A heated war brews in the fanfiction community as they seek to banish any trace of generative AI. But what happens when your next story could be flagged by a simple code?

The heatedrivalryai project has introduced an AO3 skin that turns pages red if it detects Anthropic’s Claude bot. While the method seems sound, false positives and negatives loom large.

Concerns over AI’s environmental impact and ethical training practices have fans rallying against any use of these tools. Yet, the risks of editing in other applications mean many works can slip past detection.

The outcome is a fragmented community, where every sentence could be scrutinised for authenticity. But as AI companies race to solve their own tracing issues, humans might just find themselves in an endless loop of self-scrutiny.