Heated Rivalry is at the Center of Fanfic’s AI Reckoning

The document was released anonymously on X on June 29th—and it spread like wildfire. Titled “Fandom Has a Hidden Generative AI Problem,” it outlined a way for readers to identify cases in which a fanfic had been directly copied and pasted from Claude, the AI chatbot run by Anthropic, into the Archive of Our Own’s rich-text editor. 

“We are fans of Heated Rivalry, a TV show whose rapid popularity surprised even TV executives,” the document’s authors write. “This does not by any means suggest that the issue is limited to this specific fandom.” Much of the 25-page PDF—which, as of the time of publishing this piece, has been taken offline—is dedicated to identifying specific fanworks, including some popular stories in the Heated Rivalry fandom, in which the Claude code has been found in the HTML. It came on the heels of weeks of escalation over AI accusations directed towards some of the fandom’s most prolific authors; some of these authors used those accusations to garner sympathy and support from other fans, and this “proof” seemed to directly undercut that. 

The document’s stated purpose was to demand greater transparency from authors as to whether or not they’d used generative AI, so readers could make their own informed choices about which fics to read or avoid. Its authors specifically condemned targeted harassment, bullying, and ostracization of the fic writers identified as having used AI, despite “some [authors having] loudly opposed AI and encouraged friends and readers to rally against it publicly, only to use it under everyone’s nose.” However, as is the way of the modern internet, this hope for a productive conversation was, while taken up by some, ignored by many others—and across a wide variety of fandoms, people lost their shit.

The debate has become ground zero for fandom’s broader, ongoing reckoning with AI use. “There is a lot of policing, and suspecting people's work being AI-generated, and that's a huge source of hate and conflict,” says Regina Cheng, a data scientist who studied fanfiction communities as part of the Human-Centered Data Science Program at the University of Washington. “People are using AI tools to detect if people are using AI to write, and there’s just this endless conflict around AI and plagiarism. Because of the existence and introduction of AI, there is this general anxiety of, should we use AI or should we allow people to use AI in the fandom?” 

Many of today’s fandom meltdowns feel much like the ones of the past, just hyper-scaled to match the size and pace of modern online life. But the latest blow up in the Heated Rivalry fandom feels like something new. Conflict has always been a part of online fandom, but generative AI destabilizes fandom at its core by destabilizing the entire idea of community. On an internet in which it is increasingly difficult to determine if the words in the fic you're reading, or the comments on the fic, were even human, what’s left? If we can't figure out collective ways to mediate the threat AI poses, then fandom’s function as a digital space where we gather to connect and share is at risk of being destroyed.