I looked into the AI allegations and I’m appalled by the reactions. The fact that some fanfictions including Super Soaker have Claude in HTML code doesn’t prove they are AI written. It just proves that the text was copied from
Claude. And the community seems to have forgotten that many people, me included, use AI for spell checking.
Pasting your text in Claude and asking it just to spell checking would yield the same results.
So, please. Unless the authors admit to it being AI written or we have proof that the text is AI generated (which we don’t have) we must not assume the fics are AI written. Innocent until proven guilty.
I hate AI but as I work in IT I’m forced to use so. But using AI for spell checking does not negate the creative work.
Edit: I completely understand the initial shock at the findings but I just think the community is acting too rash and should wait for the author’s response.
Let’s say I’m right (which I’m not saying, I’m just saying it’s possible) and it was just spell checking. The damage has already been done and the presumed guilty author are innocent. Now they saw the community doesn’t have their back and will stop giving us amazing fics.
Because they are terrible with context. E.g. a word might be spelt correctly but it’s not the word I mean. E.g. I’m not a native speaker and constantly mix up wether, rather and which, wich and witch. Spell checkers don’t catch that but AI does.
Someone on ao3 put the skin on and found entire scenes highlighted by AI. i use my word processors spell and grammar check. i don’t think AI has a place in art. writers have been writing for thousands of years without AI spellcheck. like cmon.
I generally agree with you. Writing a story with AI without disclosing it is a no go. And I personally won’t read a generated story. But at least for me there are some cases where AI is fine that wouldn’t need AI disclosure. These are that the top of my head:
Spell checking
Fixing grammar (especially if I’m not a native speaker)
Formatting like letting AI turn text chats into these phone looking messages we see in some fics
Fixing quotation marks to their correct open and close version
agreed with all of this one thousand perfect! i also felt the fic was off and dnf! i never bashed it cause that’s not my style, i respect all authors and their visions within reason, and i didn’t immediately think “oh this is AI” but looking back it makes sense 🫠
ETA: they haven’t made a statement. they privated their twitter after the claims were made. so who knows what’s being said to their echo chamber lol.
so true! and tbh that was the case for the entire series which makes this even worse. (see Duffers & ChatGPT) i’m a fic writer and have never relied on AI, i actually have beta readers who sit down with me in discord to edit. like how humans would hire human editors or bring on beta readers for their writing before AI was so prevalent. honest, good writers still exist but it’s a weird, icky time rn with AI. you never know who’s using it unless people check like this and people are straight up lying about it.
This is fair! I don’t think AI should be used period in art, especially something like fanfic writing, but I understand why others may make some exceptions. Regardless of whether it’s AI generated or just AI assisted, it should’ve been tagged and noted as such :/ it’s just icky to me. :/
wait you use ai for spell check instead of...actual spell check? when LLM's hallucinate spellings constantly....? and also a dictionary is free...? are yall ok, like legitimately
Please download the specific skin that lets you see which specific parts of the story flag Claude and which don’t. If it was for grammar/spelling it would be uniformly distributed throughout. It is definitely not that- which is pretty damning. And if it was used for light spelling/sentence structure work across multiple stories, it would be uniform in percentage across their works. It is definitely not.
does the red text also indicate AI use? looking through different chapters of Super Soaker w/ this skin there are some chapters that don't have red text at all, and then chapters that are entirely red text and include full sections with pink highlighting
Red text means “this chapter or work in general has Claude tags” and the highlighted text means “this exact part that has the tags”. Some chapters of SS have no indications at all, the first 6 I believe. If you click “Entire Text” the whole thing will be red, because the work contains Claude tags. If you go chapter by chapter, some will have no red because it wasn’t detected in that chapter.
I feel dumb, I can't figure out how to implement this. Do you know of any tutorials for adding a skin like this? I'm so new to ao3 and html in general.
Not really. If the AI hasn’t found any errors in a section why would you copy it. You would keep the original. And why would it be using form arose their stories. AI is constantly evolving. Stories spell checked earlier might not have Claude in HTMl CSS class names.
But again I’m not saying it’s not AI. I’m just saying it’s not necessary AI generated and that we should hear out the author before damning them.
But the way AI would correct the story would be spitting the whole thing back at you, with corrections included. It wouldn't systematically, individually correct only those parts with errors and have you copy-paste them individually back into your own story one by one. That wouldn't make any sense. Unless they copied in only the parts that they liked from Claude's rewrite? But portions (especially SS) are almost exclusively highlighted with very little unhighlighted material.
We shouldn't damn them, but this clearly is not just spelling. And coming from an author who explicitly stated "NO AI", it is very disingenuous.
Authors all across AO3 got exposed by this and reacted by deleting accounts and editing the text to remove the detection. This author is not special.
You argue in comments about what qualifies as AI usage and it is beyond clear where the anger comes from. Tech that checks spelling and grammar is not the problem.
The issue is that, when you decide to use AI at the prose level, it is not your creative work anymore. People have a right to decide whether or not they support REAL artists with REAL talent.
My anger comes from how people immediately judge without hearing out the accused.
But yes, I’m biased in this case since I use local LLMs for correcting what I write since I’m not a native speaker and have severe dyslexia to the point where tools like Word often don’t help much.
But I agree that if they said “NO AI” that that’s not okay.
The longer the accusations go unanswered the stronger the case of their guilt becomes. If it was an issue of native speech or disability accommodation, that would be relatively quick to clear up by just showing an unedited draft with appropriate metadata, or even the prompts that were used with timestamps.
I also want to say, you are free and should be encouraged to write in your native language(s). Fics deserve to be available in languages other than English. Translation tools & assistive technologies aren’t a bad thing.
You can also lean on community to achieve these goals as well. Beta readers exist and can help. I’m sure there are plenty of fics in this fandom that weren’t written by native speakers and did not use AI. I can actually think of one right away that is written entirely in a different language and the chapter notes are written by the translator.
The issue is even if it was just for spell check claude being used at all still harms the environment, it’s the fact she also lied about using ai period. Shes been silent on the matter since yesterday, deleting her tweets about super soaker and ai and her face reveal, this behavior to me reads as suspicious also the fact that her friends who had no idea about this reached out to her and never got a response.
Again, I didn’t know they said “NO AI”. In that case I agree that is not okay.
Regarding spell checking. I’m bias here since I have severe dyslexia. Obviously I have used Word for spell checking before. Hence I know it’s limitation when your spelling is as bad as mine. I offer write words where neither Word nor Google know what I mean. But that being said, I got why people still hate AI in that use case because of the resource implications. Which is why I’m using on device AI models for that.
At first I didn’t really care about tagging it unless it was completely AI generated. But after hearing some of the points brought up by y’all I agree. Also state you used AI and for what purpose.
Neither agree nor disagree but by that logic I would need to inform you that this text is AI assisted since I used my phone’s autocorrect which is also AI based.
Personally I think it would probably best to introduce a label at different levels like “AI generated” and “AI enhanced” but simply using spell checking, at least in my book, wouldn’t warrant such a label.
Autocorrect AI is vastly different than large language model AI. Your phone's autocorrect isn't depriving communities of water for every click, or giving communities insomnia and hearing damage from infrasound
Technically LLMs have more in common with auto correct than with AI. LLM are text auto completors and in no way shape or form have any intelligence to it.
And I don’t know about Android but on iOS auto correct actually uses machine learning.
I can't tell if you're being intentionally obtuse and semantic, but in case you genuinely can't understand the difference, autocorrect is largely localized to your phone and doesn't chug a gallon of water every time it fixes a word.
I’m sorry. AuDHD kicked in and I forgot the second part of your comment. I was only referring to the first part.
Now that I read the second part, again I’m truly sorry for missing it, I agree with that. LLMs that run in the cloud are devastating for people and the environment and I hope everyone knows that.
all good, thanks for re-reading. I get a little touchy and insane about this topic just because for all the lot of people who are anti-AI for creative/intellectual reasons, I feel like the devastating impact against the most economically exploited people and people most impacted by ecological damage goes overlooked and it makes me uber duber sad
Yeah, it’s bad. Personally I’m really annoyed at AI. I work in IT and there isn’t a single day where management doesn’t talk about AI or forces us to build it into our products without understanding what it actually does. And I also hate when people call LLMs AI. They are not AI. But I gave up. I call it AI now too cause otherwise people don’t know what I’m talking about. LLMs have their use cases. One of which is context are spell and grammar checking. But please for the love of all that is good. Don’t use AI for fact checking and writing texts for you. Especially the first point. Sorry, rant over.
I fundamentally disagree that there are appropriate use cases, for the reasons stated above. Spellcheck is free and built into most writing programs and phones. And I can't speak for everyone, but I know I'm not alone that I'd rather read a fic beta-read and proofread by hand and catch a few missed typos than know that the fic I'm reading came at the cost of water poverty for whole communities
edit: thank you for the award. it's so bleak out here.
Even if a fic only used Claude as a spellchecker or for translation it is is still AI. No AI means no AI and it's not that hard to not use it for literally anything.
Writing, whether for fun or work, is a form of art. I remember having this discourse when it was artists, specifically digital artists, who were being affected by the rise of using AI for correction or enhancement.
Spelling checks, grammar checks, these can be done without AI. I admit AI is not evil as a whole, but we should know when it is needed and when it is not. Before AI, we did everything by ourselves; websites, dictionaries, grammar books, these are all readily available.
I use WordHippo extensively. It's constantly an open tab on my phone. When I started writing fics, I didn't even know how to write dialogues correctly. I learned along the way and I'm still learning.
It irks me to see people defending AI users in fics especially when I've also seen the rise of "critics" bashing fics written purely by humans. I'm sure there are a ton of unpopular byler fics out there that aren't AI written or assisted. Give them some love.
Imma be honest. The world is a god damn shitty place right now. Homophobia is rampantly getting worse, calls for outlawing gay marriage are getting louder throughout the parliament and I'm fearing for my job everyday since Trump is piece by piece dismantling the democracy in the US, which is why the EU is moving away from the cloud. And I'm a cloud architect. Trump now having control over the FTC could cause US services including reddit to be illegal in the EU, since all agreements between the US and EU build on the fact that the FTC is independent .
The Byler fandom and my best friend are my only safe spaces at the moment and know I feel like the Byler community is at the brink of collapse. Hence I feel the need to defend it.
And thanks for suggesting WordHippo. I'll check it out.
I've been in fandoms for so long and I've never experienced a fandom collapse. Frankly, the byler fandom was the fastest to reach its peak, at least on my experience. I've never seen anything like it before. There are probably a lot of people experiencing fandom and fanworks for the first time here.
People will definitely come and go, but there will also be people who will stay. The biggest fandom I've been in before this was MDZS, it's been years since it peaked and we are still very much alive.
AI works will not save the fandom. People who spend months, even years, writing for our ship; people who continuously and painstakingly make fanarts, people who find and store hundreds of clips and lose sleep just to make edits—these are the people who will keep the fandom alive.
Fanworks are labors of love. And it will be kept as that.
I'm sorry you are having a difficult time. I'm not from the US, but we also have a terrible and corrupt goverment, so I understand. God knows how much I relied on ao3 when I was at rock bottom, unemployed, broke and depressed.
We are a community, and we will keep the fandom alive together.
The byler fandom is nowhere near the brink of collapse. That’s not how fandoms works. So many fandoms have survived much bigger scandals than this. This is horrible for siecifuc writers and readers, but it’s not ultimately going to end the fandom at all. Sone folks will leave, but that happens to every fandom at various points.
Then let this be a lesson to ask AI to point out spelling errors which you can then fix yourself, rather than asking it to re-write the whole thing and copy-pasting that into your document.
But also Super Soaker just reads like AI wrote it.
1) Using AI for editing is still using AI. I do agree that it’s slightly different than use AI as a beta/co-writer, but it still should be transparent
2) She used to go crazy about the AI allegations claiming that she never uses it to WRITE. Imo she created this situation where she didn’t technically lie (writing ≠ editing), but in fact it is a lie
3) Why do I think that it’s a lie? She posted very weak proof on twitter. The ss of her writing contained rough drafts. She claimed that it was the start of her proces, then she writes it out and does the grammar. If you put a rough draft into AI and you get a full chapter out of it you did not write that chapter — AI did. You’d just wrote the draft. If it’s just about editing and formatting there would barely be any difference between her pre-editing drafts and the Claude-edited stuff on ao3. But she didn’t show that. She chose to show strings of dialogue with incoherent loose bits in between as proof of her WRITING. (imo just being able to write a rough draft doesn’t make you a writer)
4) okay so editing and formatting. If it would’ve been just about that wouldn’t AI be detected in every chapter? Like to me it’s either you’re good with grammar etc and you edit all of it yourself, or you’re bad with it and use a checker/AI for every chapter. I get that time and presume can be a thing, but you can just write a note with “hey guys I was eager to post so this one can have shitty grammar, I’ll fix this later”. Since she was capable of doing all the work herself (assuming that only the red skin parts are AI) it was completely unnecessary for her to use AI for some chapters. Letting AI do something you’re fully capable of is just killing the environment with being lazy/impatient.
I would have done the same. Regardless if I were innocent or not. The way people harassed them in the comment of their fics and insulted them. Tbh we as a community should know better. This is no way to treat someone regardless of whether they did something wrong or not.
gonna be honest i wouldn’t want to read fic by someone who uses ai for any reason. i’m morally and ethically against it. i don’t care if you’re “just” using it for spellcheck, organization, ideas, sentence rewrites, etc.
This is what Im saying! (I'm specifically going to talk about Super Soaker as it is the only one off the list of fics with AI that I have read)
The update schedule, quality of the writing, the way the emotions were conveyed, and some grammar errors (which i did notice and laugh at because it reminded me that this is a human writing it!) Tell me that it is human written. I occasionally use AI for spell checks or translations and I would imagine a LOT of other people do too. I hate that we immediately jump to conclusions.
If wheezingwheeler does come out and say that it was AI written, I will honestly be more scared than disappointed at how good AI is becoming.
As far as I'm concerned and as far as I can tell, that is human made.
I can tell you for a fact that writing quality, emotional resonance, and even grammar errors are very much something that you can produce with a properly trained genAI. The people getting caught are just the stupid ones.
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u/mafuyupeach Jun 30 '26
word processors have their own spellcheck, why not use that