This Is How It Is

Spin the wheel to find out your weakness!

writing “long” paragraphs is not a sign of AI — it’s a common narrative choice many writers make both in fanfiction and in traditionally published novels, and AI stole it from us.

using an em dash is not a sign of AI. it’s a stylistic sentence choice that’s been an option in place of commas and semicolons for a very long time, and AI stole it from us.

long sentence structures are not a sign of AI, but are yet another stylistic choice writers often make to create a cadence and tone that mimics the flow of poetry, and AI stole it from us.

“YA narrative breaks”? i don’t even know what the fuck this means, but i can guarantee that AI stole it from us.

italics are once again a stylistic choice that many writers love to use to create emphasis, and it’s a more stylistically acceptable and traditional form of emphasis than bold or underline text. oh, and just to be extra clear: AI STOLE IT FROM US.

stop creating fandom witch hunts over AI when you know fuck all about what it means to sit and write a story, and to spend hours fiddling with sentence structure and dialogue to get the exact right tone. writers will stop writing out of fear that their work “sounds like AI” — IT DOESNT! AI STOLE FROM US! AI SOUNDS LIKE US! — and after a while, all that will be available on AO3 is shitty AI-generated fanfiction.

because yeah, people are going to continue to use AI to write fanfiction whether you “call them out” or not. but making a laughable thread on X that uses asinine criteria is not going to fix that problem. it will just push the real writers out because people will accuse them of using AI when they haven’t, and they will (rightfully) stop writing for spaces that attack them.

I suggest

Do fandom fannishly.

firstly - If you don't like a fic then just close it.

Comment and talk to writers. Do rec lists to share fic. Make art for people's fic. Arrange prompts and games. Ask people who like it for requests. Send pleasant asks. Give praise.

I always look at cookbooks for people who have no energy/time to do elaborate meal preparations, and roll my eyes. Like, you want me to stay on my feet for long enough to prepare 15 different ingredients from scratch, and use 5 different pots and pans, when I have chronic fatigue and no dishwasher?

These people seem to get it, though. It’s very simple in places. It’s basically the cookbook for people who think, ‘I’m really bored of those same five low-spoons meals I eat, but I can’t think of anything else to cook that won’t exhaust me’. And it’s free!

Chapters: 15/18 Fandom: Batman - All Media Types Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Roy Harper/Jason Todd, Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne, Lex Luthor/Dan the Alpha, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Lex Luthor & Jason Todd, Alfred Pennyworth & Bruce Wayne, Alfred Pennyworth & Jason Todd Characters: Jason Todd, Roy Harper, Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Lex Luthor, Dan the Alpha, Oliver Queen, Original Child(ren) of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, Alfred Pennyworth, Ra’s al Ghul, Talia al Ghul Series: Part 4 of a room full of coral Chapter Summary:

Other useful AI Removal/Detection links

How to spot AI Hallucinations like a Reference Librarian (originally on Substack)

Chapters: 14/18 Fandom: Batman - All Media Types Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Roy Harper/Jason Todd, Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne, Lex Luthor/Dan the Alpha, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Lex Luthor & Jason Todd, Alfred Pennyworth & Bruce Wayne, Alfred Pennyworth & Jason Todd Characters: Jason Todd, Roy Harper, Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Lex Luthor, Dan the Alpha, Oliver Queen, Original Child(ren) of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, Alfred Pennyworth, Ra’s al Ghul, Talia al Ghul Series: Part 4 of a room full of coral

Chapter Summary:

It’s time to break these rules, Jason thought, and fixed his gaze forward. Whatever came next, he wouldn’t submit. Not even if it was Ra’s himself, or a whole garrison’s worth of alphas.

Ra’s leaned back, his lip curling in a sneer. “Omegas are not permitted to fight in our challenges,” he said, his eyes scanning Jason from head to toe. “Find another alpha, or–”

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.