When an artificial invasion invaded the ‘Heated Rivalry’ fanfic, the Meltdown was epic

Last month, an account appeared on X under the name John Doe with the handle @heatedrivalryai. John Doe soon posted a link to a 25-page document titled “Fandom has a Hidden Generative AI Problem.”

The documentary was a systematic takedown of fan fiction writers inspired by “hot rivalry” — enemy lovers of a male-male hockey romance — who used artificial intelligence to create parts of their stories. He named 38 popular fan stories that took text from Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, including works by some of the community’s most widely read writers.

The documentary blasted the practice, saying: “The proliferation of undisclosed AI in creative spaces is limiting opportunities for human expression to shine through, whether in writing or other media. Afterwards, the anonymous account demanded that fans “remember to treat each other with kindness.”

They don’t.

Within hours, X channels were flooded with posts about “Panama Papers fan fiction,” as one “Heated Rivalry” fan put it, referring to the 2016 leak of financial transactions of the global elite. The findings jumped on Threads, Reddit, Bluesky and TikTok. Thousands of people said they were shocked. Many began calling out the authors who were identified, showering them with comments and naming and shaming dozens of other stories. Some authors have deleted their accounts or locked their works.

“It was definitely a witch hunt,” said Maxine Hood, 29, a software engineer from San Francisco and a fan of Rachel Reid’s “Heated Rivalry” novels, which last year became a hit TV series starring Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie as the burly skaters.

Many fandoms are sacred spaces where human creativity is valued, and the adoration of characters like Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, the protagonists of “Heated Rivalry,” runs deep. A few years earlier, fan fiction writers were among the first online communities to realize that tech companies were scraping their stories to develop artificial intelligence models. These authors, who share their stories for free for the love of their favorite characters, have begun locking up their works and labeling them with the “No AI” statement.

So when John Doe published the document, it struck a nerve and sparked a collective online meltdown that continues. Those who tried to keep their hands off words for years discovered machine words hidden in the stories of their community.

“I feel like the space has been disrupted,” said Amen Zaidi, 29, a graphic designer in Connecticut who creates content about fandoms on TikTok. Her most prominent emotion, she said: betrayal.

For years, “Heated Rivalry” was a quiet corner of fan fiction. Ms. Reid began publishing the novels in 2018, and by last November, there were 223 stories based on the novel in the Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction database, according to the fan run. Fanlore place.

That month, “Heated Rivalry” premiered on HBO Max to huge buzz. Suddenly, “Heated Rivalry” themed nights began to sell out in clubs across the country. Mr Storrie and Mr Williams each carried the Olympic torch in January ahead of the Milan Winter Games. In May, they walked the floral-themed carpet at the Met Gala.

At the Archive of Our Own, “Heated Rivalry” fanfiction has run rampant. Around 180 stories were uploaded the day after the show aired and the total is now over 43,000.

In the stories, the writers built a huge playground. Many pieces are erotic. Others imagine hockey players in alternate universes as rival college professors or astronauts.

The most popular story, “please leave a message,” imagines that the wives and girlfriends of players on Mr. Hollander’s team accidentally added Mr. Rozanova to a group chat, thinking she was Mr. Hollander’s girlfriend. It presents itself as a collection of text messages and has over 115,000 praises, the equivalent of a like.

“Heated Rivalry” has become “one of the most popular fandoms in the world,” said Lauren Rouse, 30, a Northwestern University postdoctoral fellow in writing studies who co-hosts the accompanying “Heated Rivalry” fan podcast.

But as fanfics proliferated at an improbable rate, so did the whispers.

“Some of these fics were so long, the word count was outrageous, and they were published during a time when these people would have to write 20,000 words a day,” said Robin Ziolkowski, 29, a nurse from New York and a fan of the show. “Does anyone have a job?”

In April, Ms. Zaidi, who once rated AI-generated writing for a data-tagging company, posted a two-minute TikTok about one story she was sure was AI-generated. She quoted passages with meandering sentences followed by short fragments, a style typical of AI writing.

The comments poured in. Some fans agreed that there was AI in the game. Others argued that it was unacceptable to accuse writers without evidence. Ms. Zaidi made the video private.

“I don’t want to be part of this witch hunt,” she said.

For Ms. Ziolkowski, the most reliable message was human anatomy. AI-generated prose gave up on describing how bodies move, especially in sex scenes, like hands resting where they didn’t reach. Several examples could be detailed here, but one PG-rated instance was in the viral “Wolfbird” story where Mr. Rozanov lay on Mr. Hollander’s back. Ms Ziolkowski was taken aback when the story said Mr Rozanov could still see Mr Hollander’s abs.

Representatives for Ms. Reid and Jacob Tierney, the TV show’s creator, declined requests for interviews. Representatives for HBO Max, Mr. Storrie and Mr. Williams did not respond to requests for comment.

Pure red

Little is known about who is behind the John Doe account @heatedrivalryai. Fans I spoke to, including the moderator of the “Heated Rivalry” Reddit page, said they had no idea.

After I reached out to the account for comment, someone using the pseudonym Ghostiesdagger emailed he claims to be part of the group behind it. “I’ve helped expose many AI fanfiction writers and caught them in their lies,” wrote Ghostiesdagger.

Ghostiesdagger wouldn’t give an actual name or chat, except to defend the documentary’s premise: that fanfiction should remain human and flawed. “We are a group that believes fandom is about building community,” Ghotiesdagger wrote.

The “Fandom Has a Hidden Generative AI Problem” account document was very detailed. It explained that when Claude types, he tags the text with a snippet of HTML code: “font-claude-response-body”. When the writers moved the writing from Claude to the Archive of Our Own, this excerpt went with it. John Doe was simply looking for this code in the “Heated Rivalry” fanfiction. (The method caught only Claude and did not write from any other chatbot.)

The document also contained custom code that anyone could use, making texts with this HTML glow bright red.

Some stories contained hundreds of instances of code. “A lot of that fiction was pure red,” said Kinsey Kaiser, 25, who works in museum collections in South Carolina and writes the fiction “Heated Rivalry” in her spare time.

Several fans stated that they were unaware of any previous case where a fandom had solid proof that a particular AI had touched its fic unless the author disclosed it. People used custom code across other fandoms like “The Pitt” and “Stranger Things” — and found hits.

One of the loudest shouts was a story about a “hot rivalry” called “The Nutcracker!” by the popular Archive of Our Own account with the handle OpalApparition, who also published “Wolfbird”. The fairy tale, in which hockey players are a ballerina and an inspector, has more than 283,000 hits and 11,000 praises. The paper found only two instances of Claude’s code in a piece, but the account publicly opposed the AI

Mikayla Hoover, 26, who works in customer service in Arkansas, said she loves “The Nutcracker!” and was hurt by the discovery. She has read everything OpalApparition has created, and some have made her cry, she said.

“It’s like losing someone I really respected in the fandom,” she said.

OpalApparition, which stopped publishing “Heated Rivalry” stories in April due to intense pressure, did not respond to a request for comment.

Of the 38 John Doe-tagged stories, 10 were deleted and seven were locked so that only registered users of the Archive of Our Own could see them. Ten added notes explaining their use of AI

One author apologized to “anyone who feels betrayed or disappointed” and promised never to use AI tools again. Another blamed a friend who edited a chapter that featured six instances of artificial intelligence, restoring the original text and writing that “a lesson was learned.” No one responded to requests for comment.

Not everyone reads the document as a public service. Ms. Hood, a software engineer from San Francisco, said the premise of the documentary was that any covert use of artificial intelligence was treason, no matter how small. But it also matched how popular each story was in Hits and Fame. For Ms. Hood, it undermined a principle: If the problem was a single case, the story’s popularity shouldn’t matter.

“That shouldn’t be relevant if you had pure intentions,” she said, adding that the documentary read as a way to demean the fandom’s most popular writers.

Their own rules

Four weeks later, some fans are trying to find a way forward.

How to do it is the question. The Organization for Transformative Work, the nonprofit that runs Archive of Our Own, condemns AI scraping and has erected technical barriers against it. However, its terms of service do not prohibit work with artificial intelligence.

“We don’t and can’t know how works are created before they are published,” said Betsy Rosenblatt, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and head of the Archive of Our Own’s legal committee. A rule against the use of artificial intelligence “would be an engine for harassment,” she said, which could lead to allegations that the site could never fairly assess.

So fans started writing their own rules for AI on Reddit, the moderators of the fanfic site “Heated Rivalry” posted vote this month to its 60,000 members asking whether to remove links from the site to stories with proven use of AI, or to remove links to every story by any author they caught using it.

Three days later, 642 voted to ban links to every story by any author using AI; 529 voted to delete individual stories. Moderators have started removing links.

The intense backlash made some people afraid to write, Ms. Ziolkowski said, “because there’s a mob mentality around it.”

Rebecca Tushnet, 53, a Harvard Law School professor who heads the Archive of Our Own legal committee with Ms. Rosenblatt, said she couldn’t bring herself to check whether her favorite stories of “heated rivalry” were on the John Doe list.

“I didn’t want to know because it would disappoint me,” she said. Fan fiction, she said, is supposed to be the one place where the stakes are amazingly low.