Someone keeps accusing fanfiction authors of writing their fic with AI, and nobody knows why
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Artificial intelligence has… let’s say, a fraught relationship with the arts community, and transformative fandom is no exception. Many fans have embraced some tools like Character.ai bots, but plenty have also bristled at the prospect of text generators getting trained on their fanfiction; in my fandom circles, I’ve seen a few people say the prospect of an AI-created content flood discourages them from writing. And in the past week, the backlash has created an odd second-order complication: someone is rampantly accusing non-AI fan writers of being “AI-using cheaters,” and as far as I can tell, nobody quite knows why.
According to posts and responses on Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr, a slew of authors have been receiving apparent spam…
