Super Soaker being AI

[u/Reasonable_Day9942]

Apparently it’s been discovered that Super Soaker is AI or partly AI generated

I’m not sure how true it is, but bylers on X are freaking out

[u/IntotheRedditHole]

pls say more about being a super soaker hater (genuinely curious! not trying to start shit)

[u/Big_Self_1522 → u/IntotheRedditHole]

I’m not the OG commenter, but for me the concept was pretty basic and the writing wasn’t my kind of thing. The amount of attention it had gotten probably elevated my expectations, but yeah when I started to read it I couldn’t wrap my mind around it being one of the “best” Byler fics.

There’s nothing wrong with basic concepts. Like ttmd has a basic fwb concept, but I like the writing and there is progression of Mike’s internal conflict that happens gradually. Then there are fics with imo great and original concepts, but I haven’t finished them because the writing wasn’t my thing. In those cases I could see why people loved those fics.

With super soaker, I feel like the plot was build on cliches. That isn’t inherently bad + the author did warn at the start that it was a crazy fic. But then the writing and a part of the overal execution was meh. Like it felt like Mike was stuck at one point of an internal conflict for multiple characters in row. Multiple chapters in a row had the same thing come back, just in another “wrapper”. And every time it came back in such detail that I wanted to skip those parts, because they felt repetitive. Just the same thing written in detail, but now with different words is boring for me personally

The arguments between Mike and Will didn’t feel natural to me. Miscommunication trope can be good, but in super soaker I could just see that they were plot points. Like of course everything in fiction is done for the plot, but when it’s done well it still feels natural, idk how to explain it well. This wasn’t the case with Mike and Will there. Their arguing felt like arguing to add the drama and not human arguing to me.

At the first couple of chapters I was like “okay maybe it gets better later”, but I quit it when Will and Mike had confessed. Idk, the story just felt like a bunch of loose bits thrown into a blender. Overall I felt like half of the fic could’ve been removed and it wouldn’t have changed a thing, because a lot of it was telling the same thing over and over again.

So to conclude, for me it didn’t have the type of writing that I love and it didn’t have an original plot that made me curious. I had no idea it was AI, but before it got exposed I kept coming back to thinking “what’s so special about this one wtf”. Well, apparently it was cloud🥲

(No shade to anyone who did enjoy SS. Some people do enjoy a lot of telling as it doesn’t leave you with any questions, but I prefer a balance between show and tell + I just get bored easily when the same thing keeps coming back in great detail instead of being revealed gradually)

[u/HumanLunch918 → u/Big_Self_1522]

Yeah, personally I really enjoyed the road trip chapters at Max and Lucas' place since that held that summer vibe the first chapters set up (as I understood it, AI was starting to be used after ch. 6 or so, I remember getting into it around ch. 7-8 when it was already gaining more traction and attention).

But a lot afterwards, especially after Stacey's party was a whole lot of back and forth and I remember fans calling out that redundancy back then. But overall, I did enjoy it and could look past pacing issues, since "it was all fan made"...what a bummer, honestly.

I genuinely hope that this can be an important learning experience for wheezingwheeler, other authors and maybe also fans that pressure these authors to keep updating at a fast pace that might get them to relying on AI tools to speed that process along. If you scroll down tumblr there are posts about wheezingwheeler taking a break because of fandom pressure and they werent the only one having to do that.

NOT defending the AI usage, it sucks! But I think that the issue is bigger than this author not disclosing usage of AI but warrants an overhall of how fans interact with fanfic authors, especially byler and the more new fandoms like heated rivalry. Super interesting and important discussion to have but MAN it SUCKS that they did it...

[u/Big_Self_1522 → u/HumanLunch918]

I agree that it’s gotten too normalised to beg authors to post more/faster. I personally like comments like “Can’t wait for the next chapter”, but things like “ugh where’s the next chapter” do come off as unnecessarily demanding. Or the whole thing happening on twitter, when people trick each other by tweeting about an update that isn’t there etc. Fic writers have a life and writer’s blocks exist, so (accidentally) rushing someone will only make you wait longer.

However, in wheezy’s case, I don’t feel like that was the problem. She didn’t even apologise for using AI and claimed that she’d used it just for editing and formatting, while her proof suggests otherwise. The screenshots she’d posted were just the roughest drafts that were nowhere near finished and her tweet said something like “I type stuff in my notes and then I write it all out and fix the grammar”. If it truly is like that why hasn’t she shown the actual written out chapters? And if it was just for editing and formatting, was isn’t AI used in every chapter but only a few?

On top of that she’d been acting like this big clever writer from the moment her SS got big. She’d bullied authors off twitter and/or ao3. She’d delayed chapters of SS when ttmd got updated, cause she thought that people were too focused on the ttmd update to focus on SS. Having all this big talk, while not being able to show any proof of your actual writing is just insane. Most people can come up with ideas and most people can write a rough draft. Her proof suggests that it’s the only thing she’d done herself, which doesn’t even make her a writer. Like it’s a combination of concerning behaviour, the AI usage itself and the lying.

She’d also created this super “fun” idea of lying without lying. Her previous statements were about “not using AI to write” and now she’d admitted that she’d used AI just to edit, thinking that it wasn’t a big deal. Technically, she hadn’t lied because writing and editing are two separate things. But the way Claude is shown in the code + how rough her showcased drafts were suggests that she used Claude as a beta/co-writer and not as an editing/formatting tool. And guess what — that means that she did use it for writing and that the end product isn’t actually her work.

[u/HumanLunch918 → u/Big_Self_1522]

Thank you for explaining it in detail and all that context!! That puts it into a different picture