love softly

Am I in love? —yes, since I am waiting. The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait… The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.

— Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

There's a lot of uproar in the fandom space recently as people are exposing fics that were generated through AI and the author claimed it as their own writing. While in the case of the big HR fic being exposed the use of AI was clear from the Claude code, this will not be the case for every fic being generated and posted without the Created Using GenAI tags. These days I am seeing more and more posts/tweets etc of people plopping random ss from fics going "it's so easy to tell this is AI" and these posts in particular scare me.

Bc it is not that easy at all. Real people use em dashes and oxford commas and words like delve. The AI did not come up with these concepts it learned them from us, it uses them bc real people use them. Yes there are certain punctuation choices and words that it uses way more than average, but that's still more than average for a regular person. Many writers do and will continue to use em dashes and abuse oxford commas and repeat things and use "big" words. I'm genuinely concerned we're gonna enter an era where ao3 authors will face increasing scrutiny for shit like having a vast vocabulary or using proper grammar.

Yeah it's pretty fucking shitty if an author uses gen AI and tries to hide it. Using it at all is abhorrent. But pls before we tumble down a path of extreme scrutiny and outrage out of AI paranoia, just take a moment to ask yourself "is this really AI or is this a person using a phrase I have come to associate with AI bc i read somewhere that AI uses it".