Too Crazy for Boystown

with all due respect, no. just because someone wrote something does not mean the thing is (again I am speaking in terms of literary ‘quality’ as judged by competitions and tradpub etc rather than whether or not it appeals to people) worthy of commendation. also don’t even try with the ‘but the environmental/social impact of AI means people i decide have used AI MUST be harassed on tumblr’. are you weighing the moral positionality of every author you kudos? what if your all time favourite porno was written by someone who owns a real fur coat? what scale of morality are you using here, and why is the moral worth of another human being contingent upon what you think counts as AI or not AI?

anyway. when you post a fic on Ao3, you are participating in a community, not nominating your fic for the Booker Prize. and this is why fanfic is so diverse and fun and varied in style and form and all that. because most things appeal to someone or the other out there, even if your fic is just a description of Aragorn unbuckling his belt when someone asks him to choose between washing his hair or shitting in his hands and clapping. the whole point of it is that it is fun and not ruled by literary prize criteria. hence, even if someone did write an AI generated fic and posted it on Ao3, they are not exactly seeking a prestigious certification of literary capability and neither is Ao3 or its reader offering that. there is no institution here claiming authority to certify quality, no structural gatekeeping function, no literary tradition being characterised as imitable machinery by the people in power. Ao3 is an archive site. it operates outside literary legitimation because it does not claim to legitimise anything.

which leads to my next point:

bro why do you CARE 😭

like if I came across that shitting in his hands and clapping fic, I would just say ‘ew’ and scroll. If I came across a story I suspect to be AI generated, I would do the same thing. I have done this on countless occasions. I would not come onto another website and talk about how Author X should be beaten with hammers for her poop fic. or make a canva graphic of Author Y’s mdash usage? why would I do that when I could just use the time to find a fic I enjoy and read that instead?

if, like i said above, writing a fic and posting it is not a declaration of literary prowess or assumed quality and is simply the act of engaging with a community, then AI generated fics are, as much as you hate to see it that way, doing the same thing. the ‘writers’ are engaging with the community with their AI fic. and sure, this way of engagement may be dishonest and what not, but clearly some people enjoy them and have made them popular or whatever, in which case that is a back and forth engagement. is the argument here that a couple of these fics have gotten a lot of comments or whatever? are we pretending that kudos and comments are now the measure of a fic’s quality, instead of reflecting whatever the primary audience in that fandom prefers to read?

there is no prize denoting literary worth that is handed out by kudos or comments or being posted on Ao3, this is just someone reading something and going yeah, I like this. are you going to go hound everyone who commented ‘great fic’ on every single fic where Naruto “gets pegged—not with a plug but a finger—a quiet, thrumming evocation of the Sexy Jutsu on the tapestry of his pubes, floating on the grammar of his balls”??? this is a person in a community saying I enjoyed this; the lit prize is an institution exercising cultural authority in a way that dictates, to paraphrase Roy, which stories are told, by whom, and how. Ao3 is not doing that. Ao3 is doing the opposite of that. Ao3 says “the person into Aragorn shitting into his hands and clapping” can post whatever they want.

and like. again. what are you getting out of this? what is the end goal? to harass some twelve year old for writing and posting OCfic using ChatGPT? this shit is always framed through the lens of pedagogical care and “accountability” but what it actually is is just a pure flame war lol. what is the educational value of slagging off someone to the entire internet over a zero stakes situation with no payoff? what does such an action garner you aside from the chance to chest-thump about your own virtue?

and most importantly, what if you’re wrong?

and this is the point of all points lol, the one that overshadows all the others i’ve made so far: the fact that what I am saying in my commonwealth prize writeup isn’t a contradiction of me thinking people should not be conducting public witch hunts over fanfic, it actually proves the point i am making! because if these people, who are in terms of writing qualifications and academic background, ostensibly at the topmost layer of the literary world, who have read much much more in their fields than you or I, have, for free, offered us a box of popcorn and an enjoyable demonstration of a reading practice lazy enough to award a prestigious prize to an AI generated story, then what makes YOU so confident that your decision and subsequent public witchhunt is justified, that your eye for ‘real’ literature and hallmarks of LLM generated writing, aside from really puerile shit like ‘goody proctor used an emdash’, is somehow better, is somehow good enough to harass people over?

idk man. in my book, a bunch of knowitall chucklefucks harassing people in their own community based entirely on vibes and a sprinkle of ship wars (yeah you mfs think you’re slick don’t you 😭😭😭), leads to a far more toxic community than a handful of young or inexperienced writers using LLMs and what not.

what you are doing is encouraging a paranoid reading practice in your own community, the community you partake in for fun! and like… man this is the thing that actually gets me, the thing that ties all of this together so bleakly: the paranoid reading practice this attitude is spreading in fan communities, the gleefulness of the witch-hunt, the "I have identified the tells" confidence… this is, structurally speaking, the same operation as what the prize judges used, just pointed in the opposite direction.

the judges had a model of what Caribbean literary fiction is supposed to look like and matched the text against it without actually reading it closely or engaging with it. AI-vigilantes on Ao3 have a model of what AI writing is supposed to look like and they're matching texts against that without actually reading them either. both of you are reading for the shape of a thing rather than the thing itself. both of you are outsourcing any actual encounter with the text to a paranoid checklist. and both your guns, subsequently, will misfire with potentially horrible consequences.

and I think the reason I find it worth saying all of this in one breath, the Commonwealth Prize, the judges, Granta uploading the story to some AI to ask about its AIness, the reactionary discourse, and yes, the AO3 witch hunts too, is that ALL of these are varying results of the same root problem, which is that we have collectively gotten very bad at tolerating the uncertainty and discomfort that actual literary engagement requires.

actual reading requires you to accept not-knowing, to at least attempt to stay in the room with a story that isn't immediately yielding to what you are demanding from it instead of deciding that something you do not understand on first skim does not deserve categorisation as ‘real’, requires you to ask "is this doing something I can't yet follow" before you ask "is this doing nothing???”.

it’s an uncomfortable place to be and I understand why people reach for the checklist instead, whether the checklist is emdash counting or "this sounds like the thing I know” or “people from X ship always use AI”. but the cost of the checklist, the cost of this paranoid, mechanical, securitised and surveilled reading practice, is that you stop encountering writing on its own terms entirely. and at that point you're not reading, are you? you're just confirming what you already thought, and some poor writer somewhere, who might have made every decision in every sentence and could account for all of it, is getting caught in the net of your refusal to engage with uncertainty.

it all is just so fucking tragic man. like the intellectual honesty of going "I didn't understand this and I wonder why that is" seems to have been replaced by the comfortable "I didn't understand this and therefore it is bad/fake/not worth my time.” and what do you lose here? what is actively being destroyed? the possibility of a real, genuine encounter, the moment of encounter that reading fundamentally is, the experience of a text doing something to you that you weren't expecting it to do, that you didn't have a framework for and had to build one as you read. that experience requires vulnerability and an admission that your existing framework might be insufficient or at the very least not throwing your toys out of the pram the minute you find in a piece of writing something you consider morally wrong.

and yeah maybe you’re right lol. maybe i should be naming and shaming. so here you go: fuck a fanwriting culture that has entirely given up on the idea that reading is something a person can be wrong about in ways that should provoke curiosity, even if the result of that curiosity is just ‘tbh yeah this is bad writing’. but alas, apparently we have decided that it's more important to be confident about what you're reading than to actually read it and find out.