the last I’ll share on this, and then taking a much needed brain break :
1 - anons are off across the fic and here. if you’d like to send me your comments or frustrations and would like me to respond - you are welcome to do so, and let me know if you’d prefer a private reply. I’ve done this a few times already last night and today, and understand (quite intimately!) the concern about having your named account attached to discourse on this issue; but unfortunately once we start to cross the line to slurs and personal insults that’s where I draw the line for my own sanity.
2- I am aware that “blaming a beta reader” feels like a convenient excuse. I don’t think it’s a valuable use of anyone’s time to debate the merits of my explanation. This person who edited my fic was a close friend who introduced me to the fandom and encouraged me to put my idea to paper. I’ve known them for many years and they are integrated in many aspects of my life. Re-evaluating that friendship is the most painful part of this entire situation. Whether you accept my explanation or not is entirely your prerogative. I’m only offering it because I’ve been asked for it.
3- I am not familiar with html or coding. The entire reason I asked my editor to log in to fix the last chapter of my work is because I kept trying to apply formatting on the last chapter that would get lost when I switched between the html and rich text editor. That chapter is where they’d acknowledged copying code directly from Claude, even though that chapter doesn’t have any of the html A.I. indicators. Which leads me to …
4- my reasons for tagging the fic as AI assisted are not because I relied on AI to create my work, but because I unfortunately - based on their acknowledgment of AI use in the last chapter - have no way of knowing where and how AI was used without relying on the word of this individual. The tag feels like the only ethical and transparent thing to do. I understand that having two instances doesn’t equate to AI only being used twice. I’m genuinely confused, hurt and disconnected to my own work. I’m not sure how the two instances of the AI html tag appeared in that earlier section of the fic, but I’m fairly confident it wasn’t by copying and pasting directly from an LLM. I don’t know why my editor would say they’d done it in one place and lie about having done it elsewhere, but who knows. We did many passes of it together after it was completed to clean up SPAG, which is where they've said AI was most heavily used. I genuinely have no idea how else it could’ve landed in an earlier chapter and not where they specifically said it was used.
5 - if you’ve read the fic, I hope you see how much of myself and my own personal experiences with mental health, my thoughts about athletes and systems of harm, and overall care went into that work. I have so much to say about every craft decision that was made, how I mapped out the plot, why I used certain words, themes, and imagery … and a lot of that is tainted for me too. I’m really sorry. I want people who connected to that story to know that. If the situation has turned you off from reading the fic - that is, as I’ve said many times now, completely understandable and I would probably feel the same way.
that’s all I got folks.
