Genuinely furious about what generative AI has done to creative spaces and I don't think it gets talked about enough in the right way.
Not the slop itself. The atmosphere. The fact that readers are now scared and defensive and running everything through a mental checklist of "does this seem AI." The fact that writers have to screenshot their drafts and document their process just to prove they're a real person who made a real thing. The fact that improving at your craft, getting more precise, more intentional, more layered, now registers as suspicious to some people because that's exactly what the generators are copyinf.
It has poisoned the default trust between creators and audiences and that trust was not theirs to take.
And the people paying for it are not the companies. It's the writers who almost didn't post. The artists who did post and got accused anyway. The people who spent years getting genuinely good at something and are now having that thrown back at them as evidence of wrongdoing. The people who are so tired of defending themselves that they're starting to wonder if it's even worth making anything at all.
That's the damage. That's what's actually been done here. And the people responsible for it don't care and will never care and that makes me so angry I don't quite have the words for it.
We didn't ask for this. We didn't deserve it. And we're allowed to be furious about it.
Wrote this a few weeks back, thought I'd share it here as it applies to IF as much as it does fandom.
