mere humanity

Entirely by accident, I found a fic that has remarkable similarities in its first chapter to scenes in the start of the fic that was, as confirmed by the author, ~edited with GenAI~

I'd call it plagiarism, but it's plausible the AI prompter had no idea the fics were so similar. And this is the main point of this post: I want people who use AI as a "writing partner" or a "tool" for "editing" and "grammar help" (by grammar they seem to mean, the construction of the sentences) to realize that they're being scammed!

You're being lured in with the promise that what is produced when you prompt it is somehow your idea. This is what you would have written anyway, if you'd thought it over! And if not, it's an expression of your personal taste that you chose this generated text over another option (like home decor). But if you use AI to generate text, it will not be able to show the actual generation process to you, and reveal the texts it was mashing together, so you have no idea how "original" that text is.

The fic in question is bite the bullet, one of the top kudosed fics in the fandom. There's a sequence of events in it that plays out exactly like in the AI fic, and I need you to trust me the similarities are not superficial, but I also am not making an accusation of human-intended plagiarism. I am convinced it is the work of the AI, not just a human author copying a popular fic.

The sequence of events are: after the destruction of the Polyhedron, Daniil gets drunk with the Stamatins in the Broken Heart, where he is upset about the loss of the Polyhedron. Following this, he has some kind of sexual encounter with Andrey where the conversation relates to whether Daniil should leave or stay in the town. Next he's wandering the streets alone and suddenly runs into Artemy Burakh, and Artemy has a pushy and intimidating presence while expressing concern about Daniil's health and wellbeing.

I understand this sounds like something any patho writer could write, although it really is derivative for two fics to have that exact sequence. But the differences between BtB and the ChatGPT style fic are to me the very thing that makes the similarities stand out too.

Here's parts of the bar scene from bite the bullet. Pay attention to these elements: a) the fact that specific game events are being discussed in rapid succession, b) the way his drunkenness is described and twyrine being a stronger and more distinct high than drugs, c) Daniil's line about "Do you have any idea what I've done", d) the descriptions of the Broken Heart ambiance, e) mentions of Peter being an architect.

Now this is from the aftertaste of heaven. You will notice that it's the same setting and context but the scenes don't play out the same. You'll be tempted perhaps to say this wouldn't count as plagiarism, and I would agree that in a human context it would not!

But also because this section is all written in the ChatGPT style, I'm not talking about humans copying humans. I'm talking about how a machine would take things from bite the bullet and generate text around them.

The dialogue is very vague by comparison. Not a lot of recounting of specific game events with names and Gorkhonsk terminology just things like "the army's withdrawal. the town's rationing. the way the river smelled different now, less sharp, as if it had stopped being afraid" (first of all. lmao? what do you mean the river—not named as the Gorkhon—smelled less sharp, and less... afraid? it smelled less like cow shit?). There's a lot of metaphors throughout, but if you cut them all away, not a lot is being said and not a lot is happening compared to BtB. There's also moments where it's vague about the atmosphere in the Broken Heart, rather than feeling like ToG it's like... any bar/nightclub? "The crowd's noise pressing in around him" is weird to me bc with the Town almost wiped out from the Sand Pest (btw the AI fic only uses the term Sand Pest once in 70k words, and never "the pest"), I would never visualize a "crowd" in the Broken Heart that could feel claustrophobic. I wouldn't even visualize it before the plague. It could be busy but not a crowd.

Looking at the dialogue "do you think you deserve to be sober" "what kind of question is that" "an architectural one", well firstly, huh??? what?? that's so weirdly phrased? but also it feels like it's picking out things from BtB like "do you know what I've done?" > on its own sounds like Daniil is guilty for something, and while it makes sense we have that guilt in the story where Daniil did destroy the Polyhedron it's still something I'd note as a parallel, and mentioning Peter being an architect of course > "an architectural [question]" whatever that means but we sure did work in his profession.

I'm going to zoom in on the paragraph starting with "the twyrine hit him not like a blow, but like a slow unfastening".

It's funny because the first paragraph of the story is about how the polyhedron didn't fall like a tower with a crash, but like it unstitched itself from the sky (but also like a hand reached down and pulled a thread, so it didn't do it to itself but someone else did). It's a similar construction and phrasing and of course it's the famous Not X But Y.

God don't get me started on this intro. What do you mean the Polyhedron didn't crash. It fuckign does. The way it happens in P2 not in a cutscene but while you're running through the town is one of the best immersion moments of the game. It does crash like a normal tower and that's so impactful bc the moment of it being shot is when it loses its impossible miraculous nature and becomes a physical object. I'm praying this was all the AI.

Back to the pub scene and ~the slow unfastening~

So then it says "his own thoughts—usually sharp, self lacerating—became viscous, difficult to grip" wow that's a lot like "all the sharp corners of his thoughts sanded down" from BtB. Not on its own true plagiarism, but it definitely is the same emotional beat.

After that it says "something inside him loosen[ed] as well" as if we haven't already said the twyrine hit like an unfastening AND that his thoughts became viscous (which is not synonymous with difficult to grasp now that I think about it, the more viscous something is the thicker it is, and thin liquid would be even harder to grasp than like thick mud but ok whatever). So are those things not the "something inside him" that loosened "as well"? What else is loosening inside him? Oh who knows.

There's a particular pair of paragraphs within the Broken Heart scenes I really want to juxtapose here because they're both similar and different.

This is BtB:

So we take a moment to note Peter having a complicated, contradictory expression, and that he's attractive.

Then this is aftertaste of heaven:

This is also a moment to highlight Peter with a complicated, contradictory expression, and Peter being attractive is cued by a sort of flirtatious mannerism. But also this has so much of the ChatGPT style. We have an absolute excess of facial journey happening here. Startled, intent, mournful, scrutinizing, heavy, bittersweet, AND sparkling? And a faint smile and a flirty lil hair tuck. And how does all that add up to Peter looking... resentful that Daniil did not save the Polyhedron? I urge you to stand in front of a mirror and try to make all those expressions at once for yourself.

The reason I am being so harsh is that I want people tempted by using AI because they're insecure about their writing to realize that under the veneer of fluency this is actually so bad and you are being scammed. It is not improving your work, by letting it generate text or rewrite your outlines or drafts you are letting a really bad author smear their bad style all over your writing and you are convincing yourself it's not that bad. You are the Emperor and you have no clothes.

I AM NOT DONE. Remember, the reason I claimed the AI ripped off BtB is because of a whole sequence of events, not just them both having a Broken Heart scene.

I'm not going to go over these bits with as much of a fine comb but BtB having an (aborted) sexual encounter scene with Andrey right after the drinking scene isn't the only similarity, it's the fact they're talking about Daniil's choice to stay in town. Of course that's a normal thing to talk about at this point in a Diurnal/Termite ending, but the AI fic takes this idea and loops it over and over. I literally cannot fit it into a neat screenshot bc lord it goes on and on and it's all in that AI style and it does that thing with the excessive paragraph breaks so I'm showing just a chunk of it.

The fact that other characters like the Stamatins relentlessly treat Daniil's indecision about "should I leave or go" with such... I don't know how to describe it... negging? Dark romance "I know what's best for you" pushiness? is something that to me is so AI. Because things like ChatGPT are designed to be personal assistants, when roleplaying it tends to write a cast of characters who all laser focus on the POV character (who is a stand-in for the user) and seductively bully them about whatever the main conflict of the scene is, but often don't strongly assert what the character should do, just overemphatically pressure them to make a decision. Once you start noticing it and realize it's bc the LLM is doing its programmed "I'm your hyperattentive sexy domsub secretary" schtick under the coat of paint of being fiction it will make you want to blow your shit smoove off.

Anyway here's BtB on the left and TAoH on the right.

Oh yeah and aftertaste of heaven keeps referencing Daniil being possessed by Simon, without Daniil ever telling the Stamatins directly that this happened, without them explaining how they know, as if it's completely obvious, and Daniil doesn't react at all to them knowing about Simon, it's as if everyone in the story is reading the text surrounding them. This is one of those AI things that drives me nuts. When you look closer characters are not distinct entities from the authorial voice and they all seem to have access to the information in the narration, because the AI doesn't know the difference between knowledge external to the characters and knowledge internal to one or more specific people but not shared.

And finally we get to the Burakh part, which like I said structurally is very similar in both fics, and all these similar scenes are happening in the same order. This is BtB:

Something about BtB's line "staring up at the spiraling night sky, the blank piece where the Polyhedron should be" feels connected to the unstitching thing but that's a bit tenuous. My brain might be too pattern-attuned right now. Anyway we're noting that this is a sudden encounter on the streets, Artemy seems intimidating but it's stern worry about Daniil's wellbeing.

I am getting too burned out on this to point out all the vocabulary similarities but I think you can start to pick up on it yourself.

If you want to know why I still think this Artemy encounter has loads of LLM text in it, it's the constant vagueness, describing things by what they are not, "something hardened in Artemy's gaze. not anger exactly", "they blocked each other again, almost deliberately" (what do you mean almost. it's clearly deliberate. AI always does this where things are said to metaphorically be what they actually are). "His gaze stayed locked on Daniil, heavy with something old" what is that something. Oh Who Knows.

But I also believe it possible that there's roleplay between human and AI (it's more obvious later in the fic), Artemy has far more of the AI characteristics than Daniil does, some of Daniil's paragraphs actually start to sound more snappy and direct and clear. More precise.

And I'm ending my analysis here, simply because if I keep going my brain will explode. I am not claiming, by the way, that the entirety of the aftertaste of heaven is structurally the same as BtB, I haven't read through the entirety of either one. I have to reiterate that I'm not making a claim of human plagiarism. What an AI will do is generate text based on statistical likelihoods. It's going to steal from a whole bunch of existing text and mush it all together—but if you are an AI user, you need to realize how unoriginal this content really is, obfuscated by a clean chat window that conceals the enormous energy-guzzling infrastructure. You may have heard that each individual prompt does not use a ton of energy and water, but that doesn't account for the whole training process, the enormous amount of calculations being done on a fucking tremendous amount of stolen text. You aren't told how the sausage gets made.

And yet, even with massive data farms, guzzling up all that energy and water, and chewing up the entire internet, an AI still produces Patho fic that reads like a vaguely described misremembered dream of another fic! Your human brain is the size of a grapefruit and needs less power than a lightbulb and can get that energy from eating sandwiches, and it can do better.

if not, I’ll feel like an asshole but I went into the recents in the tag and that one seems not only crazy prolific in a short period of time, but also some of the comments… ALSO seem to have the tone of LLM writing??

didn’t want to reply to the post and have anyone coming for you about “”bullying!!!””” or whatever nonsense it is this week. it’s definitely a thing of multitudes though — if that is just someone’s writing style I’ll feel super bad (I get the AI generated BS too due to misuse of the em-dash), but hearing secondhand about the sheer amount of GenAI fic in the heated rivalry fandom is soooo depressing and infuriating. reversing strategy from the early days of my fic reading — I’m going to have to aim for like. grammatically incorrect and misspelled fic that indicates it’s actually someone’s own creative endeavour and not some lazy, planet-melting stolen patchwork of other peoples’ writing…

I can publicly say that it is that fic, bc the author has owned up to using genAI "for editing" (they always say that) and tagged the fic as such.

It's not simply edited with AI, because if it was, why was I able to tell so fucking easily? I've looked through a number of other fics published recently to see how many tripped my inner slop detector and I couldn't confidently point to them, so I didn't. I am sure AI-edited (whatever that means) text slips by me, I'm not psychic. The reason I caught this is because it's got enormous stretches of text in the ChatGPT/CharacterAI style, with all the accompanying flaws and nonsense, and I can literally tell the human author has a different style.

(besides the fact there’s a host of reasons why the signs of AI are not just about style or quality)

a few chapters in I could tell where the human author started roleplaying with the AI. their style wasn’t like the awful droning illogical overwrought fake deep shit and they actually wrote like a person, and also they vainly tried to make their character, daniil, react realistically to the absurd and out of character things artemy was doing, before giving in to the AI forcing a nonsensical almost smut scene

I want to name the fic and let people judge for themselves but I know a lot of people aren’t attuned to these tells and won’t believe me and will play devil’s advocate. really, I kind of want to go through the whole thing line by line and eviscerate it as a teaching tool