professional booseoksoon enthusiast

I think this is a super complicated topic to be honest with you and I think my opinion varies back and forth and is super nuanced. I will start with the biggest thing and firmest thing: no one should be writing fics with ai. Fanfiction is meant to be fan art and having generative AI write your work for you is literally defeating the entire purpose. Also - what is the satisfaction in people liking something you didn't even write? Like is the satisfaction in people thinking you wrote it? That to me is so incomprehensible.

Secondly - generative AI is ruining the environment and communities. Use of generative AI directly has an impact on other people and the continual use to do something as simple as writing fanfiction is abhorrent. I genuinely cannot imagine these people living near data centers running out of water and having their electricity effected and having all this sound pollution so that people can write fucking fanfiction.

I think the first nuance here is that not all AI is generative which is where it gets wonky. To my knowledge and I could be wrong, I do think Grammarly etc. is not a generative AI... but I'm not entirely sure. I don't use grammarly myself, but when we're talking about AI, it's generative AI very specifically that is the issue with data centers and energy impacts etc. I am less worried about the Grammarly checks of the world as I am people full on using generative AI to do the work for them.

The second nuance is that I think truly recognizing AI writing is harder than we think it is. Like I can read something and have my doubts, but I don't really know because at the end of the day, AI is trained on what we're doing and is made to sound like our writing. So it's hard for me to read something and definitively say whether AI is being used, and even in cases where I am super confident, I'm hesitant to resort to 'call out' culture to correct the problem because what if I'm wrong, you know what I mean?

I agree there are instances where you can see a fic and it's like... that's AI. Literally there's not even like an argument to be had. But I think that what a lot of people do think is AI isn't. A lot of people reference 'habits' AI has and how AI can be formulaic, but writing a story is formulaic. So again, until I have like a pretty legit method of figuring it out, I don't know that accusing writers of AI writing is the move.

Additionally, I think I'm hesitant to do the call out culture approach in general because I am really not a fan of punitive justice. I do think that people who use AI for their writing should be fucking ashamed, but there is a big part of me that is hesitant to 'cancel' people or to start a public punishment display as a consequence to the action, because for me, there is a really thin and scary line between accountability and bullying. I know that there is a sort of like.. sense of well this is the punishment for this but I think I'm always really sensitive to the result being really toxic and feeling like it wasn't the right path forward.

Honestly my stance on how to handle it changes all the time because I don't know what the right path forward is, and in the age of AI, I hate that a lot of writers are being wrongfully accused because people are so confident they know what AI writing looks like, but I also hate people using the weak excuse of 'it's just for grammar' or 'I used a spell checker' when it's such a lame excuse.

All of this to say - I don't know what the answer is, but people who are using generative AI to write and make art need to ask themselves why they're doing it in the first place, and if the answer is because you wouldn't know how otherwise, then I invite you to learn like the rest of us.