Belligerent Sexual Tension. Alternate Universe. Kink Negotiation. Omegaverse. When people search for fan fiction on site Archive of Our Own — known among its legions of fans as AO3 — there’s a neverending set of tags the site’s 8 million-and-counting users can sort through to find their perfect fic. Now, this world of endless possibilities is battling another addition to the tag section: AI Generated Works.
The rapid growth of public AI models like ChatGPT has left experts in almost every sector concerned about copyright, intellectual property, and lack of disclosure of training materials. But fan fiction — which itself straddles the line between copyright and fair use laws — has the disadvantage of being a distinctly online product. It’s not illegal or hard to plagiarize, just incredibly bad form, and goes directly against the community’s understood values of credit, fairness, and creativity. Since AI models often don’t credit what work they were trained on, many fan fiction writers feared their work would be used.
They weren’t wrong. In 2023, Wired reported that generator Sudowrite had specific understanding of online only terms from the omegaverse fan fiction community. Since then, sites like AO3, Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad have begun to allow AI generated works, even as writers have continually tried to make their fics as hard for AI to grab as possible. The pushback against AI is about keeping fanworks safe. But by making fan fiction harder to access, could the ongoing war between fic writers and AI hurt the very community people are trying to protect?
Fan fiction has always appealed to 26-year-old Elle. S, 26, but in the past three years, AO3 has become a place for her to connect with people who shared her love for Robert Pattinson’s The Batman (2022). So when she opened an anonymous message on Tumblr, Elle says she was shocked to hear from a reader that they liked her work so much — and were so desperate to read more — that they had been uploading her work into ChatGPT to get new chapters faster. “It was a bit jarring,” Elle tells Rolling Stone, adding that it bothered her enough to ask for advice on the subreddit r/ao3. While there was no one who had had the same experience, many fic authors noted that readers using AI to create new chapters seemed both horrifying and a likely end result for a fandom landscape already burdened by debates over artificial intelligence. Simply put, it made people worried.
According to Anne Jamison, a professor of English at the University of Utah and the author of Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, fanwork communities operate under a sort of gift economy. “A big part of fan fiction is, ‘What we wanted wasn’t there. So we made it. The end of the story was wrong, so we fixed it,’” Jamison says. “It works because [people] are donating their time and labor to share in enthusiasm. Credit is the currency.”
“That’s why, despite there being no profit, fan fiction culture has always been incredibly sensitive to plagiarism,” she adds. “Because it disrupts that pillar of credit.”
Dean S., a 21-year-old fic writer, has been publishing works around CW’s Supernatural, Marvel’s Avengers, and Star Wars properties since 2022. He has staunch ethical objections to AI, adding that he also believes it degrades the communal nature of fan fiction. “I think the people using AI like this have a fundamental lack of understanding of what fandom is supposed to be as a creativity driven community,” Dean says. “The only way to improve at writing is just to keep writing. And fan fiction is such a great way to practice that. It’s a community of amateur writers who are doing this for fun.”
Fic writers have seemingly been going above and beyond to keep their work far away from AI. Hundreds of writers have posted on X, Tumblr, and Reddit about ways to restrict their fics from AI scraping. Some of that involves hosting the works privately on fic websites, only allowing a person to read them if they have an account. But others have taken to removing entire fics from the internet altogether. For people not aware of how deep and intricate fanwork communities run, this can sound like the loss of a handful of short stories. But fan fiction often builds on collective ideals and personalities specific works have given characters. These aren’t quickly typed missives. These are novel long tomes that have existed on the internet for years and impacted entire seasons of writing. They’re primary sources — and once they’re gone — they’re incredibly hard to get back.
“I can see, unfortunately, [a response to AI integration] where fan fiction might go way back more underground, to be more locked down, to be harder to find, to be more siloed,” Jamison says. “People can see that there’s been pluses to fan fiction’s increased publicity like greater readership. But there’s been a price to pay.”
Losing fics is a tragedy on its own, but this mass removal might have long term consequences. Fan fiction doesn’t work its best in a bubble. Sure, you can take pen to paper and hash out a 20,000 word alternate universe saga bout Captain America and the Winter Soldier going to therapy together all on your lonesome, but it’s only when you post it online or read others that it becomes communal. Making fics harder to access might protect them from AI a little longer, but it’s also making it harder for new readers to access — cutting them off from the very community they’re looking for.
Neither Dean or Elle have say that encroaching AI risks have made them think about quitting fanfiction. But both note that the art form doesn’t work without the people who create it working together.
“There’s been this disturbing and rapid trend of instant gratification seeping into creative spaces with the use of generative AI. It’s creating this really upsetting environment where personal flair and voice are increasingly seen as negligible, rather than the very heart of fan fiction,” she says. “Fanfiction is connection and creativity. AI is just words on a page.”
#ChatGPT #Ruin #Community
