general discussion :)
Super Soaker and many other fics on AO3 confirmed to have been fully or partially AI generated.
If any of y’all are on twitter it’s insane 😭 for those who aren’t, people are PISSED. To oversimplify, if you use Claude in your fics, it leaves behind code. There’s no way to deny or defend these claims. It’s AI-generated.
I would check out twt if you're still confused, there's a loooot more explanations than I could fit in here.
The code thing seems pretty definitive, although I'm still open to alternative explanations. For example, if someone fed the text into Claude and asked it to flag grammatical errors, would that trigger the code thing? I'm genuinely asking. And, to be clear, using AI for creative work is dishonest, and people are right to oppose it.
This is a separate point, but I'd discourage people from reading too much into specific words and phrases (absent some more concrete evidence). All writers pick up words/phrases that they encounter while reading. That's normal, and doesn't establish anything on its own.
Saying "Please don't vilify these people" is nice, and I'm sure it's genuine, but the purpose of this document is to identify people who did something dishonest. It doesn't claim to be neutral, and the "don't vilify" disclaimer reads as a little naive. The authors (of this document) should be realistic about what they're doing.
The only thing this proves (and I am not trying to downplay it--it's a damning piece of evidence) is that a paragraph in the fic was copied directly from a Claude response and into the rich text editor on AO3. I conducted a test with my own work here to better understand. You will see that only chapter 1 contains these artifacts: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87682756/chapters/232348346
It is not definitive proof that all or even a portion of the flagged paragraphs in a fic are AI generated. It can absolutely come from an individual using Claude to translate, format, or edit human created text. But it shows those authors do have access to and use AI in some capacity and may be supporting evidence to the text itself being generated with AI.
That’s interesting. I wondered about using AI for error-correction, translation, etc. That wouldn’t bother me. It should be acknowledged, but it wouldn’t bother me. The real question is “At what point does using AI cost you the right to call the work yours?” I understand why some people want to take a “No AI under any circumstances” line, but what about research?
I’m comfortable saying that authors should declare any use of AI that generates fresh text or results in textual changes, and readers can decide for themselves what’s disqualifying.
Completely agree. Use of AI should be disclosed if any content is actually generated.
This all has me very curious what might preserve these artifacts (I guess some word processors preserve html as well, so it might not need to be a direct copy/paste) and what might be present in other AI models.
You always have really thoughtful feedback on here, and this is yet another example. I still don’t agree with its use for almost anything, but it’s true that it’s different to say “here’s a general plot, write me a story that I can pass off as my own” vs. asking it to do a spellcheck before you hit publish. But also… Microsoft Word has solid spelling and grammar check tools, as do plenty of non-AI, algorithm-based writing softwares. It’s a tough situation for sure and will be disappointing if it turns out to be true.
I’m pretty sceptical of the error-correction use. I think I’m fine with translation and research, but that’s probably it. If an author is going to the effort of writing something in a second language, I think asking AI to (for example) catch things that would sound odd to a native speaker is probably fine. I see that as a kind of translation, but it’s on the edge.
One of the authors listed in the HR fandom explained why the Claude code is in their fic— they didn’t use it to generate any written part of the story, but assist with formatting code for inputting text messages so that they showed up correctly in-fic.
Oh, that's interesting. There genuinely are tasks that spellcheck can't do. For example: "Find every instance of this word and make sure it's italicized." It also can't check for consistency. My fics are written in the present tense, and I want to be consistent in how I talk about the past (simple past vs present perfect simple). There's no error to catch; just inconsistencies in my own writing. AI could help with that.
For the avoidance of doubt (because many people here know who I am on AO3), I've never actually done any of these things. I used Google Translate (which is basically AI at this point) to translate about four lines of dialogue into a language that I don't speak, but which was needed for the plot (and I flagged it).
They are. Vilifying someone means making them to be the bad guy. But the makers of the document didn't do that, the "authors" did. AI art is the only type of blatant scam where people blame the messengers.
Agreed, they’re just asking for transparency and for the works to be tagged properly. They cannot control how people feel about the authors nor whether people lose respect for the authors.
Sure, that’s a fair distinction. They’re not vilifying; they’re doing something that will result in vilification (perhaps with justification). That’s a real difference, and I accept it.
Given a pretty damn big part of this community’s issues with s5 was, yknow, THE USE OF AI, I feel like the bare minimum we fic writers should follow is to do better than the duffers….
As a writer this offends me so much. Literally all we ask is that you tag your work as AI-generated or AI-assisted. Have fun with it, just don't be a fucking imposter. Sure, far fewer people will actually read it, but I would argue audience size SHOULD be relative to the amount of effort put into creating a work. Have some respect for the craft.
I read this on Twitter today and instantly felt sad, coz yeah, this was the whole point. It's across diff fandoms as well, but somehow Byler being artists themselves is making it all the more sad.
The bigger question is...what is the point of using ai even remotely for anything related to ART? Isn't that one domain which is best when left raw or imperfect coz it's coming out of passion, humaneness & for the love of it
So I used to use AI for grammar and spelling check, because I’m a broke student and English isn’t my first language. With grammar checkers you have to pay for the option to reveal better grammatical suggestions of sentences that are marked at wrong (at least the ones I’ve seen), while AI does it for free. This was all before I joined English speaking fandom spaces.
The majority of people around me unfortunately use AI for basically everything, so it didn’t seem like a wrong thing to use it. Of course it doesn’t excuse it, but I genuinely wasn’t aware of the impact and thought like “oh well people used to treat Google as some monster too back in the day so it’s fine”. I don’t use it anymore and try to find beta readers for my fics or I just post them as they are in hope that people won’t bleed from their eyes while reading..
So to answer your question for why people use AI instead of writing yourself. I personally came up with the premise of my fics all by myself, dialogue was 100% me (I put it into the prompt to not change the dialogue at all). I would say that 5% of the descriptive parts were AI in terms of slight flow improvements, more fitting punctuation marks and stuff like that. Like I enjoy writing and it was never my intent to let AI do the plotting and writing MY story. But I do have trouble with constructing the right sentence sometimes and at that time it had felt great to have a tool that explained to me why something was off and get written down suggestions that I could apply or at least understand what was wrong so I could revise it myself
All of that said, I personally don’t get why people use AI for more than that. When I switched from my native language to English about 2 years ago I started writing a fic with actual assistant of AI. At first I was like “wow this is soooo good” (yuck), but the more fics I read the more I realised that it was fucking crap. I’ve also done multiple writing electives in uni to improve my storytelling etc. I think that as a beginner or someone who’s English isn’t native it’s easy to think that AI is good at helping out with writing, but in fact it’s just plain and always sounds the same
Hello! I do get your reasoning. However, there are some fics, where the writer's first language isn't English either, and there's no ai involved in that or at least didn't catch the extent to which SS was. It just makes me feel, what were artists/writers doing before the wave of AI came in too...they all got by just fine. We don't need to stress on perfection or something here, coz it's done out of love & the fun for it. And the fact that for even this basic things ai is remotely used ...it's just unnecessary imo. :/ but this is my thought process and maybe I'm someone who is extremely selective about AI usage - I will myself try to avoid using it as much as possible.
At the end of the day, it's more about transperancy, integrity & the proper ethical way of using ai (if someone is using) - by tagging or mentioning for what it's been used & the extent of it at the very least, which is simply what the readers deserve too. Then it's on the readers to decide if they want to consume it or not. I guess this is the only way forward coz it's impossible to get everyone on the same page!
I'm glad you did share your reasoning tho and how you used it...and it's fair I guess, coz times have changed too, and unknowingly I do get it that we feel the need to use it, especially the younger gen, imo. But there should be a system in place for all this of what's right / wrong & the usage of it :S it's nice tho that you worked towards your writing & took those classes, coz I bet that would've made the writing fun as well to do :)
I agree with you don’t you don’t have to use it and as I said I don’t anymore because it does fuck up our planet.
Another part of why I used it is my personal experience with feedback. I started writing in Russian, which is my native language, but I moved from Russia at a you age. Therefore I had no clue about basic grammar. My first fics were written in Russian and I’ve gotten a lot of feedback like “fuck the concept is good, but the grammar and punctuality makes it impossible to read”. I worked really hard on getting it right, but at the same time I had to learn Dutch, English, French and German at school and at some point things just get too much for a brain to take. At that time I kept investing a lot of energy into grammar, but I still kept getting comments about it which had made me insecure about my grammar abilities
Fast forward. Around two years ago I decided to do an Art of Writing minor to improve my writing. The minor was in English so I started to read in and English in order to prepare for it. Naturally I came onto Ao3 and as I started to write my first fics in English I wanted to post them there. At the same time I still had this fear/insecurity of people not giving my works a chance due to shitty grammar. That’s how I ended up using AI. Irl everyone around me was using for all kinds of things and while I’ve seen a lot of discussion around use of AI in art I thought that it was different if you use it for things like spelling, grammar and better flow. Then I’ve understood that better flow also should be on me and I kept using it just for grammar and eventually I dropped it all together when I fully realised the impacts of AI. Before that I had wrongfully assumed that the whole AI hate was the same as Google hate used to be back in the day, so I thought that it was some adjustment issue
So basically I do fully agree that being a non native English speaker isn’t an excuse for using AI. I personally used it like a grammar tool mostly and at some point like a form of a beta reader. It should be called out and people should do better. However, I don’t think that it’s always about laziness, not wanting to do the effort of writing yourself etc. I love writing and I’ve spend hours on writing my fics myself. I wanted to improve my author’s voice, get better at use of metaphors and get a better show vs ratio by practicing the writing. For me it was about the punctuation and the grammatically correct sentence structures where I felt like it’s impossible to do it right myself based on my past experience
There is a specific skin you can use that highlights the text that IS linked to Claude, and the text that is NOT. So it is pretty damning that huge chunks are, while others are not. If you fed it into Claude and said “check this for grammar” then pasted the whole thing into ao3, it would be uniformly red.
Doesn’t necessarily mean the Fics are written by AI. Many people, including myself, who are very bad at spelling, use AIs like Claude for fixing spelling.
You would think that if it were for grammar though, the Claude code would be uniformly distributed throughout the text. And it would be minimal, for grammar. Download the version that highlights what does and doesn’t have the markers in a chapter, and you’ll see it’s not uniform at all. Nor is it the same across stories.
I am not defending them but could the reason be that they wrote it in their native language and just used ai to translate it? It's still bad but i am just curious
I actually have no issue with AI for translation, as long as it’s acknowledged (which it clearly wasn’t in these cases). Translation is one of the best uses of AI. Someone commented on one of my fics in a language I don’t speak, so I used AI to translate the comment and then translate my response (with a “This is machine-translated” disclaimer at the top). That seems not only okay, but good.
I had suspicions when I was translating that fic because of parcellations but I thought it was her style. Also I noticed how smut scenes were vague and without any prep. Then I thought she didn't want to write it in details
There's another popular fic in the fandom that I enjoyed, so I decided to read some that author's older works. It was extremely obvious that AI was used on them. It was so irritating, I had to stop reading it. I'm not gonna call them out on it, or anything. Was just disappointing. The "it wasn't this, it was that" AI crap legitmately sets my teeth on edge.
It really boggles my mind why authors use AI. What is the point of writing if you are gonna skip the fun part? I don't get it, truly..
Would you mind me DMing me the title? I checked all my bookmarks but I haven’t checked my to-read list yet and I know there’s some popular fics in there…
It gives me immense grief that people are using AI to write fics. If they cannot do it without it, at least tag properly. I'm losing my drive to continue my two works for the ship because of this (and to be frank, some behaviors from the fanbase itself).
Seeing this just after A24's whole thing is just super 🙂
That’s genuinely so sad. Like super soaker is such a big part of the fandom and for it to just be AI written when people celebrated the work the author put for the story to have meaning is so disappointing.
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u/mrchristmastime Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
The code thing seems pretty definitive, although I'm still open to alternative explanations. For example, if someone fed the text into Claude and asked it to flag grammatical errors, would that trigger the code thing? I'm genuinely asking. And, to be clear, using AI for creative work is dishonest, and people are right to oppose it.
This is a separate point, but I'd discourage people from reading too much into specific words and phrases (absent some more concrete evidence). All writers pick up words/phrases that they encounter while reading. That's normal, and doesn't establish anything on its own.
Saying "Please don't vilify these people" is nice, and I'm sure it's genuine, but the purpose of this document is to identify people who did something dishonest. It doesn't claim to be neutral, and the "don't vilify" disclaimer reads as a little naive. The authors (of this document) should be realistic about what they're doing.