a life should leave deep tracks

I think people are just using prompts, which has made ai increasingly unreadable 🥴 I still remember when authors were accused of using ai and those fics were so much better, and sometimes I'd get worried because I couldn't tell if something was really ai or not, but now the style is too distinctive and the storytelling is ruined, and that's because ai has most likely been feeding off its own content, creating this inbreeding problem. We're at the point where ai slop isn't just soulless, but downright garbage.

Twitter discourse is up a thousand levels lol.

it's sooooo incredible. i'm going to start by giving the genuine real life answer just because you mentioned twitter discourse but like laksjfdlkajsdflakjsd truly if people could spent just like fifteen seconds having common sense. lando is in wheelies. lando is zooming around on fucking wheelies in a huge group of his friends, who are all driving cars with his fucking licence plates. he's not sneaking his friend's girlfriend off in wheelies in a motor parade of his own luxury cars being driven by a number of his friends. be reasonable people!!!!!

and i don't mean this to say that kind of reading is universally bad, although it's not my cup of tea and i would not suggest anyone make it their primary mode of reading. but i can see how a reader who is thinking mostly in terms of tropes and archetypes would see the value of their story in the idea and not the writing. because if the most important part of a fic is its likeness to other stories, how you get there doesn't matter as much. and if you think other readers share the same interests as you, then of course you'll think an ai version of your story is just as valuable a contribution to the community as actual human writing.

that is suuuuuch an interesting example about the person able to just neatly articulate enemies-to-lovers age gap romantasy boom boom like that's the whole thing.

i find it so puzzling with the new-to-me trend of people insisting top and bottom "characterization" should be tagged, because to say nothing else about all the implications around that level of rigidity in preferences, "who does the penetrating" doesn't feel like the all encompassing description to me that it seems to be for other people. but exactly like with the way that book at specific beats it was hitting because of the tropes, i think the way sex gets written ends up being the same thing. top-so-and-so has this all encompassing implications that they're also going to be dominant and also more of the aggressor or pursuer and overall given the masculine characterization.

i think there can be such incredible sex scenes that don't involve penetration at all -- like the power of a really well articulated handjob truly cannot be underestimated. but in having sex scenes that also dictate characterization that also have to hit these specific narrative beats, all the uniqueness gets stripped away and it loses any feeling of being an exploration of sexuality.

it's hard for me to understand the appeal of something where you already know exactly what's going to happen, except of course i also rewatch or reread things so i know logically it's just a different version of that. getting the comfort of familiarity and the ease of being unchallenged. and i'm sure i'd feel different about those by-the-beat trope slops if they were narrative patterns that appealed to me.

anyway all that said, i do also think that people way over inflate the importance of an idea. any of us could sit here for five minutes and come up with three great ideas. you get chatting with a friend and you can have twenty ideas you wish desperately would be written in no time. you can use a random word generator and prompt ideas, like ideas are easy and everywhere and amount for about 1% of how good something actually ends up being.

On top of that, you've also got the modern tendency to view art through the lens of content consumption, rather than deep engagement with craft, that I think also tends to make slopfics more appealing. Things like characterization, plot, authorial voice, etc all make fics richer, but also make them more work for the reader. AI fics, on the other hand, take no real effort or attentiveness to follow. For people who aren't used to seeing reading as a reciprocal experience where their role is to actively engage with the text, the absence of all those markers of good or at least human writing isn't a problem, because those things aren't what they're looking for anyways. The slop-ness of AI fic is precisely what makes it valuable to them, in the same way that the artfulness of a good fic is what makes it valuable to you or I. They're looking for content, not craft, and that is precisely what AI is designed to provide. Add to that the explosion of fandom as content in general, and you've got a lot of new readers who actively seek out bad, frictionless writing instead of the kind of effortful storytelling that defines fanfic for many of us.

this was so well said and genuinely so helpful to read because i think you articulated such a fundamental difference between how people approach fandom and reading in general.

i'm obviously a big fan of fanfic, but i've seen people say that fic is better than published books and that's just factually not true. the number of fics that are as good as published literally books is very very few. the new yorker i know, but i remember years ago reading a new yorker article for the first time as an adult with the capacity to appreciate it, and feeling like it was this genuinely moving experience. this was a narrative nonfiction, like a long form article, on procrastination, which of course i can't find now to link you to because content has become impossible to find online plus now it's all behind a paywall. but there were a couple years there when the new yorker made all their content available, and i read my way through the archive and it was just so good. there's a feeling that comes from reading really good writing that simply isn't there in amateur fiction.

it's not that there isn't also an appeal in amateur fiction - something about the raw unpolished straight-from-the-id unhinged glee can be incredibly appealing. but someone writing fanfic as a hobby is not applying the rigour of getting an article published in the new yorker, for a bad example that's comparing fiction to nonfiction, or a book published by a literary publisher, as a better comparison. there isn't the time spent crafting the final product, there aren't the layers of eyes with skilled professional editors. there isn't the same amount of scrutiny.

i mention the new yorker thing just because i remember it so vividly as this moment of understanding that writing could do more than I'd realized. that words could be put together that well. that it could feel that good and interesting and satisfying to read something, that i could care about a topic i hadn't heard of before. i have so many memories from that time of reading. they had an article about itching that still scratches at my brain. that time was the peak of the personal essay. I think of like Meghan Daum, "My Misspent Youth." I read quite a bit of their short fiction too, like one summer making my way through Alice Munro's catalogue.

I think people can have that experience with all different types of writing, like some people have that experiences doing deep dives into classic books, or other types of literary novels, or poetry, or whatever. but, absolutely, part of the experience is not just appreciating the art for what it is, but appreciating the craft of the art. appreciating the skill of the writer by actively engaging with the text. and appreciating how different it feels to read something masterful.

i really appreciate the way you've articulated that it's the frictionlessness of AI writing that makes it valuable to a reader who just wants to consume content, that the lack of craft is a feature, not a flaw.

i think that can be for younger people, but i also think that as people get older, they often have even less exposure to other types of writing. i'm sure it depends on the experience, but younger people i think are more likely to have to read literary things in school/university, vs i think say of my grandma, years and years ago, just reading those extremely generic romance-mystery novels that are absolutely the equivalent to AI fic now. in a way i think it can be harder to get exposed to new things as you get older, because you have to figure it out for yourself.