re: the current AI fanfiction chicanery-fuckery. under a cut because i talk too damn much when i'm procrastinating.
i'm not going to relitigate the entire situation because a lot of fics have been deleted and twitters have been deactivated, and i'm not in the fandoms involved, so i'm basically just looking at this from two perspectives that are more meta: the conversation around popularity in fandom, and the hurt feelings that readers might be experiencing, just based on what i've been reading across a couple platforms.
first, something that i've been thinking about is how often we just don't want to feel stupid or fooled for liking something. i've seen a lot of people basically expressing "how could i be so stupid to like that fic when it turned out to be AI" and it's like, well it was popular, you weren't alone. in a lot of cases, it was recommended to you by people you trusted, people who are your friends who didn't know better either.
plus, for a lot of people, they were friends with the writers and got manipulated. i even saw someone managed to fool their very anti-AI beta. others maybe got swept up in the proximity to someone who was "fandom-famous", and people can scoff at it, but those "ooh number big" brain chemicals are no joke. so i don't think that it's fair to call someone "stupid" or even helpful to make being able to clock AI in fic a matter of morality or intelligence, when it's not.
a lot of people (looking at you, r/fanfiction, sorry) are taking the approach of well i could never read and like something written with AI because i only like fic with half a hit and negative sixteen kudos and it's like, well that's kind of not how that works. also, if you think those people aren't using AI too, boy do i have bad news for you.
similar to any other type of scam/scam-adjacent behavior, it could happen to anybody, and it's not your fault you were lied to, and it doesn't make you stupid or bad, it's just where the world is right now and that really sucks. you can learn some level of discernment, but like i said, it is getting more sophisticated. a lot of these people only got caught because they were lazy. and people who want to lie and cheat their way to ooh big number are going to do whatever it takes, and some of them are going to get away with it and even potentially fool you.
you can pull out the magnifying glass whenever you see em-dashes or 'it wasn't x or y but z' or the word humming too many times or white room syndrome or my personal favorite, fics that forget their plot every other paragraph and you can kind of see where the AI needed to be prompted to continue, but even that won't hold up especially with people who are willing to actually go back and edit their AI fics to sound kind of normal or even just use additional AI that makes AI writing sound more human or have paid accounts on more advanced platforms. trust me, i'm in academia, there's no bottom to this shit when people want a certain result from this stuff. you'd think they'd just write, but for some reason they are so attached to the AI process that they think of it as writing even though it isn't.
and also, i think that this crosses over with that uncomfortable conversation about why people dislike popular fics out of jealousy or frustration with their own success (been there, it's normal) or how fics get popular in the first place, and the assumption that the higher the number, the further from quality, when anybody who has been in fandom long enough knows that it's a few things.
one, timing—being one of the first fics in a fandom does a lot. that goes double for a popular show that has a ton of people swarming to a tag to see what is there. someone who starts a longer fic at the top of a fandom will get hundreds of thousands of hits because people keep coming back especially if they are one of the few fics at the start and at peak popularity.
two, platform size—a lot of popular writers go from fandom to fandom and take their giant audience with them when there's crossover, and also a lot of them (not all, but a lot) gravitate from big fandom to big fandom, sometimes purposefully focusing on things that have mass appeal, but also to be fair, just liking those types of things. please note i am not saying there's anything wrong with this, i've just been in fandom for well over twenty years, and i know what i've seen, and i've watched a lot of authors go from small forums to livejournal to ao3 and anybody can notice this trend. these people have been building some of their platforms for 10-20 years. i saw it a lot with people who went buffy -> harry potter -> supernatural -> marvel and you can plug and play or add in a variety of fandoms there and see the trend of how people got these huge writing platforms, especially when they run things like an influencer and have marketing pushes and all of these other strategies to promote their fic. it's a skillset separate from writing, and i think it's fair to acknowledge that, even when it makes people mad that things they think of as less-than see so much success.
tl;dr—what i've been seeing is people retroactively saying that they knew the entire time and had no clue why some of these AI fics were popular, and i'm like, well again, this is kind of complicated. it might have been obvious. in a couple of the big fandoms going through this right now, i won't lie, it was pretty obvious because of the timing and the AI not being as sophisticated when they started, so there's those common phrases and other errors that are outside of what i think of as human range. but the reality is that it wasn't simply the AI that made their work popular, and it's not as simple as "people in fandom only want to read fast-food fic so they get what they deserve".
but first— again, we have to acknowledge that there's a lot people are willing to ignore for that big number-big name proximity. this is kind of how shit like msscribe happens, because people just want to touch the hem of the garment and see if some of that rubs off onto them, too. do you like this writer or their fic? no. but maybe that person will post a link to your fic on their giant twitter, maybe they share it in a discord and you get some of those readers and comments, too. lots of magical thinking.
second—again, i think people have their heads in the sand about how much people are willing to put up with to get a story that hits their buttons, and won't notice some of the issues that come with that AI prose, or will write them off, or don't want to be the person to point it out because they know that might lead to them being in the middle of a 47 (ha) part tik-tok drama that becomes a three hour youtube video read at the pace of paint drying from cribbed from a reddit post on r/hobbydrama. i think most people just quietly DNF a fic, mute the author, and move on, but there's a lot of people who just want something easy to read and digest, and who want that feeling of reading what everybody else is reading and being in on the fun, and find the community to be fun and get swept up in participating in the story as it gets posted, especially when granted access to things like discord servers or groupchats on twitter.
there's a lot of rambling here, and i think my main point is really just to hammer this home again:
you are not stupid if you fell for the okey-doke. if you read a fic that ended up on a list or in that document or even just that you made the detection skin and went through your bookmarks and a bunch of stuff turned red—you got lied to and scammed, and that's not your fault. you can sort of develop the ability to spot these things, but similar to scams, everybody has a weak-point or might not notice something, or doesn't want to accuse a friend.
if you got inspired to make something because of one of these fics, i get it if it feels tainted, that's a normal feeling to have. you got inspired by something and made something real when the person who made the thing you got inspired by couldn't respect you enough to just try as hard as you did. that art, those edits, the poems and everything, that was real and i'm sorry that someone lied to you.
and finally, if you're someone who has three hits and half a kudos and a single bot comment on your fic and you're looking at this and feeling more tempted than ever—cheating to win is not winning. it's losing with a countdown. someone will catch you, people are already writing more scripts to find more AI. that's how communities work, especially in fandom, when people really want to get out the rot. a lot of people in fandom, as a reminder, are people with day jobs and skillsets that make them very good at this shit. it's professors and engineers and scientists and coders who aren't vibe coding, and i say that not to scare you, but to remind you that it's worth it to just put in your best effort.
okay, now i'll take off my professor costume. more seriously, maybe this bubble never pops the way we want it to, but i think that people are just going to adjust and find new ways to avoid a thing they don't like. also, as the saying goes, if you build it, they will come. it's better to be patient and have the one honest person leave a comment on your fic than to have a bunch of people read AI bullshit and know in your heart of hearts that you made the world a little worse with more pollution and less water for attention that will fade the second something newer and shinier than your fic pops up. that's just how fandom tides turn, and it doesn't mean you did anything wrong.
i mean, i basically just gave you the formula. wait for something to get popular, be the first person in the door with a coffeeshop omegaverse au with enough smut and maybe some classic tropes. make one of the characters a mafia rich guy who saves a lonely omega barista who cries constantly and smells like strawberries and cream while the alpha guy smells like cigarettes and whiskey and sin. hell, write it now and then find and replace the names when you see a gif-set garnering curiosity and a ton of notes. rinse, repeat. make sure it's 150k and you update once a month or so to keep the audience engaged and growing during the peak of the fandom. step four, ???? step five, profit or however that meme goes. i'm only being kind of sarcastic. /light-hearted
my main point is just that this is really disheartening, but i don't want the takeaway to be i need to cheat so i can be like those people who have that thing i want (that will likely not work for you, it's giving crypto rug-pull, similarly, these people have pulled the ladder up behind themselves) or worse, i need to take my fics down because people will accuse me of using AI because there's witch-hunts (not how that works) or worst, it doesn't matter that they did it because i liked it and i can't like something bad because that would make me bad.
maybe this stops and the bubble bursts and this all feels like a bad dream, maybe people keep going and it gets better and harder to figure out, or maybe what i think is going to happen is that it levels out but people rise to meet it to protect fandom, even though it'll be a messy process that will definitely end in a youtube video cribbing from a reddit post that starts off with 'but first i have to go back and define what fandom is for thirty minutes even though if you're clicking on this video you definitely already know but i need that run-time for dat ad money, babeeyyyy'.
most importantly, there's a lot of stories written by people. this post was written by a person, and is riddled with typos i won't fix because it adds to the charm even though it undercuts my tumblr-accent drenched humor. there's more of us than there are of them, even when it sucks that it seems like the bad is winning. just keep writing, there's an audience for everything (trust me i'm an expert on that) and if you build it, they will come. but you gotta build it, not the robot.
