know we in The Hobbit & The Lord Of The Rings fandoms value our creativity and love for the craft of writing above all else, so I knew I had to say something. To not only use AI to write for you, but to silence others who simply ask about it, despite you so brazenly having it listed on your profile, is an utter shame.

I'd hate for any other readers to stumble upon it, and think they found something good when it had no human heart put into it.

The fic series in question is Tails and Thorin, here you can see the creation dates and completed dates of all stories within the series, showing just how closely the dates are to each other. If the series ends up getting deleted, the fics in question are: Braids and Blunders, Seed-cake, and Pebbles and Stone.

She also writes for The Pitt, specifically Hucklerobby, and I have to assume if she is willing to write for Bagginshield with AI, she is willing to use it for Hucklerobby as well. The fics in question for The Pitt are Bloodhound and Scent Puppy.

Her AO3 is Kerningster, and her Tumblr is kerningster.