The fanfiction community is at war with AI — and itself
The fanfiction community is at war with AI — and itself
同人小说社区正陷入与人工智能的战争，以及自身的内耗之中
Readers are scrambling to develop ways to detect whether generative AI was used to write fanworks. The results are questionable. 读者们正争先恐后地开发各种方法，试图检测同人作品是否由生成式人工智能创作。但这些检测结果的可靠性存疑。
Over the past week, a new fanworks movement has kicked off, with the aim to root out authors using generative AI. But the detection methods being implemented are questionable, and any fanfic writer could be caught in the crossfire. 过去一周，一场针对同人作品的新运动悄然兴起，旨在揪出那些使用生成式 AI 的作者。然而，目前所采用的检测手段存在争议，任何同人小说作者都可能因此受到波及。
Broad distaste around the use of Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI tools has long been a thing in creative communities, including the world of fanfiction. Readers and writers have passed around tips for spotting supposedly AI-generated works, citing anything from em dashes to the broad concept of purple prose. But on June 29th, an anonymous X account called @heatedrivalryai promised a seemingly more reliable solution. It posted a skin — similar to an extension — for the popular fanfic repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) that would purportedly identify coding artifacts left behind by Anthropic’s Claude bot. 在包括同人小说在内的创意社区中，对 Claude、ChatGPT 等 AI 工具的广泛抵触情绪由来已久。读者和作者们一直在交流如何识别所谓的“AI 生成作品”，从破折号的使用习惯到华丽辞藻的堆砌，各种迹象都被列为怀疑对象。但在 6 月 29 日，一个名为 @heatedrivalryai 的匿名 X 账号声称提供了一种看似更可靠的解决方案。该账号发布了一款针对知名同人小说平台 Archive of Our Own (AO3) 的皮肤（类似于浏览器扩展程序），据称可以识别出 Anthropic 公司 Claude 机器人留下的代码痕迹。
“When a Claude-generated response is pasted directly into AO3 from Claude, the text is wrapped by a Claude-injected code ‘font-claude-response-body,’” said the @heatedrivalryai account. “Its presence indicates the use of Claude definitively.” When a user visits a page (like a work of fanfic) with this code, the skin turns the entire background red. “当 Claude 生成的回复被直接从 Claude 网页复制并粘贴到 AO3 时，文本会被包裹上一段 Claude 注入的代码‘font-claude-response-body’，” @heatedrivalryai 账号解释道，“只要这段代码存在，就明确表明使用了 Claude。”当用户访问带有此代码的页面（如某篇同人小说）时，该皮肤会将整个背景变为红色。
Several test posts have been published to AO3 that allow users to check if it works. The screen immediately turned red when I tested the skin against these examples myself, and I published a Claude-generated short story to run my own experiment just in case. The red screen appeared when I directly pasted from the chatbot into the editor and vanished if I pasted text (including the exact same generated story) that didn’t come straight from Claude. AO3 上已经出现了几篇测试帖，供用户验证该工具是否有效。当我亲自测试这些示例时，屏幕确实立即变红了。为了保险起见，我还发布了一篇由 Claude 生成的短篇小说进行实验：当我直接从聊天机器人界面复制粘贴到编辑器时，红屏出现了；而如果我粘贴的是非直接来源（即使是完全相同的生成内容），红屏则不会出现。
The Claude detector post was accompanied by examples of fanfic where the artifacts were spotted, which the anonymous creator said was meant to demonstrate the system works, not “create an environment of mistrust or accuse particular users.” But fanfic communities have quickly mobilized to publicly name and shame writers whose published works were flagged by the tool, and its creator certainly doesn’t consider AI a positive thing. “Fandom is a uniquely connective, collaborative space. It thrives on the human element and the creative spark which drives it and feeds off it,” they said. “If we unknowingly allow AI to corrupt these spaces, what will be left of them?” 这篇关于 Claude 检测器的帖子附带了一些被发现含有代码痕迹的同人小说示例。匿名创建者表示，此举旨在证明系统有效，而非“制造不信任环境或指责特定用户”。然而，同人社区迅速行动起来，公开点名并羞辱那些被该工具标记的作者。该工具的创建者显然对 AI 持负面态度：“同人圈是一个独特的、具有连接性和协作性的空间。它依赖于人性元素和驱动它的创造力火花，”他们说道，“如果我们无意中允许 AI 腐蚀这些空间，最后还会剩下什么呢？”
Anthropic did not respond to my request to verify if the fan-made Claude detector works as described. The methodology here does look sound, however, and our own testing backs it up. There’s no apparent reason for the Claude code to be present in a story if the bot wasn’t used somehow. But there’s a clear risk of both false negatives and overgeneralizations. Anthropic 公司并未回应我关于验证该粉丝自制检测器是否如描述般有效的请求。不过，从方法论上看，这种检测手段确实合理，我们的测试也证实了这一点。如果不是使用了该机器人，故事中显然没有理由出现 Claude 的代码。但这里存在明显的风险：既可能出现漏报（false negatives），也可能存在过度概括的问题。
The code wrapping is only preserved if text is copied directly from Claude into AO3’s editor, so it won’t catch anything edited in Google Docs or Microsoft Word and then moved to AO3 — and as someone who writes for a living, I can testify to how risky writing straight into a CMS is. Some writers who have been flagged have already updated their works to remove the artifacts, and future works can easily evade the tool. 这种代码包裹只有在从 Claude 直接复制到 AO3 编辑器时才会保留，因此它无法检测到在 Google Docs 或 Microsoft Word 中编辑后再移动到 AO3 的内容——作为一名以写作为生的人，我可以证明直接在内容管理系统（CMS）中写作风险有多大。一些被标记的作者已经更新了作品以移除这些痕迹，未来的作品也可以轻易绕过该工具。
Conversely, the tag doesn’t reveal how heavily Claude was used in a given work. That flashbanged scarlet screen could mean the entire story was fully AI-generated, or that an author pasted a few human-written sentences into Claude for spell-checking or translation, then moved them back into AO3. 反过来说，这个标记也无法揭示 Claude 在某部作品中的使用程度。那令人眼花缭乱的猩红色屏幕可能意味着整个故事完全由 AI 生成，也可能只是作者将几句人类撰写的句子粘贴到 Claude 中进行拼写检查或翻译，然后再移回 AO3。
That hasn’t mattered to some fandom members, who view any use of generative AI as an inexcusable betrayal to the wider creative community. Many people cite concerns over the environmental impact of the technology and how it’s trained by scraping the open web, which likely includes fanworks uploaded to platforms like AO3. 对于一些同人圈成员来说，这并不重要，他们将任何对生成式 AI 的使用都视为对更广泛创意社区不可原谅的背叛。许多人提到了对该技术环境影响的担忧，以及它是如何通过抓取开放网络进行训练的——这很可能包括了上传到 AO3 等平台的同人作品。
This particular tool’s applicability is limited — AO3 isn’t the only platform for publishing fanworks, and Claude is just one of many AI models. At least one person claims they’ve written separate code that can detect “Claude, Deepseek, and some ChatGPT” usage, but they haven’t released that solution to the public or explained how it works. I asked Google and OpenAI if their models leave any traceable artifacts in text generation that could be detected by similar means, but they haven’t responded. 这种特定工具的适用性有限——AO3 并非发布同人作品的唯一平台，而 Claude 也只是众多 AI 模型中的一种。至少有一人声称他们编写了另一套代码，可以检测“Claude、Deepseek 和部分 ChatGPT”的使用情况，但他们尚未向公众发布该方案，也未解释其工作原理。我询问了 Google 和 OpenAI，他们的模型在文本生成时是否会留下可通过类似手段检测到的可追踪痕迹，但他们均未回应。
In fact, it’d be highly surprising if a universally reliable system existed. I’ve been reporting on the issues surrounding AI detection for a few years now, and to my knowledge, there isn’t currently a reliable technological solution for distinguishing generated text from that typed out by human hands. Systems like C2PA Content Credentials and Google’s SynthID are making some progress toward identifying generative AI in images, videos, and even audio, but these rely on invisible watermarks and metadata that don’t carry over for copy-pasted text. 事实上，如果存在一种普遍可靠的系统，那才令人惊讶。我报道 AI 检测相关问题已有几年，据我所知，目前还没有一种可靠的技术方案能将生成文本与人类手写文本区分开来。像 C2PA 内容凭证（Content Credentials）和 Google 的 SynthID 等系统在识别图像、视频甚至音频中的生成式 AI 方面取得了一些进展，但这些系统依赖于隐形水印和元数据，而这些信息在复制粘贴文本时是无法保留的。