I want to roundhouse kick GenAI into the sun

[rynling]

Just for shits and giggles (and also inspired by the brilliant fanwork of a friend), I decided to write a few quick stories about Tenna, the villain (sort of) of the recently released Chapter 3 of Deltarune. I thought the idea of shipping him with Spamton, the villain (definitely) of Chapter 2 was funny for a hot second before actually becoming intrigued by the dynamic. What if they were both awful and made each other worse, that sort of thing.

The problem I had initially was how to write Tenna, who we only ever see speaking to an audience. How would his voice translate to a more intimate situation? To get a sense of fandom tastes, I pulled up fic for the ship on AO3 as sorted by the number of bookmarks, which I hoped would filter out most of the slop.

But alas. There is. A whole lot of slop. Very clearly written by GenAI. And people love it. Apparently.

I don't understand this at all. These stories all follow the same beats and use the same vocabulary, and the characters don't speak in their distinctive voices. There's no attempt to engage with the story or lore of the original game, and there's no specificity at all. Why would so many people bookmark fic like this?

Meanwhile, my university has been aggressively integrating GenAI into its software licenses and digital infrastructure, which has been causing huge problems for everyone. To give an example, many incoming students from East Asia or with East Asian heritage can't upload their photos to their university profiles because the software flags them for using AI-generated images. Because all Asians look fake to the algorithm I guess?? At the same time, the East Asian language teachers have been asking the university to pay for licenses for region-specific GenAI tools that might potentially make huge advances in language learning, but the university (which has more money than God) has been ignoring them. Because why would a university want to use GenAI for actual education and pedagogical innovation amirite.

TLDR: This is dystopian and I hate it.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

You know, I never thought to sort fics by bookmarks. That's actually a smart idea. I remember there was pseudo-discourse last year about someone making a claim they only read fics if the kudos to hit ratio was 10 or under (and I started doing actual research into the validity of that and then... got... distracted), but bookmarks seem like a decent way to gauge genuine interest, for a lack of better words. And I say that, only to keep reading your post and.... fucking yikes. We sure live in a society, huh?

That's beyond frustrating. That's teetering on "wow, we really do need to blow everything up in order to start fresh" levels of existential dread. Fuck, I'm so so sorry you have to deal with that at your job, never mind running into it on AO-fucking-3.

On the flip side, I've been fucking petrified of writing Tenna in my own fic. I swear half the reason he's stayed as Just A TV is bc I'm that scared of messing up his voice and everyone reading inventing a way to throw tomatoes via the Internet to launch them at my face. But like... no, why am I scared. I've literally been rewatching playthroughs daily since I beat the game and taking notes on his speech patterns and jotting down dialogue samples as an exercise... while others are just defaulting to AI slop.

Yeah, definitely hate it too. But it also makes me feel WAAAAAY better. We're doing ok, friend. Keep writing your toxic old man yaoi 💕

[rynling]

Lol thank you. I think I have one more toxic old man yaoi story in me, and then I'm done.

Although I think writing about Tenna has, shall we say. Awakened something. I have a whole bunch of same-sex ships that I've been wanting to write for, but I was terrified by the potential reception. But honestly, if Tenna can be his beautiful self with his gorgeous OSHA-certified shoes, what's to stop me from doing the same. Bless Toby Fox for writing unhinged characters and making them look fantastic.

I've been watching a few Deltarune playthroughs too, but the darker route at the end of Chapter 3 is, man. It's something. To lighten things up a bit, there's a book that was just released a few weeks ago that I've been reading, Stupid TV, Be More Funny: How the Golden Era of The Simpsons Changed Television and America Forever. It's an interesting book on its own merits (even though I'm not a fan of The Simpsons), but also good research for bad reasons.

Anyway confession time. I subscribed to and bookmarked your story (partially for the pleasure of seeing the numbers go up), but I haven't started reading it yet. I was afraid that you would've nailed Tenna's voice so perfectly that I would just be imitating you. But if he hasn't appeared in the story yet, then. Let's just say this is very good news for me and the fantastic evening I'm going to have tonight.

[eff_ess_oe]

I think this comes down to two things (which are kinda intertwined): #1: popularity of the fandom/character/etc, and #2: new/latecomers to transformative fandom who probably didn't engage with it prior to lockdown, are young, or both.

Obviously, Tenna is one of, if not *the* most popular chara(s) of the newest DR installment. So there's gonna be a lot of folks who wanna read as much stuff with him as possible, and when they run out, they'll be too impatient to wait for more. But then again, some of these people may be either too busy, inexperienced, or impatient to write stuff that they'd want to read, and AO3's infrastructure is set up so that finding people to commission fic is nigh-impossible. So they go to AI because it's the easiest way to get their """"quality"""" Tenna fic fix. And they may not see anything wrong with it because they're not as immersed in non-algorithmically-driven fandom culture, so they're missing opportunities to engage with fellow fans, not getting the full spectrum of Tenna's character or what it could be, and engaging in all the usual problems with AI in one fell swoop. It's sad, really.

EDIT: if you wanna filter out slop, sorting by comments is a good idea! That way, you'll be able to see other people's reactions and if the author is amenable to them, which can be a good way of deciding whether a story/author's worth your time or not. It also comes back to what I've been hinting at wrt. engagement.