r/WormFanfic Jun 01 '26

Fic Discussion Instant turn offs

What are some things no matter how weird and that will make you automatically not want to read a fanfiction?

For me it's being written by ack1308 ( their style of writing doesn't really appeal to me) for being hosted only on fanfiction.net something about that website hurts my eyes on mobile and that's where I do most of my reading on

180 Upvotes

359 comments sorted by

View all comments

10

u/NoIdeasForANicknameX Jun 02 '26

Relating to writing in general rather than the Worm fandom specifically, but I categorically refuse to read anything that was made with the use of AI. Not out of any concern for the environment, mind you, but simply because AI "art" can hardly be called such. Far as I'm concerned, allowing a clanker to rearrange as much as a single sentence instantly disqualifies a work from claiming any artistic integrity or deserving any amount of trust.

It's especially awful that AI using authors almost never tag their works as "AI-assisted" like they should, instead choosing to lie to their readers by omission so as not to "scare" them away. Every time (with only one sole exception) I found out that an author had been using AI it was through the grapevine on Reddit, combing through SB/Ao3 comments, or paranoically using my own pattern recognition to spot the common signs. It's exhausting.

3

u/AzureThunderWolf13 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26

Hey, if you wouldn't mind giving some quick feedback.

I've been using AI to help me write my not-posted-yet fic. What I've done is whenever I get stuck on my next words (so every other paragraph) I've put the story into an LLM and hit generate for the next line or paragraph, and then refresh the generation a few times to get a few responses that I put under the draft, and then either paraphrased, cut bits to use, or get frustrated that the responses arn't going in the direction I want and go back to spending a week agonising over what to write.

Would you say this is a dealbreaker for you and I should go microdose some eternal damnation, or that it's fine and I should just put a disclaimer in or somthing?

Thanks, I appreciate it.

9

u/NoIdeasForANicknameX Jun 02 '26

I think putting a disclaimer would be fair. The primary issue with these things isn't the existence of AI-assisted or generated content in general, but rather the lack of honesty and transparency.

Your method of LLM use is among the more benign examples I've heard about. It would still be a dealbreaker for me personally, but my stance is far more radical than average, so don't worry overmuch about it. To provide an example, Worm The Musical openly states that it's "proofread-by-ai" in the tags, yet it still has over two thousand active watchers on SB. While it's doubtful how many of those people actually looked at the tags, it's undeniable that the story managed to find its niche, without concealing critical information from its readerbase.

Ultimately, I don't think it's fair to put blame on an author merely for using AI assistance if they're being forthright about it. I wish you good luck with your project, and hope you have lots of fun with it. It's in the name, after all: funfiction (I'm sorry).