i'm tired of this bit

I can easily see this fantasy world having idioms like "Never take the advice of a tree that's small enough to hug."

Please tell me that is because you know who he is and we have reached international coverage on this fiasco please

He's a joke candidate, standing as Independent from main political parties. He used to be one of three people that was Lord Buckethead, but there was disagreements and I think legal disputes, so he split off and became Count Binface instead. He's never won a consituency, or got enough votes to win his deposit back from standing in local elections, but pops up here there and everywhere.

As a joke candidate, he is just there to have a laugh, but also stands for the left and calls out corruption and poor standing from news outlets, other parties, and wherever he sees it.

Currently, to the elation of the nation, he is running in the (unconfirmed) by-election for a constituency ran by the far-right twatface called Nigel Farage.

Good ol Nigel just flagged by his own bank for transfers so large they thought he was laundering money, and it's spiralled into an investigation into his finances that weren't disclosed and are rather dodgy.

He likes to frame himself as a man of the people (he wants to remove us from the ECHR) standing against the Establishment, so concoted a little scheme that has blown up in his face.

He announced he was going to stand down at MP, triggering a by-election. He then announced he was going to run in the by-election, which (if he won) would frame him as a true man of the people, or (if he lost) confirm the Establishment is out to get him.

But he's also (despite his truly abhorrent tan) utterly transparent, and all the major parties squinted at him and went 'aw fuck off Nigel' and refused to send an MP to stand for Clacton (said constituency).

Except.

For Count Binface.

Which has (exactly as intended) ruined our discount-Donald's plans, and turned him into a national joke.

As as our dear anon has said, Farage is now stuck between rock and hard place.

If he loses... he lost to a bin. He lost to a man with a bin on his head. He lost to a man with three (3) three points on his manifesto.

1. Reduce 99p flakes back to 99p.

2. Build one affordable house.

3. Force cyclists that break the Highway Code to ride unicycles as punishment.

If he wins (which he probably will, Claton is very far-right) then he won against a bin. It's not hard.

It is the pinnacle of British politics.

We have never been more united #refuseuk

Count Binface for Clacton!

("Why should the people of Clacton vote for you?"

"Well, I'm not Nigel Farage.")

watching this from afar but thought you might find this interesting...i personally don't use AI in fanfic bc well that's not the joy of it to me + environmental concerns but this is so fascinating to me - i didn't know how widespread ai use was in fic but also the fact that people feel like they need to use ai! and all the people in the comments who are either vindicated that they knew it was ai from the writing and the people who are very disappointed by it...i think this is going to result in witchhunting and fandom drama but i think we're going to see more of these posts sadly

god i'm sorry but i'm so sick of this shit. completely unnecessary and the endless disclaimers about "this is not for harrassment" and "we are just trying to help people make ethical choices" and the claim this is supposed to get people to tag their fics for having used ai combined with language about "ai corrupting fan spaces" is extremely fucking disingenuous lmao. you cannot in one breath use supercharged language about "corruption" and "real human connection" and then in the other claim you are not shaming people. the shame is baked into these moralised judgements about the "corruption" of fandom and "real" connection. this is exactly the sort of deeply slimy two-faced shit that i absolutely abhorr.

i am going to say several things now that i have been saying in private for months. i am going to sound judgemental, but frankly, if you're sitting on your moral high horse passing down judgements about people you can take it. you cannot talk shit without expecting to get hit (as i almost certainly expect to w this, tho obvs i am switching anon off in a couple of hours bc fuck that noise).

1) i genuinely and truly believe that call outs like this are far more corrosive to fandom than minding your own business or feeling sad because you got got by some mid claude generated prose. all this does is foster an atmosphere of paranoia, hypervigilance, increased scrutiny and systemised unpersoning & dehumanisation of "immoral" and "deceptive" others. in every single case i have seen where someone is deemed to have used ai to create a fanwork, i have only seen people gleeful that they actually finally have a "moral" target they can get mad about and rip to complete shreds sans consequence and sans repercussion.

2) this is the literally most counterproductive way to get people to tag their fics for ai use. once again, i point to the shrill insistence that fandom is about Real Human Connection and the language of "corruption" - do you think these are neutral terms? are you incredibly naive and foolish? these are words loaded with shame. the subtext of all these statements is: if you aren't putting your own real blood and sweat into this work of art, you are corrupting and poisoning fandom. in one breath you are invoking both the protestant work ethic and its moralisms and dirt/purity binaries in relation to literal humanness and being part of community. shaming has literally never worked in the history of anything to get people to adhere to something. if you want people to tag their ai fics, you, person who gets upset at the concept of being "tainted", have to manage your own big feelings and create a space where using ai is a morally neutral thing* and where engaging with ai created works does not make you a fandom outcast.

3) i do think some reflection is in order to contemplate why people even feel the need to turn to ai to create fic. what are the circumstances that produce such a feeling? let's think about this, for a moment, with some empathy. do people feel like they need to create something in order to participate in fandom? if so, why do they believe that? are there certain ideas that we entrench viz. artists and writers as "real" fandom and everyone else as "second class" members of fandom? (lbr, this statement is implicit in a lot of posts that go around about how authors deserve more comments. ask for feedback by all means; but the insistence that there is a "real" fandom and implicitly therefore, a fandom which does not matter, which is not productive, which does not contribute and therefore make fandom "real" are ideas which i simply think is point blank wrong. merely being in fandom IS fandom.) if people feel the need to create, why do they believe merely writing it out themselves is not enough? are they afraid of "failing" as writers? why? do they feel they're not good enough to make art? why? if they believe this is the only way they can make friends and have community? if so, why? the answers to all of these questions, in my opinion, at least partly indicts fandom culture at present and should call for some serious self-reflection!

4) genuinely WHAT harm is being done to you by the existence of an unlabelled ai fic? what actual harm? why does it hurt you so much? what are you feeling so deceived about? yes i get that you come to fandom for human connection, but what about a fic writer using an llm actually precludes there being a person behind the fic? what specifically is upsetting you? can you actually sit with your feelings and identify what specifically you're mad about?

5) now for my really mean and problematic opinion :) : i frankly believe half the "distressed" feelings about being "deceived" by ai use are because people have created a moral identity out of not reading or using ai which butts straight up against their tastes in fanfiction running heavily towards the kind of deeply ubiquitous ao3 house style fic which almost certainly underpins LLM data training sets. in making a whole moral personality out of something which directly implicates your taste, you fabricate an insecurity which must be excised: what better way than by turning it outwards to claim that you were deceived and taken in and therefore, that the deceiver has committed some unspecified crime against fandom and must be sent into the proverbial corner? there are exactly two solutions to this. either you become more confident about your taste and you own it and you also own the recognition that this kind of prose is pretty easy to generate using an llm; or you develop a taste for the difficult, which is currently more difficult to generate using an llm but most probably will not be in a couple of years (i'm not being a doomer here, but realistic. at some point llm capacity will cross the threshold of what even a canny reader will be able to identify).

6) i think we could all do with a good hefty dose of a) DON'T LIKE DON'T READ and b) MINDING OUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS