holly

So, plainly: I write my work myself. Generative AI doesn’t write or draft my prose for me. I’ll be transparent about the rest, though, because AI is quite hard to escape entirely now: there are ordinary parts of my process that touch on it. Running a chapter through Grammarly for spelling and grammar (the proofreading, not its “write it for me” features), or doing initial research (hi, Google AI assisted search that is now largely inescapable) for fic concepts and American equivalents for things I only have British references for. But the thing most people really care about — the actual writing being produced by generative AI — is not my bag.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, though. Unless there’s actual proof, the kind people have found lately, with AI text or code left sitting in the file, no one but the writer can truly know how something was made. “It sounds like AI” isn’t proof, and it can’t be, especially when these models were trained on enormous amounts of fanfiction in the first place. Of course some AI prose reads like fic. It was taught by fic. Which means “this reads like AI” and “this reads like a fanfic writer” have quietly collapsed into the same sentence, and that’s an impossible position to put a writer in, because there’s no version of it I can actually disprove.

I’ll be honest, because I think a lot of us are feeling it: this has made me anxious. Writing is something I genuinely love. Project Hail Mary changed my life, and taking that love and turning it into something of my own has been one of the most valuable things I’ve ever done for myself. The messages this week have chipped at that — partly because there’s no way to answer them, and partly because they’ve landed alongside a few other comments about my writing simply not being good enough. Any one of these on its own, fine. All at once, it does start to take the joy out of the one thing I do purely for joy.

I understand why people ask. It’s a rough moment for fandom and fanfiction right now, and the trust really was broken by people who lied about it. You have every right to be cautious, and I hadn’t said anything yet, so I wanted to answer in good faith and as transparently as possible.

Going forward, though, I won’t be engaging with anonymous accusations or unkind messages about this. Not out of anger. Just to protect the part of this that’s still fun for me. If you have doubts about how I write, that’s completely okay, and the kindest thing for both of us is to simply not read my work — no hard feelings at all.

Pile-ons in fandom aren’t pretty. And while I understand why things are particularly sensitive right now, an accusation without objective proof has just as much chance of being false as true — and you’re firing those shots at real people, who feel every one of them. I’m not debating anyone’s right to know whether what they’re reading was written by a human or by AI — I’m all for tagging fics correctly, so readers can choose what they engage with. It’s just that right now, with where the technology is, it’s a very easy thing to jump on with conviction but not proof. It’s something that I think, over the next few months, as a community we will need to navigate together to figure a way through that keeps up with the pace of AI advancements and tech generally. But idk about anyone else, but I don’t want to feel like I can’t use an em dash (correctly) or a certain phrase for fear it reads as AI — with everything that now comes attached to that.