They made me do this

for those unfamiliar with tennessee williams's works, one of his favorite avenues to explore character flaws was through illusion and delusion. blanche dubois, a well-to-do southern belle recently loses her family's inherited plantation to foreclosure, though the audience should understand in the changing shape of the modern world, belle reve is in truth lost to progress and modernity. blanche appears to us as a relic, entirely out of place and out of time in 1940s louisana. she cannot accept her newly lived reality, always stricken with panic at the "vulgarity" of the new world with its clamor and temptation. daki, of course, shares few superficial traits with blanche, but both remain suspended in time, unable to adapt, even going so far as to deny themselves not only their reality, but base needs, base impulses.

daki is a creature of habit and tradition. he is long-lived and has lived long. he cannot be anything but suspended in time, suspended in the stage of grief that denies reality. it is a loyalty to his culture, a devotion to himself, his identity as a jedi. his was a life and a trauma we, as humans, cannot fathom. but devon is not daki, and she cannot fathom his process for grief either. if daki is akin to blanche, devon is akin to the wingfield children in williams's the glass menagerie. tom wingfield is a warehouse worker, confined to a small apartment with his mother and sister whom he supports financially. his mother often recounts her past, much like blanche, from time immemorial, antiquated stories that feel more like fairytales they'd heard as children. expectedly, it drives both of her children to mania. tom escapes to art, while his sister, laura, escapes to her glass menagerie. both are fragile means to cope with their reality, both inside and outside the apartment. the new world is described as just as suffocating as their mother's bygone babbles:

"[...] one infused mass of automatism."

(i'll get to maul in a moment)

devon and daki are confined to living in sewers, to panhandling, to debasement common of... commoners in the wake of congested industrialization. this is not the future devon saw for herself. the empire robbed her of her clean air, her castle in the sky, her knighthood, her privilege. that fantasy is all it is now. because unlike her master, devon knows only an axial existence, her life caught between justice and injustice, peacetime and war, fantasy and reality. tom wingfield recounts to his sister an escape artist magician he saw who inspires his eventual escape from the apartment:

and let's speak of con artists because maul is not exempt from the williamsisms. when we are reintroduced to maul in this series, he is swallowed by memory. a spy droid, not dissimilar from the probe droid he employed in the phantom menace; a pair of dathomiri zabraks resembling his brothers; and a coterie of fractionally loyal mandalorians. it isn't until they are plucked one by one from his side that maul can operate unimpeded by his past. there is a line in scene one of the glass menagerie: this scene is a memory, and is therefore non-realistic. when the wingfield siblings are forced to face their lived reality, it came accompanying violence: tom's outburst shatters laura's glass figures, and the object of laura's interest, in his clumsiness, breaks her favorite of her menagerie: a lonely unicorn.

the last of its kind, with the ability to adapt.

[enter: devon]

after maul is maimed by the inquisitors, he recalls his own fractured past, all parts voiced entirely by sam witwer, all signaling to the audience, in williams's words, what funny tricks your memory plays. maul's denialism is unlike daki and devon's. maul is too shaped by tricks to not see the empire for what it really is, the tragedy lies in his inability to decode the precise reality of his trauma. and this is why maul is an expert con artist, because he was the stage magician's apprentice. he can continue to mouth palpatine's propaganda but shape it to deceive a young jedi cloistered in her own "2 by 4".

the season ends on an admission and its core conflict is resolved. devon declares to maul, to herself, that she is finally ready to confront reality and abandon the menagerie, the 2 by 4, belle reve. but the hairline crack in the glass cannot be sealed, the violence that came with her "emancipation" will continue to shape her reality like it shaped maul's. the questions i'm asking going into season two are: will devon go mad by her own proficiency to adapt, or will she invent for herself a new reality founded on illusion?

lesbian | gay

bi | trans

rainbow | pan

ace | aro

nonbinary | queer

I’m gonna assume writers know whether or not their own works are ai because they either write them themselves or have ai write for them.

but as for readers (or writers who read other writers’ works), no, you can’t tell unless the writer themself says their works are ai generated. anything else is witch hunt, speculations and possibly wrongful accusations — all of which harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more.

so if at any point you think an untagged work is ai and if that bothers you, quietly click away. but you can never know for sure based on vibes. because everything ai writes, a human writer does. that’s what ai was trained on and what it was trained to mimic.

every “ai telltale” is something humans write before, otherwise ai wouldn’t have been able to mimic it in the first place. because it needs human-made works to mimic on.

AI cannot pass for good writing at any length; you may not know what's wrong with it but you can see it's short on meaning and completely uniform in tone and emphasis. But it can pass for amateur writing, and amateurs need to be encouraged and not accused.

So that's why, even though I am pretty good at detecting AI, I don't throw out accusations. Because maybe they're just starting out and they haven't yet learned their individual voice, how to pack writing with meaning, how to vary the tone and emphasize the important parts.

sort their Ao3 queries by popularity and only read stuff that enough other people have approved of,

click away from bad stuff too fast to really appreciate how bad it is and how much worse it could have gotten,

have in the past few years mentally shifted to attributing ALL bad fic writing to AI, thus creating a feedback loop for themselves where bad=AI always, with no chance to correct this perspective, or

have benefited from Ao3's, let's say, reputation as a site for "good writing only," (not true, but many believe this) which has resulted in many beginner, young, self-aware, or self-critical writers sequestering themselves to wattpad or other platforms. this is purely anecdotal, but despite still only ever sorting by date, i believe i'm encountering far less "bad" writing in any given fandom than i used to back on fanfiction.net, which didn't have the potentially intimidating reputation for "high quality" writing that Ao3 enjoys. this might give someone who hasn't been in fandom for literal decades the impression that most fic is average at worst, so that when they do see the "outlier" bad fics, they feel there must be some explanation for why those exist. "since they don't fit in with the rest, must be AI"

meanwhile, the fics they're reading:

anyway, bad writing is good and should be left alone.

it might be bad for you, but it may be plenty fine for the author's friends and they're having fun together so don't be sour and go read something else

it might be bad for you, but it's actually doing a bit, and you didn't understand, aren't privy to the joke, or are too young/old to "get it"

it might be bad for you, but the author is fighting for their LIFE trying to write in a language that isn't their native one, and they know. they KNOW it's not the best thing you've read. just shut up and let them express themselves, learn a language, and have fun

it might be bad for you, but the author is 14 and has literally never written fiction before in their life outside of a prompted school assignment short story. they may or may not be aware of the "quality" of their writing. doesn't matter. leave them alone. i can't even imagine the damage being accused of sounding like AI would do to someone at that stage, before getting even half a chance to develop their own voice, perspective, style. you could leave them questioning whether they have anything worth saying or are capable of doing anything uniquely so bad they'll never write fiction again til the very day they die.

it might be bad for you, but it belongs on Ao3. full stop

it might be bad for you, but Ao3 isn't a writing pageant or a "good fiction" vending machine; it's an archive. think of it specifically as a historical archive if you have trouble with the idea

it might be bad for you, but this person hasn't tried writing anything since graduating high school five decades ago and a) needs practice just as much as the hypothetical 14yo above bc skills can't just be plucked off a tree on a whim b) this person is doing something for fun in their limited time and they can either get the chance to grow into a unique voice in the community or you can chase them off with your prickly standards c) doesn't "get" all your ideas of "good" writing that may actually just be a collection of fads, tropes, and styles that enjoy popularity at the moment, and they are actually just doing things their own way that might be way more interesting and good than your narrow taste can recognize

it might be bad for you, but it's actually good for you. seeing your own mistakes in someone else's writing, where those same mistakes are finally revealed to you by being laid bare without the fig leaf of a brain working hard to supplement what you wrote with what you had intended to write, is a great way to grow as a writer. seeing something that makes you cringe and swearing to never do that yourself is a great way to find your voice and style. read some bad fic once in a while; enjoy it; learn something

bad writing is a good and natural byproduct of humans writing. many different kinds of people (with different levels of language proficiency, different experiences, different tastes) sitting down and writing results in a huge variety of content, aesthetics, and quality. such high natural variability means no one here is a big enough expert to reliably sort the failure of inexperienced humans (to form something ~like what they have read before) from the failure of AI (to form something ~like what it has been fed and given value data for).

the cost of accusing bad writers of using ai is too high for the questionable benefit of playing whack-a-mole with "potentially" ai fics

it would be really nice if we could somehow reliably separate "generated by ai" (boo) from "cooked up by a gremlin" (yay) but, for reasons previous replies have detailed, we can't so leave it be.