we need to talk about The Silence and The Song
as per my last post, i have received a lot of encouragement to go public with this, and the more disappointed people i have in my dms, the angrier i get. so i will.
the silence and the song is an ancient arlathan au DA fic on ao3 by luxannaslut, and it is partly, if not entirely, written by an ai. i have no wish to be involved in any kind of fandom drama or witch hunting or bullying, but as a writer myself there are few things that piss me off more than watching people steal the work of others because they can't be fucked to write. it's disrespectful to your fellow writers, it's disrespectful to your readers, and it's disrespectful to the authors of the works the ai is stealing from.
ai is a plague that has no business being in creative spaces and you must do better.
there was something very odd and monotone about the sentence structure of tsats that i couldn't quite place, so i fed chatgpt a prompt along the lines of "two people in a fantasy novel hate each other, but they secretly desire one another, and they kiss", and the screenshots above are the results. the third one is an excerpt from chapter 40 of tsats. the writing pattern is identical and it doesn't seem like the "writer" has even bothered to pretend they wrote it. if you're going to use ai, at least be sneaky about it. you know, paraphrase a little.
"her nimble fingers worked with quiet precision" (ct. 1), "his grip firm but tender" (ct. 33), "her gown pooling around her like embers" (ct. 1).
fingers don't make sound, so what does quiet precision mean? as opposed to what? her joints cracking with every movement? how is a grip firm but tender? what does that mean? since when do embers pool?
the entire fic is littered with these adjectives that contradict each other or just straight up do not make sense, because all an ai does is generate descriptive language with no understanding of what the words it's spitting out actually mean. i could spend hours picking out examples from the seven billion pages worth of text, but i quite frankly have better things to do and would simply challenge you to try getting through a chapter or two without noticing the pattern.
repetition at structure-level
all the scenes in this fic are described in pretty much the same way. they open with purple prose vomit of the surroundings; solas is standing somewhere looking "unreadable as ever"; ellana's fiery golden molten fire copper ember ginger red hair is flowing this and that way; there's some dialogue with whoever is present and it leaves ellana feeling different variations of "something she couldn't name". this is, once again, a blatantly obvious sign of ai. below is the result of me feeding chatgpt the line "write me a scene from a fantasy novel where a woman with red hair is sitting on the ground in a magical garden at night", and side by side with that is the opening scene of the fic. make your own judgement.
this one speaks for itself. we fucking get it. her dress is orange, her hair is red, mythal's presence is heavy in the room, solas looks unreadable, compassion is sitting on her head like a crown, solas' ears are betraying him and ellana's move with every thought she thinks. we get it. the issue here is that an ai remembers the info you feed it, but not necessarily the info it shits out. if it's being told to write scene after scene of an elven woman with a gown that looks like fire doing xyz, it's going to do so with no regard for how many times the reader has already been informed of these details.
lastly: the breakneck speed
359,6k words in four weeks by a person who allegedly is employed and married and hasn't pre-written anything? no. any writer will tell you that this simply isn't possible. it absolutely infuriates me to see how much praise this "writer" gets for posting up to three full chapters in a day without anyone calling bullshit. i am pulling out my hair, you guys.
why i'm not going to live and let live this one
perhaps i would be less angry if the fic was some silly bullshit court intrigue Y/A stuff, but this is a text that handles very heavy and triggering topics such as SA, coercion, domestic abuse, and other things of the same vein. to sit back and put your feet up while having a robot write these extremely sensitive and very real human experiences with words it has stolen from texts written by actual persons is fucking heinous. the "writer" should be deeply ashamed of themselves and i'm sick and tired of watching people eat up their bs.
and on that note: the amount of people in my dm's telling me that they feel stupid and naive for not clocking this has infuriated me more than anything else. you're not foolish for this. being fed ai-generated bullshit is not what is supposed to happen on any creative platform and much less a fandom-centred one, so of course no one approaches a fic through that lens. fandom and fic writing is supposed to be about passion and the only person in this situation who needs to do better and change their behaviour is luxannaslut. polluting our creative spaces, wasting the time of your readers, and minimising the effort of actual writers who are working hard to provide content for us all to share and enjoy is vile and so, so lazy. i beg of you: do better.
kaledo-art
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
