Too many times, we've started to read a fic recommended by a friend and came to realize it wasn't written by a human. Generative AI as it currently exists is based on stealing the fruits of human labor, so it's personal for writers who do the work themselves. The injustice makes us angry!
We're going to post about common AI tells and non-AI alternatives for things like research. We're also going to dissect fics and tell you why we think they're AI-generated. That last one is the trickiest part. For that, we're sharing our annotations, like a scan of a paper book with our handwritten notes in the margins. We're currently focusing on the Heated Rivalry TV show fandom, because that's the fandom for which we're currently reading the most fic. (This may change in the future, obviously.)
We're not telling you what to believe. We might be wrong! Do your own thinking and make your own decisions.
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You've possibly seen this blowing up on Twitter, but because we live in the stupidest timeline, an AI-generated story has won the prestigious Commonwealth Prize. There's no definitive evidence yet, but I've read this all the way through and I think it's an excellent exercise in practicing the ability to spot genAI rhythms and tics. You can read the story on the Granta website: The Serpent in the Grove.
Below is a dissection of the sentences that have that distinct Eau de Robot. Open the story in a new window and do a read-along with me.
They say the grove still hums at noon.
First sentence, and we're kicking off strong with an all-time AI-fave: hum. Not dispositive, but it's not looking great.
Not the beesâ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound â as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there.
It being followed up immediately by the falsely profound metaphors that sound good but that fall apart the more you scrutinize it is definitely a pretty bad sign, Bront. "neat industry"; "clean rasp of cutlass on vine"; "as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there." Bonkers density of figurative language, but it all feels hollow. Only one of those things makes a noise even close to approaching a hum. Swallowing a shout is a fancy way to say "wanted to shout but held it back at the last minute." It's a perfectly good phrase that I've used myself lots of times, but in this context (actually making a noise, and that noise is a hum, and actually it's the earth making that noise) it makes no sense.
Ask the oldest in the village and youâll hear some version of: âIt had a well there once, and a woman. The grove ainât forget.â
My primary beef with this is the dialogue. The mix of formal and informal registers feels slick and terrible? "It had a well there once, and a woman" doesn't sound like it belongs with "The grove ain't forget." Again, not dispositive, could just be someone just trying to sound literary but instead contributing to something that feels uncomfortably like a colonizer's gaze? (NB: am not white; born and raised in a Commonwealth country in the Global South.)
Inside, air clung thick as porridge skin: damp earth, woodsmoke, and the sour tang of fermenting cocoa.
Classic AI rhythm in display here! Observation: thing, thing, other thing. This one even has a smell, but at least the smell makes sense. Rule of three spotted.
Fun fact: porridge skin ain't that thick! Not discounting the fact that maybe Trinidadian porridge is different from the various types of porridge I've eaten, but. It's a thin layer, usually. The porridge itself, now that's what's thick (situationally, depending on personal preference + the grain(s); I like mine thick enough to stick a spoon into upright). This might just be a careless metaphor; humans make 'em all the time.
No fan, no bulb, no hum â only the thin light slipping between warped boards and the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.
Another classic AI-style sentence (No x, no y, no zâonly [thing]). Bonus: we have hum again. What's supposed to hum in here? We're no longer in the grove, we're in a shack. Rule of three spotted.
Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission.
Once you've read a certain amount of AI-generated writing, you'll notice that the LLM will throw out certain pet constructions. Things are etched/burned/written etc. in bones. Things never like asking for permission. Questions asked will frequently have some kind of metaphor or figurative language attached.
His eyes narrowed against the glare outside and the darker glare inside him: old promises that never ripened, the ache where hope should live, a gnawing sense that land can own a man while making him swear the land belongs to him.
Multiple terrible metaphors that fall apart when you poke at it. Narrowing his eyes at the outside glare: yeah fine. Darker glare inside him? The fuck does that mean? There's the colon, that tells us that the next three things will help illustrate but they don't? Old promises that never ripened is quite good, actually, I like that one. Ache where hope should liveâa little cliche, but whatever. The land metaphor is also fine. But none of this helps make sense of darker glare, or why Vishnu is...squinting at it??
Also: another rule of three.
Look, you'll pry the rule of three from my cold dead hands; it's a perfectly good construction! But look at how often it's used here. Three paragraphs in, and we've seen it three times.
He knew every root that tripped a foot, the snake-curve of run-off, the brittle crumble after drought.
Fourth rule of three in four paragraphs, and...man it's hard to articulate specifically why this sentence gives peak AI, but it does. It's partly the way the sentence fragments stack and partly the rule of three.
He could name the price of rice in the shop, the price buyers would give for wet cocoa, and how the distance between the two left a man short.
Sort of a rule of three here, but what I wanted to point out here is another popular AI construction: thing 1, thing 2, and then a clause that contrasts the two. AIs also love a metaphorical distance. Like. So much.
Nineteen and brown like dust after rain, she turned roti dough with a rhythm that came not from joy but from endurance.
AI-favorite structure spotted: not this, but this other thing. And again, a reasonable sentence structure to use. Excellent rhetorical device! But we've seen variants of this several times already, and we're only on paragraph five.
She wore her role without protest and without light; both things can be true.
This is also peak AI style, and again, it's hard to articulate. I think it's the repetition + weird metaphor (what does it mean to wear something without light????).
One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courageâs cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.
What does it mean to write the future in invisible ink? I'd buy this metaphor if there were enough scaffolding, or if it were an idea expounded in a poem. But here it stands as the third item in a sequence that never quite meshes, which could be bad writing and not AI, but gosh.
Speaking of third things: another rule of three. We're at paragraph eight, with one of the paragraphs being a single sentence.
They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.
What does "rain took a shape and decided to keep it" mean? Because rain...does have a shape? Kind of famously, in the (god I can't believe I'm saying this) shape of raindrops? Unless it's using rain in the sense of rainstorm, in which case, I don't know, I guess? And at first glance I thought the shape referred to the woman but upon a reread, I realized: no, the referent is what they call her?
You're forgiven though if you didn't even notice the rain metaphor because "made benches become men"? Look I'm not discounting the possibility that I'm missing a Trinidadian reference, but taken on its face: made what become what now?
Hair tumbling wild, a dress that caught and released light, laughter with iron under it.
Another rule of three. I've lost count at this point, but we're at paragraph 10, with two of those paras being single-sentence.
She wore the islandâs mixed bloodlines like a crown â African in the hips, Spanish in the cheekbone, East Indian in the hair when the rain kinked it, Carib in the way her gaze could bless and warn at once.
Ah yes, the crown, famously worn on...the hips and cheekbones and eyes. Which, fine, I'm being picky here, I get what the writing is trying to get across, but the word mantle is right the fuck there and would've worked somewhat better. Or Nazir could've picked a different simileâwait no he couldn't because he didn't write this.
The rum made a spilled drink a signal, a brush of hand a promise, a sorry whispered near his ear an invitation.
Rule of three, paragraph 11.
After that, Sita became obstacle by existing. Not for anything she did wrong, but for how exactly she fitted the life that fenced him in: the quiet chores, the patient hands, the unlit lamp.
Rule of three, paragraph 12. The metaphors in this work by and large except for the unlit lamp. What does that mean? There's no context from the story at large. The light imagery we've received so far has has appeared basically once and it had to do with Vishnu squinting against two types of glare.
He studied how Sita walked the track alone, how no neighbour watched their yard, how the plank over the old well at the acreâs edge lifted on one loose nail.
Rule of three, still on paragraph 12.
The ring of stone lay there where cocoa gave to bush, its mouth boarded with ply and chance.
This sentence is fine, by and large, except for how its cadence sounds too similar to the preceding sentences, but: boarded with ply and chance? Ply is fine. Chance? I'm repeating myself a lot here, but truly: what does that even mean?
Bush kept it, snakes liked it, air from it felt like a hand from a grave.
Rule of three, paragraph 13. The hand from a grave simile is...god it's almost apt, but once again thinking through it makes it fall apart in a very AI-characteristic way. Hand from a grave associations: rotting? Bony? Cold, sure, that works. Something that pulls, the undeadâokay there's something here, but there's nothing here to give it weight and context. Again, I'd read a poem that had this as its central theme/conceit, but plopped here in the midst of a thicket of metaphors, all it does is trip me up.
He cleared scrub in neat hours.
What does this meeeaaannnnnn.
Another day he spilled a pail and grimaced at a taste he invented. âPipe water startinâ to seep by the old stones,â he lied. âCloser than that blasted road, ent? The sun go cut yuh in two on that walk.â
I'm reading this story very attentively and I'm generally really good at parsing dialect/patois with very little context (grew up around...many languages), but I'm struggling to make sense of this paragraph. Here's my attempt to interpret this paragraph:
Vishnu spills a pail of water (from where? Presumably the well where he's planning to throw Sita into so he can fuck/marry Zoongie?) and grimaces as if he's tasting something nasty that doesn't exist because he made it up with his own beautiful mind. What is he tasting? Unclear! His own spit? Can't be the water, because from all indications he spilled it before he drank it.
He lies about a busted pipe by the old stones (which stones? The ring of well stones? Unclear!).
Something is closer than the road, though again, unclear whatâthe well, the pipe, the stones.
The road is unshaded which makes the sun feel especially ferocious you're walking along it.
As you read the story the significance of this becomes a bit clearer but the slipperiness of the referents feels eerieâlike, yes, humans mess this kind of thing up, too, but not this slickly, and in this particular way. It's impossible to track the sequence of events and what Vishnu means as-written.
Big in the way of women who never apologise to furniture, she had a laugh that shook dust from joists and a voice that could soften to coax a child from a ledge.
"Big in the way of women who never apologise to furniture"âI'm sorry, what? It has a pleasing rhythm and sound, but what does it mean?
She noticed the fresh-cut path and the way land bore witness.
Once again, figurative language unanchored from anything substantial. "She noticed [...] the way the land bore witness" feels significant and poetic, but how can somebody notice land bearing witness?
People talk about bush like it dumb.
This isn't really about proof of AI, but how this story annoys me and panders to the colonizer's gaze that I mentioned up above: the mix of syntaxes in the story doesn't feel good to me. Pick a lane and commit. Jamming a story full of falsely profound metaphor in a syntax that's distinctly white and over-educated, only to flip to dialect like this makes it feel like a garnish. It highlights the otherness of Vishnu's experience when the othering, the alienation, should happen in the other direction, if that makes sense.
Sita lifted two planks and slid them aside. Wood complained in a voice too near speech. She lowered the pail until rope slackened. Smell rose â old wet, crushed jasmine, frog skin. On the second haul, the board beneath her shifted the way a tired man shifts in his sleep. The plank gave one long groan and swallowed its word.
Once again, I've been paying really close attention to this story, but I'm not able to make sense of this situation. There's a well with an opening that's been partially boarded up. Vishnu has taken care to loosen the nails on those boards. Sita has pulled aside the boards and is pulling water from the well. But...she's standing on the boards? That she's pulled aside??? Who stands on top of a well opening to pull water instead of beside it? I was picturing a well with a raised ring of stones but okay, maybe it's a well with a ring of stones flush with the ground, that's also fine, but why is she standing instead of kneeling, and why is she standing on planks that she's pulled aside, that are still simultaneously over the well? Why isn't she just standing on solid ground? The story even made a point about how she's thoughtful/smart?
Again, maybe it's bad human writing, but after reading a bunch of AI-generated prose I'm here to tell you that this kind of bizarre shift in what's supposed to be where + extremely polished prose at the SPAG level is a telltale marker of AI.
Stone, shoulder, hip; shock of cold tearing breath.
Rule of three. Paragraph 19.
One foot banged and screamed.
That's a weird construction. Screamed with pain/agony/sensation, sure, but okay, fine, people use weird constructions, too, but "banged" in such close proximity to "screamed" has the autocomplete on steroids vibe of AI-generated prose to me.
Halfway to dying, the big preachments â God, Fate, the Ordeal of Woman â gave way to small things: a childâs laugh chasing a yard fowl, how light falls on a cup, a line of ants crossing a bowl you meant to wash.
Double rule of three. Paragraph 20. Listen I'm just tracking how many of these rack up in this story, okay. I use rule of threes all the time in my writing but this is a notable quantity.
Also, how do the big preachments give way to the little details? We've had no insight into Sita's thoughts or attitudes towards the big picture stuff. We've had hardly any insight into Sita at all, really. It's unmoored and contextless in, again, a distinctly AI-generated fashion.
She did not call out loud. Call for who? A man who had cleared brush like a conscience? A grove that listened? She reached and slid and failed and reached again, breath sawing, chest burning. The circle of sky above shrank to a coin.
Wait, the sky above should've already sunk to a coinâSita is already at the bottom of the well at this point. It can't really shrink any more. Which again illustrates how this story sucks at tracking action and continuity.
Midday should hold pot noise and scolding and a childâs quarrel.
Rule of three. Paragraph 22.
Silence in a village is smoke; it sneaks from something burning.
Peak AI metaphor structure. It also makes no sense. Silences in villages occur all the time and for all kinds of reasons? If for no other reason than people need to go the fuck to sleep at some point? And the fact that everything should suddenly fall silent at midday and that's what alerts Marsha that something's happened: that makes no sense. Like, did all the villagers cosmically sense that Sita had fallen down the well. Also: Puttie is with Marsha! Kids make noise! If there's an ominous silence, that's a sign for Marsha to go check on Puttie, not to walk a half mile or whatever to the freaking well.
The hush had a tilt â a room shifted half an inch.
Another falsely profound metaphor, written in the AI-characteristic way.
She saw the ring of stone, the lifted planks, the scuffed rope.
Rule of three, paragraph 23.
What's the rope attached to? The lack of description of what the well looks like and how it works is maddening.
She tore a length of vine from a mango trunk, peeled it in her hands to feel if it would hold a woman. She didnât shout a name. She got to work.
...girl why wouldn't you just use the rope????? Like yeah it's scuffed up but it's probably stronger than a random vine you yanked off a mango tree, plus it's right there? (How didn't it fall down with Sita?)
And again, the AI rhythm that you learn to recognize after a while: [Subject] didn't [verb]. [Subject] did [other thing instead].
It wasnât the words but the way they split the day into before and after.
If there's one thing AI loves, it's splitting things into one thing and then the other.
What burned there wasnât begging. It wasnât love. It was older, lower, a coal that hadnât died in the poor ash of their marriage: a blue flame saying plain, I see you.
A variation on the not x, not y, but a secret third thing: z format. Also: take a shot, we have another rule of three, nested within a larger rule of three.
Water is jealous. They pulled until Marshaâs shoulders were fire, until Vishnuâs hands were bone.
I can accept "until Marsha's shoulders were fire" as a syntactical feature of Trinidadian patois, but "until Vishnu's hands were bone"âonce again, I could be missing important Trinidadian context here, but that doesn't make sense in an eerie way that screams AI to me. Like, if the software is putting out a best guess as to what comes next after hand, well, bone is a really good pick! But pulling until your hands are bone? It doesn't sound correct outside of, once again, poetry where there's a bunch of other stuff going on to help situate the imagery.
Sitaâs elbow hit stone, then her hips, then one knee.
Rule of three. I've given up on tracking the paragraphs. I'm honestly rapidly losing my will to live.
She came over the lip choking a sound the day almost refused.
Another meaningless metaphorâwhat does it mean for a day to refuse something? Accompanied by the AI tendency to hedge.
At the clinic they cut the hem and wrapped the leg and checked for lights going out behind the eyes.
Rule of three, meaningless metaphor. "Checked for lights going out behind the eyes" what does it mean, what does it meaaannn, I feel like Jack Skellington trying to figure out what Christmas is except with considerably less joy.
She let the nurse make the necessary notes in a ledger whitened by many small tragedies.
Why whitened??? Sorry, I've been doing this a while and my ability to post in complete sentences is rapidly fading.
Shame is a substance he felt on his skin. It itches. It doesnât rinse.
Yet another variant on the "not x, not y, but secret thing z" structure.
Sita rode, white with pain and the kind of tired that goes through bone and keeps going.
Ey, there we go, figurative language involving bone. Also, I'm going to aggregate all the sentences that use "the way" in its construction at the end of this post, there are...several.
Evening poured itself into the day.
This metaphor allllmost works except I think "day" should've been "sky"? Or "poured itself into" should've been "displaced."
Puttie came from Marshaâs yard with cheeks sticky sweet, saw his mother, and his face did a thing with no name â opened, broke, opened.
LOL there's the missing kid. Who the fuck was watching Puttie this entire time? As always, possible that it's a human forgetting to track a person, but I would like to reiterate that AIs are especially terrible at this kind of thing. Also: another rule of three.
Also also: "opened, broke, opened" makes no sense. Closed and opened work, as does closed and broke. But this particular pairing is nonsensical.
He had no words for the pressure on his chest, so the old names stepped forward: jumbie, duppy, serpent.
Rule of three.
Sita healed slow. She learned to favour the leg without letting the favouring become a limp other people could define her by.
OK, what the fuck happened to her leg? All I remembered was a big bruise, so I went back and reread, and all we have is "Sitaâs leg â already writing itself in purple" so...sounds like a bruise? Not even a scrape or a bleed? Not a bone break, they only wrapped her leg without mention of a splint or cast.
Once again: maddening lack of detail and context. Things shifting in weird, eerie ways that make the action very difficult to track.
Marsha saw to food, jokes, errands.
Rule of three.
She sorted beans with new slowness, looked at her boy with new exactness, and built inside herself a shelf for the decisions she would need to make when the time came.
Rule of three.
The girl teacher asked Sita to write her name. She pressed too hard, and the A came out like a little house with a crooked door, but it stood. The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink. Sita went back and soon had a signature that would carry weight.
Oof, all the similes and metaphors in this, only one of which makes sense.
On Sunday the priest preached serpents and gardens; the reading demanded it. He said the woman listened to the wrong voice in the tree. Sita felt her mouth curve. Here the tree had kept truth and a man had lied.
...what's the tree that had kept the truth? There's been no tree in the story? Other than the mango tree from which Marsha pulled the vine lmao. There was a well and a whole lot of brush and a magically silent child who stayed nicely occupied while his parents disappeared for hours?
I do understand that the tree here might be yet another metaphor but what does the tree stand for? Help.
She felt the scar seam like a tailorâs last stitch. She didnât hate her leg. It had thrashed exactly long enough to catch a stone.
What. Happened. To her leg. Also: you're not supposed to feel a tailor's last stitch?
People passing said they sometimes heard the noon hum if the wind was in a mood.
Humming spotted!
She wrote three things each night: âI breathe good in my sleep.â âThe jasmine smell by the door was clean.â âMarsha laugh at a thing I say.â
Self-aware rule of three but it still counts!
First good rain after dry is a forgiveness the sky gives itself.
Another metaphor that sounds beautiful but makes no sense.
Everything flared â anthill, flower, first rot. Sita stood in the doorway and let blown mist reach her face; Puttie danced into it; Vishnu checked the drain heâd cut to turn water from the well mouth.
Rule of three x2.
She lay down and woke before light with a wordless admission: I lived. Not gratitude, exactly. A fact that felt like a small warm animal in her hands.
Listen, if this sounds precisely like the rhythms and writing style of a lot of Heated Rivalry fanfic, it's because this exact construction is extremely popular in a lot of HR fics. Weird coincidence!
On some middays, if the wind wants, you can hear the hum.
Humming! I will give credit to the fact that while it doesn't make sense, it's at least thematically consistent humming.
He listens: the brook language of leaves, sunâs thin hiss, a creak where wood learns to pretend to be a board and is tired of pretending.
Rule of three. None of the metaphors make sense. What's a "brook language"? The sun...hisses?? "wood learns to pretend to be a board and is tired of pretending" is literally a nonsense phrase.
He thinks of a towel catching light, a jasmine moved from a mouth to a door, letters spelling a name until the name meant breath.
Rule of three, and that last metaphor makes. No. Sense.
One day â the hum loud as if noon had tuned itself â he brings his daughter
Humming spotted again, and it makes even less sense than usual. The noon tuned itself??
He calls her back with a word his mother once used that grammar canât carry but love can.
"That grammar can't carry." God. Someone who is good at interpreting nonsense please help me understand this, my family is dying.
He speaks â not to saints or ghosts, but to a living listening.
Not x, but y construction. Also: what the hell is a living listening?
In the hot hush, the grove held its breath and released it â small and entire, like a last stitch drawn through a wound that had finally decided to close.
This metaphor makes no sense: stitching a wound closed means the wound didn't actually decide anything? When we speak of wounds deciding to close we refer to something healing without intervention.
The serpent in the grove was never only a snake.
It was the thing in a man that slid along stone for dark, and the thing in a woman that wrapped a vine around herself and climbed.
This sounds pretty but is! Meaningless! "slid along stone for dark" is completely meaningless!
The grove remembered.
The house remembered.
The boy remembered.
And now, at noon, when the wind turns kind, the hum sounds less like hunger â
and more like the earth clearing its throat to speak the names of those who came back.
Rule of three, humming, meaningless metaphor.
And now: a collection of sentences that use "the way," a known AI favorite, some of which I've already mentioned above.
She wore the islandâs mixed bloodlines like a crown â African in the hips, Spanish in the cheekbone, East Indian in the hair when the rain kinked it, Carib in the way her gaze could bless and warn at once.
Big in the way of women who never apologise to furniture, she had a laugh that shook dust from joists and a voice that could soften to coax a child from a ledge. She knew the ways of men hollowed by want until only one thing remained. She noticed the fresh-cut path and the way land bore witness. People talk about bush like it dumb. But bush keeps memory the way hair keeps scent.
On the second haul, the board beneath her shifted the way a tired man shifts in his sleep.
It wasnât the words but the way they split the day into before and after. He staggered out, rum turning to poison on his tongue, and went to the well.
If you ask him, he shrugs the way men shrug when feeling places a hand on the neck and says be still.
Bonus: the summary for the story sounds AI-generated, too:
âThe Serpent in the Groveâ by Jamir Nazir is a story set in rural Trinidad about a struggling farmer, a silenced young wife and a grove that seems to remember what others try to bury.
Another bonus: Jamir Nazir's headshot might be AI-generated as well? Take that with the hugest grain of salt, though; AI detectors aren't the most reliable.
Anyway, I hope this liveblog helps demonstrate some of the markers of AI prose. It's not just using rules of three, it's how often that construction shows up, and it's not about nonsensical metaphors, but their frequency and the specific ways they don't make sense. The sheer number of not x, not y, but z-style constructions in this storyâmaybe it's Nazir's writing style but if it is, he needs to find a new pattern.
Going beyond sentence-level craft, it's also the way facts and things in the landscape don't receive enough detail, and when they do, the details shift and become uncertain. Sita's leg, how she's drawing water from the well, what the well even looks like, how they ever got water in the first place, losing track of Puttie, Marsha making the bananas choice to not even check on Puttie and leaving him unsupervised simply because the village fell quiet for a minute. None of these details fit.
So it's not about one thing; it's never about just one thing. It's about a bunch of things in aggregate. Keep in mind, too, that it's not about calling out bad writing (though AI writing is often bad!), or telling you that your fave author sucks or that your taste sucks. It feels like that in the moment; I get that. Our ultimate goal is to call out fraud. Don't put in the work if you don't want to. Just don't pretend that you did.
Wolfbird by Opal Apparition, Ch. 12, annotated with AI evidence.
Summary: this fic struggles with point of view, human physiology, and interaction between human bodies. It does this to a degree that we believe is inconsistent with human authorship and is indicative of AI use.
EDITED TO ADD: Apparently the siege condom is a reference to something earlier in the fic that we didn't remember, so please disregard that one.
The issues with physicality and blocking are an issue on their own (simply put, when human writers mess up blocking, they don't do it this way), but it's especially notable because the spelling and grammar in this fic is impeccable, and in human-written fics, that suggests a very high level of care and attention to detail.
That level of care and attention to detail is very, very incongruous with gravity not working or Ilya having three hands. Spelling and grammar this pristine suggests that someone read it over carefully at least once, and probably several times--but in all those careful reads, they missed that Ilya has three hands?
The EPUB and PDF of Wolfbird, downloaded from Archive of Our Own on April 6, 2026, can be found here.
People use generative AI for all kinds of things, not just generating text, but there's no good reason to use it for those purposes, either. The environmental impact and the moral implications of how it exploits labor (not just the works stolen for training sets, but the immense amounts of underpaid and exploited labor required to clean up the data and outputs to make the models work) just aren't worth it. For just about every use you can think of for genAI, we can guarantee there's an existing tool that uses a lot less water and processing power, and you don't have to worry about random lies and hallucinations.
Find and Replace
If you want to change a word in your fic to another word, you can use Find-And-Replace. This is available in all word processing programs.
Here is how to use it in Google Docs: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/62754
For Word, CTRL+H for Windows or CMD+H for Mac will bring up the Find and Replace dialog box. Make sure to click on the More button to check options like Match Case and Find Whole Words Only if you're trying to e.g. replace a character name that's a common word or fragment of a word, like Mark, or Ben.
Exporting into AO3-ready Format
Ellipsus does this with one click. https://ellipsus.com/Â
Google Docs has a variety of tools. There's AOYeet. There are a variety of plugins and scripts, but here's one of the most popular.
Word formats the text correctly (up to and including header styles), no export needed; just copy and paste your text into the AO3 Rich Text editor.
Spellcheck, Grammar Check and Thesauruses
There are many ways to check that youâve used a word correctly, or to think of substitutes. Here are some tips:
Get a beta reader who is familiar with the language! You can ask a mutual on social media, put out a call for help in a relevant Discord server, or just check in with oomf!
English has dictionaries and thesauruses to help readers, available for free on the Internet. A dictionary defines words, while a thesaurus offers close words.
Dictionaries: Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) are all famous, reputable sources. (OED might require a subscription; if you have a library card, you might be able to get access to it for free. Check the Resources page on your library website.)
Thesauruses: Merriam-Webster has an extensive thesaurus as well; WordHippo is also an excellent resource. The r/ENGLISH subreddit is frequently helpful.
Do an internet search! Look up "how to use X in a sentence." Odds are pretty good other people had the same question.
Choose the word in your own language, use Google translate to translate to English, and then translate it back. If you get a different word on the reverse translation, then itâs probably not accurate. Google translate often offers multiple options, so try another variation, and work until you get the same word both translated into English and then translated back.
Checking English Acronyms
There are several ways to check that youâve used a word correctly. Here are some tips:
Get a beta reader who is familiar with the language! You can ask a mutual on social media, put out a call for help in a relevant Discord server, or just check in with oomf!
Do an internet search! âWhat does ABC mean?â Odds are good that youâll be able to find the source of the acronym.
Checking Setting Accuracy
There are several ways to check that youâve been accurate with the setting of your story. Here are some tips:
Get a beta reader who is familiar with the setting! You can ask a mutual on social media, put out a call for help in a relevant Discord server, or just check in with oomf!
Do an internet search! âDo hockey players go to school?â Odds are good that youâll be able to answer your own question. Reddit and StackOverflow can sometimes prove extremely helpful!
Do some research about the setting. Read a book of the history of the sport, watch a video of a rocket launch, listen to a podcast about deep sea fishing, or go visit the ballet in person.
GenAI is an exceptionally poor way to conduct research, because the models that power GenAI don't actually know anything. It basically predicts what the next word should be in a sequence. You can't trust it to be correct; everything it tells you needs to be fact-checked, at which point you might as well conduct the research already.
Checking English Phrases
There are many ways to check that a phrase is in common use. Here are some tips:
Put the phrase into Google ngrams and see how often it is used: https://books.google.com/ngrams/
Search the phrase in texts and see how people are using it in their own writing. You can do that here: https://archive.org/details/textsÂ
Search the phrase on the web with quotation marks around it and see how other people are discussing the phrase, e.g., âtime of my lifeâ meaning
Checking Word Frequency
Are you worried that you used the same word too much?Â
Use your software's Find function to see all instances of the word.
Upgrade to Scrivener (you pay for the license, not a subscription!) for the built-in frequency checker.
Read your story aloud. You'll be surprised by how many things become evident (repetitions, awkward phrasing, missing words, etc.) when you hear words vs. seeing them on the page.
Use speech to text to have your text read aloud to you. Yes, the machine voice is grating, but it can help you spot errors.
Writing Character and Emotional Arcs
There are many sources of advice for writing romances or shippy fics that cover everything from basic romance beats to character development to how to develop conflict and tension. Here are some sources:
Tasha L. Harrisonâs substack: Romance 101: Write Your Romance This Year
The Turning to Story podcast (link goes to Apple Podcast but obviously use your favorite podcast feed/app)
The Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast
The Writing Excuses podcast
Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels by Gwen Hayes
Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Dynamic Characters and Effective Viewpoints by Nancy Kress
The Fire in Fiction: Passion, Purpose and Techniques to Make Your Novel Great by Donald Maass
Wired for Story by Lisa Cron
Honorable mention to the not-yet-published: Think, Write, Edit, Romance: The Romance Writer's Journey from Blank Page to Finished Novel by KJ Charles
The Emotion Thesaurus and The Emotional Wound Thesaurus by Becca Puglisi and Angela AckermanÂ
https://onestopforwriters.com/, a huge database of everything related to writing craft, also by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman. 14-day free trial.
Our advice:
Read. Just read. Read attentively and critically. If an author does something you love, go back to that passage or scene and analyze it. What worked for you? Was there a particular rhythm you found pleasing? A style of building metaphor? How did the author build the tension, and then release it? What did the author do with the characters that captivated you?
Also useful (but probably less fun to do unless you're a sicko with a literature degree): analyze authors you don't like. Was there a way the author wrote that set your teeth on edge? Were there assumptions the author made about how the world works (or should work) that you didn't like? What about the sentences grated on your nerves? What about the characters fell flat?
Avoiding cliches
Again, the best way to avoid cliches is to read widely and deeply, especially in the genre in which you want to write. Read the classics, read the most popular books, and read the source material. Pay attention to what still sounds fresh, and what sounds dated and repetitive.
Get a beta reader who is familiar with the language! You can ask a mutual on social media, put out a call for help in a relevant Discord server, or just check in with oomf!
Do an internet search! âIs ABC a cliche?â Odds are good that youâll be able to find an answer.
Scene-level pacing
How quickly does time pass in a scene? Is it sped up, slowed down, etc? This PDF is a helpful explanation of how to write pacing on a scene level.
For US Residents: Library Resources
Libraries are magical. Use them. Not only do you save money, but increased circulation and resource usage by members helps libraries maintain their budgets. Here are some free resources besides books provided by many libraries:
Streaming services, like hoopla or Kanopy, with music, movies, tv, etc.
Newspaper and magazine subscriptions
Academic journal databases
Historical databases
Online learning & instruction
Librarians. Seriously: talk to a librarian. If they don't know something off the top of their head, they're experts at finding obscure information and are more than happy to help.
Libraries that Allow Nonresident Cards (as of May 2026)
Fairfax County Public Library
Broward County Library
Queens Public Library
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library
Orange County Library System
The Mercantile Library
Monroe County Library System
St. Louis Public Library
The Queer Liberation Library (anyone with a US mailing address can apply for a free membership)
reciprocard.com can tell you what library cards youâre eligible for, based on your location
We get why people use genAI for all these tasks. It's easy, it's right there, and it's freeâby which we mean, it doesn't cost you immediate up-front cash. You are, however, paying for it in all sorts of other ways. Not just in terms of externalized costs, like the environmental impacts and the rising price of electricity and GPUs, but in the hit you're taking to your reading, writing, and thinking skills. If you were training for a marathon, secretly adding a motor to your shoes that moves for you instead of building your endurance would, rightly, be considered cheating. Why cheat yourself?
It's not just the skill decay, either; a lot of things people use AI for are things you can address by becoming part of a community. Need help with grammar or edits? Join a Discord server or fannish subreddit to meet some people; find some friends, find a beta. Want to discuss a niche topic? Whether it's details about hockey teams, the intricacies of etiquette and fashion in the 1830s, or the dynasties of the Indus Valley Civilization, etc., guaranteed some nerd out there is so excited to infodump on you, or at least help you and cheerlead as you fall down a series of research rabbit holes.
Engaging with fandom is a community act. Why circumvent that aspect by talking to an inherently unreliable robot instead of a person? Humans are fallible, sure, but at least along the way you make a friend.
If you want to learn something, learn it. If you want to do something, do it. The best wayâin fact the only wayâto get better at something is doing it, over and over and over again. Don't let a piece of software atrophy your skills, or deny you the chance to acquire it in the first place.
Is this all work? It sure is! But here's the other good news: if you're not having fun, you can stop. Writing fic is completely optional, and if you're not enjoying the activity, you don't have to do it! It's valid to just read fic, or post gif sets on Tumblr, or ramble on Twitter, or draw stick figures of your faves, or do whatever you DO enjoy!
Do art that brings you joy, and if you don't know what that is, try things until you find it! This whole enterprise was built because it was fun for humans, and bringing AI into that is pretty depressing.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. Itâs a collection of some of the most common AI writing tells and patterns. Recognizing AI prose is an exercise in seeing how many of these tells are present in a story in aggregate, as well as learning the characteristic rhythms of AI-generated sentences.
All of these tells stem from how Large Language Models (LLMs), like Claude and ChatGPT, generate prose. The chief thing to keep in mind is this:
LLMs have no way of knowing whether any particular sentence makes sense. They canât actually understand anything. They are not sentient.Â
What they do have are giant sets of data they were trained on, i.e. existing writing, pretty much all of which was used without permission or compensation. When someone tells an LLM to generate a story, the LLM will spit out arrangements of words that have a high probability of being âcorrectâ based on:
Its training set
User-provided prompts and context
Constraints programmed into the LLMs themselves (which are incredibly complex)
When we say âcorrect,â please know it has nothing to do with factual correctness, or even internal story cohesion. Itâs all about how likely it is that the next word to appear in a sequence matches the patterns that have been set based on the three constraints above.Â
LLMs excel at patterns that stick to consistent patterns and rules, so: spelling and some basic rules of grammar.Â
It often starts choking on its own spit at the scene and story level.
Keep all these things in mind as you go through the list of tells below.
Youâll also notice that a lot of these tells are things real people doâpeople fuck up sex scene blocking all the time! People also suck at writing concisely (*shoves tens of thousands of words cut from first drafts under the rug, where they bulge grotesquely*), mess up timelines, forget where their characters are in the room or even in the country, etc. AI was trained on human writing, and all its tics and foibles are based on human patterns.
That said, itâs still possible, with practice, to spot AI-generated prose, especially if it hasnât been human-edited. Weâre not arguing that every fic that uses em dashes, or rules of three, or contains continuity errors is AI-generated. Itâs more about learning how to recognize patterns, seeing how often the patterns appear, and taking in the whole picture. Even then, itâs not a guaranteeâunless the author has âfessed up to using AI, or unless theyâve accidentally left a prompt in the fic, this is more about building a case piece by piece.
Here are some building blocks for making that case.
Common Tells for AI-Generated Text
Extremely prolific output, sustained over a period of months
In our opinion, this is the one strongly dispositive sign in this list, and itâs also the only one that requires zero subjective judgment. The Heated Rivalry TV show fandom is unique because it has a very recent start date and an improbable number of highly prolific fanwriters who started publishing fics in immense quantity right after the show came out. EvilHarlowe, possibly the most prolific writer in the fandom before she deleted her account in early April of 2026, would publish up to tens of thousands of words a day, requiring her to type at a rate of something like 3000 to 5000 words per hour (assuming she wrote eight hours every day, seven days a week). Tendonitis alone wouldâve posed a problem at those rates.
Some of these prolific authors claim to have pre-written these works before the TV show came out because theyâd read and loved the books, and itâs possible a few may be telling the truth, but itâs just not plausible for the vast majority of the highly-prolific writers to be doing this. If someoneâs been writing 80k novels every month for four months, itâs almost certainly AI.
And listen: hyperfixation can get our ass; whomst amongst us hasnât on occasion output an ungodly number of words in a short amount of time because a giant wad of dopamine had been dumped directly into our brain. But the key thing about these bursts of productivity is that theyâre short-lived and draining: writing is work and requires energy. Maintaining that kind of output over a period of months is basically impossible unless the writer resorts to using an LLM.
Polished at a sentence level but incoherent at the paragraph and scene level
Drafting quickly and hitting publish on an unbetaâd draft can result in all kinds of structural issues and mistakesâtimelines might get mixed up, passages can be accidentally repeated, or, on the flipside, crucial setup might be accidentally omitted. However, those kinds of mistakes are usually accompanied by other signs of hasty drafting: sentences that are less polished, typos, grammatical errors. That doesnât tend to happen for AI. Perfectly clean sentence-level prose accompanied by a messy or incoherent story is one of the specialties of LLM-generated fiction.
Bloated prose
Concise, precise writing is not a strength of AI prose. Thereâs a tendency to bloat sentences with complex constructions, too many metaphors, and irrelevant details (many of them bizarre). More detail on the metaphor and irrelevant detail issue below.
Grammatically correct but nonsensical sentences/metaphors.
These read smoothly but have no meaning, e.g., âHe filed his hands down the bedspread.â These sentences often feel a little like something made up by an alien whoâs trying to demonstrate its humanityâlook at how poetic and profound!
The bizarre quality of these constructions come from the LLM making a series of associations and leaps based on probability and how closely words appear in its training set. When a word has multiple meanings, the LLM can stumble; it can fall on its face outright if the word has verb and noun forms that are spelled identically but used very, very differently. In the âHe filed his hands down the bedspreadâ example, the chain of association the LLM went through probably looked something like:
File â Used on hands (nail file) â Filing something down
Hence: âHe filed his hands down the bedspread,â a sentence no human would write on purpose in a Heated Rivalry fic.
These nonsensical sentences are especially jarring because they tend to be correct in every other particular. Spelling, punctuation, syntax are all correct (at least for reasonably formal registers). But the arrangement betrays a lack of understanding of how humans think or how the world works. There's fluency at the word level, but no fluency at anything else. The result is distinctly uncanny valley.
Excessive and weirdly specific details
A pattern many LLMs have picked up on is that sensory detail enriches a text. Lacking human discernment, however, they jam these details everywhere, all the time, regardless of their impact on the pacing, or even if they make sense. If a weird metaphor can be fused with the specific detail, even better. LLM-generated prose in particular is full of smells, and often theyâre bizarre, like âseared fish oil.â Hockey rinks smell like Zamboni exhaust, or something burnt, orâŚstick tape??? Things are constantly hummingâthe air, the silence, emotions, blood. Situations, bodies, and things can rarely exist as they are; they need to be gussied up.
Themes and figurative language that never reoccur.
LLMs, as noted before, struggle with maintaining cohesion across long stretches of text. This results in a lot of thematic imagery or metaphor being used once and then abandoned, only for a different image to sprout up in its placeâe.g., someone has a shark-like smile in chapter one, a Cheshire cat smile in chapter two, and a smile like a knife blade in chapter three. Complicating this tell however is:
Over-usage of pet phrases and metaphors
Some LLMs have pet words and figurative constructions that they use over and over again: hum/humming is a popular one, as is something being etched/drawn/felt etc. in the bones. Silences are never just silent; something has to happen to them. (OftentimesâŚhumming.) This repetition isnât a matter of, say, three or four times over the course of a ficâtheyâll sometimes appear multiple times in a paragraph.Â
LLMs also, for unknown reasons, favor certain names: ChatGPT generating Elara as a girl's name over and over again is well-documented, for example. Claude repeatedly uses Marcus Webb, Sarah Chen, Volkov, Voss and a few othersâjust search Reddit for Sarah Chen or Marcus Voss. The number 47 is a number Claude tends to throw out by default.
The absence of these isnât dispositive, of course; theyâre extremely easy to edit out, and names like Marcus and Sarah are reasonably common. But if a fic almost exclusively uses 47 as a number, it might be worth looking at it more closely. If it straight-up names a character Marcus Webb, itâs almost certainly AI.
Repeating scenes or actions
Once again: humans will sometimes forget to delete a new take of a scene, or repeat themselves inadvertently. LLMs do it in a distinct fashion, however: highly-polished prose describing substantially the same thing in fairly rapid succession.
Weird or implausible sex scenes
Is a character lying on their stomach but in the very next sentenceâsometimes the next phraseâtheir navel is visible? Do the limbs never add up? Is the character licking a hip crease before the clothes come off? Many LLMs, either due to the exclusion of sexually-explicit material from the training set or programmed restrictions on generating sex scenes (or both), struggle with them. Tracking how bodies interact and where they are in space is genuinely complex; LLMs in particular struggle with sequencing (e.g. clothes need to come off first before you can lick bare skin) and body blocking.
Violations of the laws of physics
Does the cum run down their dick and end up in their belly-button? Did someone leave so much spit while sharing a spoon for ice-cream that the spit floats on top of the ice-cream on the next scoop? (This one is bizarre on many, many levels.) Is sweat flowing upward somehow? Again, LLMs donât actually know anythingâand that includes basic laws of nature that we take for granted.
Losing track of locations
Did the characters start the scene in Montreal, but suddenly flip to Ottawa, and then back to Montreal again in a few paragraphs? Wait, were they in a hotel, or were they in an apartment bedroom? Again, LLMs canât track whether the locations in any given story make sense; all it has are the user prompts and what it has been programmed to spit out as most likely to be correct.
Time warps and other timey-wimey nonsense
Did a character resolve to wait two weeks on a Friday, and then five days later, itâs Tuesday and two weeks have passed? Did a character begin performing a six-hour surgery at midnight, and itâs lunchtime when they finish? LLMs canât track the passage of time any more than they can understand the laws of physics or track where a character is at any given point in a fic.
Monotonous emotional registers
This one requires a substantial chunk of text to check, but does the story feel strangely stressful and numbing at the same time, because every scene is written at the same heightened emotional pitch? LLM prose, especially when given a prompt for a romance plotline, is prone to being overwrought and maintaining that tone throughout, whether or not itâs called for.
Uniform sentence rhythm and scene pacing
This one also needs a substantial amount of text to check, but AI tends to maintain the same pacing regardless of whatâs called for on-page. In particular, it tends to favor bursts of dialogue intercut with lengthy internal musing, even during moments that should be fast-paced, such as a fight scene. Stories play with time dilation vs. compression all the time, but when to use which is always a judgement callâsomething LLMs are unequipped to do.
Markedly different writing styles in the same work, or a fluency discrepancy between the work and the authorâs notes and comments
One of the joys of writing is experimenting with voice and form. Weâre not talking about those sorts of deliberate experiments here, though; weâre referring to the fics that abruptly switch from paragraphs of overwrought prose filled with metaphor to prose thatâs much more rough and ready with completely different rhythms.
Sometimes it's not so much a style difference as it is a difference in fluency, especially between the author's notes and the fic proper. If the author's notes and comments display a notable fluency gap, not just in vocabulary, but syntactically, it's worth going back and looking for other AI tells. (Just to be extremely clear: this is not a slam on people writing in English when it's not their native language! One of the people writing this guide learned English as a second language. So, you know, fuck yeah write the fic of your dreams in whatever language you want. Just don't fucking use AI to do it.)
A distinctive AI rhythm to the sentences
LLMs lean on a few workhorse sentence structures. To be clear: these are all perfectly legitimate ways to structure sentences! They became popular for a reason; a lot of them provide a nice rhetorical flourish. LLMs, however, over-use these structures to the point of monotony. If you want a crash course in the specific rhythms and stylistic tics of AI, check out this video that breaks down why Shy Girl is AI-generated. It goes through the book in exhaustive detail, and by the end of the video, it should give you a pretty good ear for the rhythms of AI-generated prose.
âThe thing about Tom's body was that it never lied to him. It woke at five. It ran its mile.âÂ
Notice this setup: X was that phrase. Pronoun + verb + prepositional phrase. Pronoun + verb + prepositional phrase.Â
This longâshortâshort-short sentence pattern is common in Claude-generated prose.Â
âPracticed neutrality. Revealing nothing. He understood the machinery of it. He was part of the machinery of it.â
Notice how the sentences use this pattern of repetition? LLM prompters call it an âamplification echoâ because it repeats previously established information.
âShe'd be pleased about it in the way that meant she was not pleased about it.âÂ
The false profundity in this one is a pretty big AI tell (if sheâs obviously not pleased, then she wasnât pleased to begin with!), but check out the setup: Description + in the way that + false negation.Â
Subject, prepositional phrase, prepositional phrase, predicate with false negation. Once you see the pattern, you canât unsee it.
âThe moment moved on the way it did in this houseâslow, interrupted by small children, going on without anger.âÂ
Hereâs another âthe wayâ, but now itâs embedded in another classic Claude pattern: Description + the way + monotone emotion phrase, em dash, part 1, part 2, part 3.Â
Read it out loud to yourself and feel that rhythm. Notice how it throws in a metaphor that feels tantalizingly profound, but that falls apart upon examination.
âHer hands worked Sam's belt. Button. Zipper.â
This is an extremely common fragment list pattern, often deployed whether or not it suits the emotional tone or pacing. Short subject. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.Â
"Sam looked at himâthat direct, unhurried way he had, the way that didn't apologize for itself."
Yet another âthe way,â but hopefully you can begin to recognize the pattern. Short subject + prepositional phrase, em dash, predicate with a phrase with falsely profound negation or metaphor.
On display here is another popular LLM construction: This, not that. You will also see the obverse: Not that, this. And speaking of popular LLM sentence constructions:
"Not unkind. Not impatient. Justâwaiting."
This construction has become one of the most famous AI tells, and is especially common with ChatGPT-generated prose; itâs all over places like LinkedIn and in the descriptions of AI slop videos on YouTube and Instagram. Not X, not Y, but secretly Z.
âHe had a voice like a waiting room â neutral, practiced. Designed to contain things.â
Superficially profound metaphor spotted! But we also have this pattern: Short subject + metaphor, em dash, part 1, part 2. Part 3.Â
This is an abstract-noun character description, which is one of the hallmarks AI-generated prose. These nouns are often meaningless in context, and an example of the way AI-generated prose defaults to telling instead of showing.
Like we said, this list isn't comprehensive. And once again: it's not about a fic containing any one particular thing from this list, or even two or three. It's about a sustained and repeated pattern. Feel free to add other tells we might've missed in the reblogs. Hopefully this helped give you an idea of the sorts of things to look out for.
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