Artificial Intelligence is the death of human creativity – or at least that’s the rhetoric that sci-fi films always told us. Arnold warned us in The Terminator. Keanu fought back with some flying karate action in The Matrix. Black Mirror was basically a user’s manual on how such technology can spell our own demise.
It seems, however, the memo was missed in fanfiction circles. What was once a beautiful world of people-written works has been infiltrated, and our enemy is ChatGPT. Or Claude. Or Bard. Or Gemini. Or QuillBot. Or Type.Ai. Or literally any generative AI chatbot, where you give the robot a prompt, and it will spew a torrent of word-vomit that, seemingly, looks like any fic you’d find on sites like Tumblr, Archive of Our Own (AO3), Fanfiction.net, or Wattpad. But it’s not.
“You can almost always tell when it’s not written by a person,” said Charlotte from North Carolina, better known as Charlottesbookshelf on Tumblr.
“If you look for too many em-dashes and overly descriptive paragraphs with really flat dialogue and perfect grammar, it’s AI. It could pass as a very boring fanfic, but even something written by a 12-year-old has the passion and excitement behind their writing.
“Passion is something AI can’t recreate on its own. It gets that from us.”
Writers and readers, take note. Every time a fanfiction is generated by a chatbot, that content was stolen from a real fanfic writer. It may not be a word-for-word copy, but the style and characteristics that make a fanfic so beautifully human were scraped (a technical term for extracting data from websites, analysing it, and storing it in intelligence databases) from the internet. No one taught ChatGPT how to write an angsty M/M omegaverse multiseries. It can only learn from those who did it before (and better).
“Data scraping can be human-led, but it is often done by a bot these days,” says Nivetha Ganapathi, a technology consultant and AI engineer.
“The data can be anything, but the problem is that the information collected was not meant to be collected on such a large scale. It is not its intended use. Therefore, AI is learning from a source that was never meant to teach it.”
So, AI has it in its metaphorical robot brain that fanfic looks a certain way, sounds a certain way, and feels a certain way because that’s how everyone else does it. As we learned to write from each other, swapping tips in DMs or giving constructive feedback in the comments, a chatbot only knows what it finds online. Our intelligence is its limit.
“In order to replicate a pre-existing text, a Large Language Model (LLM), such as ChatGPT, will look for patterns across a wide database and summarise it, which is good for generating sentences,” added Miss Ganapathi.
“It stores this information, and when you give it a prompt, it will mimic the patterns it knows.
“There is an issue with this because it also mimics any problems within its source, such as limitations on websites or inaccurate information. AI only replicates what it is given.”
It’s not so bad when a human gets things wrong. To err is human, after all. But no one wants to read drivel generated by a one-dimensional bot. And certainly, writers don’t want to be replaced by something that doesn’t know its smut from its drabbles. We’re here for authenticity.
“If I see that someone endorses AI in their work, I instantly block them,” said Emi, 24, from Germany, who’s been reading and cross-posting her organic writing on Wattpad, Tumblr and AO3 since she was 13.
“If they can’t be bothered to write it, I can’t be bothered to read it because I believe AI does not belong in creative spaces.”
Emi says she understands why people use AI, especially those who generate writing guidelines or the opening paragraph to kickstart writer’s block. However, she maintains that a full-blown fic is out of the question.
“A lot of people see it as lazy. You can spend hundreds of hours on something original, only for AI to write something that’s half as good in a fraction of the time, and people who don’t recognise the difference applaud it.
“It’s soul-destroying to be beaten by a machine. It’s why so many writers abandon their works when they receive no attention for so much effort.”
The unfortunate fact is, it’s easy to turn to AI for a solution. Writers try their best to keep up with demand, only for readers to click off the minute they reach the kudos button. They are real people; they have lives, jobs, families, and studies to consider, and their fanfics are written for free at their own pace. In a world where we increasingly crave endless, instant content, it’s no wonder AO3 currently has nearly 8,000 works tagged as “Created using Generative AI”, and those are only the honest ones.
Quite simply, it’s the convenience that makes AI so attractive – knowing you can get that quick fix of your favourite ship without the wait for the next chapter. The worst thing is that we, the fanfiction community, have little power to block generative bots from entering our spaces beyond basic restrictions.
In May 2025, admins at Organization for Transformative Works (the organisation that owns AO3), announced new measures to limit data scraping on the site. Thousands of users shared their concerns about their work being included in a Common Crawl dataset in 2022, during which the collected data was used to train AI. In fairness, the Archive was not aware of its inclusion, but the damage was already done.
If your work was online and fully accessible before 2022, ChatGPT slurped it up to train its robot brain like a data-sucking vampire – whether you wanted it to or not.
“We often cannot do much about data scrapes like this,” said Miss Ganapathi, echoing the statement from AO3.
“You would have to ask AI companies to remove the information from the dataset, but then, it is already processed and being used across platforms.
“Individual users could potentially claim copyright in this case, but again, the dataset is so large that it is unlikely that an individual would succeed in convincing a company to remove anything so small.”
Therefore, we are the ants and an AI company is the boot. Our only protection comes from sites reducing a bot’s chances of collecting data, but the very soul of fanfiction is its wide accessibility. You can lock them behind a login wall, but ultimately, anything public on the internet can be scraped.
It makes for a bleak outlook, but at least host sites like AO3’s admins will fight the legal side of things to prevent future data collection. They’re good eggs like that. What matters now, say writers, including Charlotte and Emi, is the absolute rejection of chatbots. They say it shouldn’t be within an inch of fanfiction.
Nic Cross, 32, knows the internet can be a frustrating place. They upload their writing and drawings to Wattpad and a Tumblr blog, but have struggled in the past with people stealing their art and reproducing it through AI.
They said: “The worst thing you can do to a person in fanfiction is feed their work into a generator.
“I once had a moot [mutual follower] tell me they couldn’t wait until I finished my story, so they gave it into a chatbot and asked for an ending.
“They didn’t see anything wrong with what they’d done, but I was livid. Just like that, the generator had analysed my work for some crappy final chapter, and it was because of someone who said my writing was so amazing but too slow.
“To quote William Shakespeare, et tu, Brute?”
It really is like a knife in the back, but Nic is reassured by the community around them, which practically hunts down AI sympathisers with pitchforks and burning torches. In the face of relentless adversity and an uncertain future, they find joy in creation.
Fanfiction is art – an ancient concept that is so uniquely us. In comparison, AI has been around for no time at all. Michelangelo did not need it for the Sistine Chapel. Dickens and David Copperfield, equally so. Ask Chat to generate the Mona Lisa, and it will give her six fingers.
We have never needed Artificial Intelligence to create our own masterpieces. If we succumb to the temptation for the sake of convenience, it really is the death of human creativity.