Delightfully bonkers

(originally posted on reddit, where it was immediately nuked because discussion of AI is against sub rules, so - you get to read it instead)

Feeling pretty sad.

Found out that a fanfic I rather enjoyed and even admired was almost certainly written with a text generator, or very heavy use of one. To be brief, and avoid identifying details,

The big giveaway: repetition of ideas and bland character voices. I noticed that the characters kept having the same conversation over and over again, while their voices became less distinct. At the time, I put it down to poor editing and typical novice writing, thinking the writer had simply forgotten what they'd said before, focused on plot over coherence. It felt... oddly empty, skimmable, and notably different in style to certain other scenes which were much more richly written, in character, and the reason I kept reading.

The story was written extremely fast, one chapter a day - which I've seen people do when in the grip of obsession, so didn't set off any alarms.

"AI style" is often (and correctly) decried as a completely useless indicator, since AI imitates real writers - it imitates us. But this fic had it, and on top of everything else, it's damning.

Another reader joined the dots and asked if the author had used AI. The fic, along with several others and the attached pseud, was deleted the same day.

It's my first encounter with untagged AI fic in the wild and more upsetting than I thought it would be. Part of the reason is that I really did enjoy the premise and certain character-based sections of the story, which were genuinely moving and in-character, and now I'm second-guessing myself: did they write those, though the rest was generated? Did they simply heavily edit the output, because they cared more about those sections? Or did they use different prompts? And does it matter? (Yes. I loved it because a person wrote it. Of course it matters.)

Another reason, a more bitter one, is that I spent a good bit of my time leaving a comment on every chapter. It's not every day you get a strong fic with a steady update schedule and I wanted to show my appreciation; and even though successive chapters were less to my taste, I still wanted to encourage the author to keep writing and learning and improving. We're all playing in the same sandbox, right? So I was detailed, I analysed, tried to pick out themes and always point out something I liked even when the chapter had been a bit of a struggle.

I've been very active recently in a very lively fandom and have really enjoyed the feeling of community and connection: lots of back and forth in replies, chatting about the characters, recommending other fics. I like the imperfection of fanfiction because I know there's a person behind it, trying - sometimes clumsily, because they're learning, we're all learning - to talk about a thing they love.