The Importance of AI transparency on AO3
Hello everyone. Why am i making this post? To start with, I do not condone AI usage in creative works. If you do, please be so kind to disclose it, but better yet, do not use it. It is not real writing; you're only doing yourself a disfavor and deceiving your readers. Not to mention the environmental harms. Recently, someone has unveiled a foolproof method of uncovering whether someone has used Claude LLM in their AO3 work, by directly examining the source code. I'll leave their explanation here:
"The absence of this particular Claude-generated HTML code [“font-claude-response-body”], in a fanfiction does not necessarily mean that the work is human. These examples are purely cases in which, whether due to inattention or hastiness, the original Claude formatting was copied and pasted directly into AO3’s text editor without the filtering of writing platform tools (Google Docs, Pages, Word, etc.) or otherwise being removed by the user."
This means it cannot detect Chatgpt, Grok or any other AI LLM, and not if the text was pasted to somewhere else (like word, notes, etc.), before making its way to AO3. Only from Claude and only directly to AO3 text box. These are no baseless accusations, as there are no ways the “font-claude-response-body”, could have gotten there other than the author copy pasting the AI generated text. This is indeed the first definitive proof we have of AI usage. I am a reader and writer on AO3, and with the Claude AI unmasking going on (read the doc here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YyFKLzunnvVJRDTql5nHJwBb-swxIftn/view), some unsavory characters have been unmasked for their AI use as well.
One of them – AO3 author and writer of the very popular Avatar fic I'll be like One of Your Girls, eatingsoupwafork. She was not among those linked in the doc–with the new skin installed, I perused some of the most popular Avatar fic on AO3, and to my joy, almost none of them had the Claude fragments in their source code, which is another win for us Avatar fandom (though as i mentioned before, it's not indicative the authors necessarily didn't use AI). But such was not the case for this particular author. I just want to say that I do not condone harassment, so do not send any hate to this person. But i believe politely asking authors to be transparent and take accountability, which is not harassment or hate. When called out, and asked to appropriately tag her work as AI-assisted, she did not admit to using AI, even going so far as to say she ''will be the first one to call out AI'', and that she "does not understand using AI in creative works", and even called for her readers to install the new skin. This hypocrisy is not surprising sadly, as some of the authors in the linked doc who got caught for using AI, had 'fuck ai' in their tags and ANs.
As of today, July 3rd, she has deleted all of the Claude fragments...But fortunately, I have receipts. These are the screenshots I took yesterday on July 2nd, showcasing how it looked like when flagged by the code (a blazing red), an example of the Claude fragment (“font-claude-response-body”.), and how many instances there are on the whole (146, discount five as those are the skin code, and the marked out areas are just my personal bookmarks for privacy):
Ant then how it looks like today, scrubbed clean and white, with Claude mentions only from the skin code and comments:
I did not want to, and would not be making this post, if she only had came out clean and apologized, or at the very least owned up to it. Yet she covered her tracks and only then, did she smugly suggest that her readers check out her fic for AI traces themselves. This is quite frankly distasteful and offensive in my opinion. If you so blatantly use AI in your work, why hide it? Because you know it's wrong and that others will call you out on it. Again, I do not condone sending hate comments, let's all be respectful, as it is not my intention to dogpile on this person. I believe my tone in this post was respectful and appropriate. I only wanted to bring light to this situation because the hypocrisy is staggering and disappointing. Especially for such a renowned fic author. My hope for the outcome is transparency going forward, not dogpiling or harassment. I believe readers should know when their favorite author has used AI and then lied about it. I will be muting this person, and you should too.
