I remember the Purge - when "slash" and "lemon" fics were mass-deleted without warning and writers had an exodus to Ao3. My fandom (LOTR/Silmarillion) had volunteers working tirelessly to compile a collection to import and preserve lost works. Ao3 was such a beacon on a hill.

But that's the thing: it's an archive - made to withstand censorship - so it's going to contain all the 'bad' stuff. Even AI stuff. As long as AI isn't considered outright plagiarism, it will continue to be allowed by virtue of Ao3's founding principles. A feature, not a bug.

But I think this problem is also its own answer.

When I first joined Ao3, I was awed by the caliber of writing there. Stories were so maturely written - I imagine it was biased toward the more adult writers that were purged for adult-themed stories. Now I see a definite shift - overall younger, more heteronormative and straight and neurotypical and male demographic compared to before, and it's starting to look more like the environment the first Ao3 writers fled.

Unfortunately, I believe that history tends to repeat itself. No matter how noble and successful the pursuit at first, eventually corruption and decay will set in, and no matter the safeguards, things WILL begin to crumble - and new things rise to take the place of the old. And I think Ao3, due to its nature as an archive, will become an infested tree as time passes. I love and respect this majestic tree, but there will come a day when I can no longer tell where tree ends and bugs begin. And then perhaps we will leave in search of another beacon on a hill. Perhaps a platform where the point is the OPPOSITE of an archive; where only the writers that are invested in anti-AI creation hold each other accountable. Just as we've gone from TV to streaming and are now going back to streaming that looks suspiciously like TV, I think we might go back full circle to those curated fanfiction sites where you have to "pass" a certain standard in order to be published.

Of course AI users will try to follow us there. That's where the good stuff will be, after all, and all they want is internet clout and ego boosts - so they'll want to lie and lurk there too. This brings me to my second point: shame.

I once read a thought-provoking article about how shame has been bastardized to be only seen as a bad thing. Using the Little Red Riding Hood as an example of a fable that shames cannibalism, the article highlighted shame as a social tool that prevents bad behavior. Even when there are no cameras, most of us do not steal because we're taught that it's a shameful thing to do.

You're right: most Ai users lie. At first people were tagging their works as AI, but almost no one is owning up to it anymore after the initial backlash. They're lying, restricting viewership, turning off comments, re-uploading original stories to AI-fy it to match their newer AI stories to avoid detection. This shows that they're ashamed of admitting to being an AI user. They're aware that we have no respect for them. Because we've made it clear.

I imagine most AI users are young and insecure, which explains the self-defeating endeavor of lying for attention. You can't keep it up forever, and later you'll realize you could have spent that time on honing your skill instead of staying unskilled while gathering praise for something you know isn't your own. My - perhaps naive - hope is that some can grow out of this. Which is why I'm on Tumblr despite being shy and having almost zero audience, shouting annoyingly into the void in hopes of reaching even just one more person. Hoping to let budding writers know that no, not "everyone does it". And yes, there are artists who genuinely prefer to work hard rather than to cheat. That they're not unique in being bad at something they never practiced. That it feels good to be proud of your own work.

Because it worked on me. I changed my mind. I used to use ChatGPT.

As a severely ill person with disability and debilitating brain fog, I was excited to use it to help me compile shopping lists. Then I saw my writer friend fuming over it; so I began to research and read and listen. And I changed my mind. Decided I'd been shortsighted - and stopped using ChatGPT, even for shopping lists.

We won't be able to filter out every last AI user, but I believe that with enough dissent and examples to follow from real writers and artists, some AI users can turn around - I've seen it happen. I can't stop people from plagiarizing my work, but I can be someone who writes with such sincerity that readers that value that value my work; my readers stood up for me and gave no attention to the copycat.

Because AI users don't have that. Unless they're really good liars, most of the validation they get is fleeting, from readers that don't engage deeper. How can they? There's no depth to their stories. Sassy, maybe, or sexy - but can they evoke the heartbreak of how trauma shapes every speech, every touch in a person? Can they express the despair of silences between two people who don't know how the other person needs to be loved? So far, no AI slop I've seen can do that. Because it's an algorithm - and everything in the world has more garbage among its ranks than good, so it's bound to spit out mediocre work. It will never make a reader write "this is a beautiful, holy work". It will never make a reader reach out to say "your writing helped me reflect a lot, change my mindset, and become more resilient because you write from your heart". It will never inspire a reader to give you 9-part reviews analyzing every word you've written in a chapter.

I like to believe that people that vibrate at a similar frequency recognize each other. The kind of people that devour 150k words algorithmized overnight with mechanical repetitions and surface-level cliches and move on aren't the readers I'm writing for. Just as there will always be antivaxxing science deniers and racist homophobes, AI users will perhaps always exist - but I'll keep pouring my vulnerabilities into my works and hope to touch readers' hearts, and they will touch mine with their kind words, just as you've touched my heart with yours. And if AI users envy that? Who knows - maybe they will be tempted to explore what's on the other side.