43,000<\/a>.<\/p>\nIn the stories, writers built an enormous playground. Many pieces are erotica. Others imagine the hockey players in alternate universes as rival college professors or astronauts. <\/p>\n
The most popular story, \u201cplease leave a message,\u201d imagines the wives and girlfriends of players on Mr. Hollander\u2019s team accidentally adding Mr. Rozanov to their group chat, believing he is Mr. Hollander\u2019s girlfriend. Presented as a collection of text messages, it has more than 115,000 kudos, the equivalent of a like.<\/p>\n
\u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d became \u201cone of the most popular fandoms in the world,\u201d said Lauren Rouse, 30, a Northwestern University postdoctoral scholar in writing studies who co-hosts a \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d fan companion podcast.<\/p>\n
But as the fan fictions multiplied at improbable speed, so did the whispers.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of these fics were so long, the word count was outrageous, and they were posted within a period of time where these people would have to be writing like 20,000 words a day,\u201d said Robin Ziolkowski, 29, a nurse in New York and fan of the show. \u201cDoes anybody have jobs?\u201d<\/p>\n
In April, Ms. Zaidi, who once rated A.I.-generated writing for a data-labeling company, posted a two-minute TikTok about one story she was certain had been A.I.-generated. She quoted passages with meandering sentences followed by short fragments, a style typical in A.I. writing.<\/p>\n
The comments poured in. Some fans agreed A.I. was at play. Others said it was unacceptable to accuse a writer without proof. Ms. Zaidi made the video private.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to be part of this witch hunt,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
For Ms. Ziolkowski, the most reliable tell was human anatomy. A.I.-generated prose gave itself away when describing how bodies move, especially in sex scenes, like hands resting where they couldn\u2019t reach. Few examples can be detailed here, but one PG-rated instance was in the viral story \u201cWolfbird,\u201d where Mr. Rozanov was lying on Mr. Hollander\u2019s back. Ms. Ziolkowski was thrown off when the story said Mr. Rozanov could still see Mr. Hollander\u2019s abs.<\/p>\n
Representatives for Ms. Reid and Jacob Tierney, the television show\u2019s creator, declined requests for interviews. Representatives for HBO Max, Mr. Storrie and Mr. Williams did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
Pure Red<\/p>\n
Little is known about who is behind the John Doe @heatedrivalryai account. The fans I talked to, including a moderator of the \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d page on Reddit, said they had no idea.<\/p>\n
After I reached out to the account for comment, someone using the pseudonym Ghostiesdagger emailed to claim to be part of the group behind it. \u201cI\u2019ve helped with exposing numerous A.I. fan fiction writers and catching them in their lies,\u201d Ghostiesdagger wrote.<\/p>\n
Ghostiesdagger would not give a real name or chat, except to defend the document\u2019s premise: that fan fiction should stay human and flawed. \u201cWe are a group who believes fandom is about building community,\u201d Ghostiesdagger wrote.<\/p>\n
The account\u2019s \u201cFandom Has a Hidden Generative A.I. Problem\u201d document was highly detailed. It explained that when Claude writes, it labels the text with a snippet of HTML code: \u201cfont-claude-response-body.\u201d When authors moved writing from Claude into Archive of Our Own, that snippet went with it. John Doe simply looked for that code in \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d fan fictions. (The method caught only Claude and not writing from any other chatbot.)<\/p>\n
The document also included custom code that anyone could apply so that texts with that HTML code would glow bright red.<\/p>\n
Some stories contained hundreds of instances of the code. \u201cA lot of those fics were just pure red,\u201d said Kinsey Kaiser, 25, who works in museum collections in South Carolina and writes \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d fiction in her free time.<\/p>\n
Several fans said they knew of no earlier case in which a fandom had hard evidence that a particular A.I. had touched its fictions, unless an author had revealed it. People ran the custom code across other fandoms like \u201cThe Pitt\u201d and \u201cStranger Things\u201d \u2014 and found hits.<\/p>\n
One of the loudest outcries was over a \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d story titled \u201cNutcracker!\u201d by a popular Archive of Our Own account with the handle OpalApparition, who also published \u201cWolfbird.\u201d The tale, in which the hockey players are a ballet dancer and a stage manager, has more than 283,000 hits and 11,000 kudos. The document found just two instances of Claude code in the piece, but the account had publicly opposed A.I.<\/p>\n
Mikayla Hoover, 26, who works in customer service in Arkansas, said she loved \u201cNutcracker!\u201d and was hurt by the discovery. She had read everything OpalApparition had produced and cried at some of it, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just feels like losing somebody that I really had come to respect in the fandom,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
OpalApparition, who stopped posting \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d stories in April citing intense pressure, did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
Of the 38 stories flagged by John Doe, 10 were deleted and seven were locked so only registered Archive of Our Own users could see them. Ten added notes explaining their use of A.I.<\/p>\n
One author apologized \u201cto anyone who feels betrayed or let down\u201d and promised never to use A.I. tools again. Another blamed a friend who had edited a chapter in which six A.I. instances appeared, restored the original text and wrote that \u201clessons were learned.\u201d None responded to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
Not everyone read the document as a public service. Ms. Hood, the San Francisco software engineer, said the document\u2019s premise was that any hidden A.I. use was betrayal, however small. But it also tallied how popular each story was in hits and kudos. To Ms. Hood, that undercut the principle: If a single instance was the problem, a story\u2019s popularity should not matter.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat shouldn\u2019t be relevant if you had pure intentions,\u201d she said, adding that the document read like a way to humiliate the fandom\u2019s most popular writers.<\/p>\n
Rules of Their Own<\/p>\n
Four weeks later, some fans are trying to find a way forward.<\/p>\n
How to do so is the question. The Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit that runs Archive of Our Own, condemns A.I. scraping and has built technical barriers against it. But its terms of service do not ban A.I.-assisted works.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do not and cannot know how works are created before they\u2019re posted,\u201d said Betsy Rosenblatt, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and a leader of Archive of Our Own\u2019s legal committee. A rule against A.I. use \u201cwould be an engine for harassment,\u201d she said, which might invite accusations that the site could never fairly judge.<\/p>\n
So fans have started writing their own rules for A.I. On Reddit, moderators of the \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d fan fiction page posted a poll<\/a> to its 60,000 members this month, asking whether to remove links to stories with proven A.I. use from the site, or to remove links to every story by any author caught using it.<\/p>\nThree days later, 642 had voted to ban links to every story by any author using A.I.; 529 voted to erase individual stories. The moderators have begun removing links.<\/p>\n
The intense reactions have made some people afraid to write, Ms. Ziolkowski said, \u201cbecause there is a mob mentality around it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rebecca Tushnet, 53, a Harvard Law School professor who leads Archive of Our Own\u2019s legal committee with Ms. Rosenblatt, said she had not been able to bring herself to check whether her favorite \u201cHeated Rivalry\u201d stories were on John Doe\u2019s list.<\/p>\n
\u201cI haven\u2019t wanted to know because it would disappoint me,\u201d she said. Fan fiction, she said, is supposed to be the one place where the stakes are gloriously low.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last month, an account appeared on X under the name John Doe and with the handle @heatedrivalryai. John…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":576495,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,195219,243118,218,219,1026,49947,243115,243116,243117,61,60,80,13471],"class_list":["post-576494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anthropic-ai-llc","tag-archive-of-our-own-web-site","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-books-and-literature","tag-computers-and-the-internet","tag-fans-persons","tag-heated-rivalry-book","tag-heated-rivalry-tv-program","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology","tag-writing-and-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}