The Grand Central Station of the Multiverse

canon is what happens in the text. e.g. merlin tries to poison morgana

a headcanon is a fact that you have personally made up as an elaboration of canon. it is your invention. e.g. i think morgana and gwen had a teenage lesbian situationship before the events of canon. or, i think modern morgana would love evanesence.

an interpretation is how one reads the existing text. it is not an invented fact nor is it a headcanon, it is a reading. e.g. i think merlin tries to poison morgana out of misplaced self-hatred. or, i think that one line was delivered with suppressed malice and shows a nuanced relationship.

fanon is the general fandom’s accepted headcanons and interpretations that elaborate or recontextualize canon. e.g. merlin is a badass waif and morgana is a bitch.

on survival

This marker only exists if text was copied directly from Claude AI into the AO3 text box. It wasn't originally identified in a fandom context and doesn't occur if the text was copied from Claude into ie a Word doc or if a different LLM was used. It also doesn't differentiate between text that was completely generated by Claude and text that was only edited by Claude for formatting or spelling.

The main takeaway from this experiment is, in my opinion, that AI use in fanfiction is widespread and ubiquitous and not detectable to most people. There is no reliable way to tell if a text was written using AI because of how LLMs work and what they were trained on, but a lot of people ARE using AI to write fanfiction and the results are good enough to make AI use rewarding.

Just to note that this can't be differentiated because LLM models (unless paired with additional methods, which Claude may or may be) don't track input in this way. All output is identical: it's statistically generated text, based on the input. There's no mathematical distinction between "editing" and "generating" for the model, though people try to draw a distinction when they talk about LLM use by humans.

Otherwise, yes, agreed. Presumably there's plenty of authors copying into word processors and *then* publishing to AO3, which would hide these artifacts.

I'll just say this: my mathematical research is adjacent to LLMs. I understand very well how they work. I do not think the mathematics of it is somehow evil. And I refuse to sit around and draw lines about "acceptable" use: is it ok to use LLMs to copy edit? What about to translate? Or to generate a list of names for background characters? To format?

You could spend a lot of time building an ethical framework to try and answer these questions in a coherent way. But for me it comes back to the fact that I fucking hate "AI" and the companies that peddle it. I do think they're evil. And I don't want to read anything touched by "AI" because I don't want to engage with their products.

But there's never going to be a way to know for sure, short of artifacts (that will very quickly disappear, now, due to the new knowledge of how they're generated). It's easy to just feel hopeless.

AO3 has many, many benefits for both readers and writers, but it also has some pretty severe downsides and things it simply isn't designed to do. One of those is creating the deep fannish ties that other kinds of fan-used platforms do. Some of us manage to build those ties on AO3 through sheer effort, but it's an uphill battle.

So things like, "I know the person who made this, I talked to them about it while it was just a plot bunny, I beta-ed it, I helped them work through particular scenes they struggled with," are just not possible to communicate over there. Nor should they be. That's not what AO3 is for.

I really do think it would be helpful to go back to the days when we created curated archives and extensive recommendation lists. These would not replace AO3 but would exist alongside it, and it would allow those of us who are pickier about what we read to navigate through the glut of fanfic that exists out there now. These kinds of communities/mailing lists/posts also have THEIR downsides, including potential drama when people feel hurt that they are not included, etc. which is something we'd have to navigate with care.

But rec lists used to be a much bigger part of fandom than they currently are. When I was in BTVS fandom, one of the most beloved members of the whole fandom was someone who rarely wrote or created other content of her own, but she curated beautiful and extensive recommendation lists of fanfic, fanart, fanmeta, etc. Everyone adored her because she was kind and generous and because she was doing fandom a real service. I think of her often and hope she's doing well (she is an extraordinarily brave person and lives in Russia; there's every chance she's stood up for something against the regime and has faced the consequences. You'll always be a hero to me, Elena! "If nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do.")

I think fandom is absolutely going to have to branch out from just using web 2.0 platforms and AO3. These platforms are not designed to do the kind of community-building that fandom has historically been built on. I hate Discord and its privacy (and its whole interface). Tumblr is great for certain things (fanart, shitposts, memes, links to fanfic, etc.) and terrible for others (actual substantive conversation involving more than two or three people). Video-forward platforms can only do video.

If we want to have the kinds of communities we used to have, we are going to have to move beyond platforms that are built by giant tech companies for the largest possible audience. I'm very open about what that looks like. Maybe it's using existing sites (Dreamwidth is always there!), existing kinds of platforms that we could tweak (forums/mailing lists), or even building completely new platforms a la AO3.

But at a certain point we have to be willing to do that work and make our own spaces. Because our tech overlords are absolutely not going to do that for us, not only because it wouldn't make them enough money but because their worldviews are completely at odds with the hobbyist, gift-economy-based ethos of fandom. They can't build these places for us because they don't understand or value the same things we do.

I am encouraged by things like the Fediverse (which isn't great for fandom but is a new idea that I approve of very much) and the general cultural backlash against AI and social media. I think we're moving in a direction where a decentralized web full of niche stuff is possible again.