ChatGPT x Reader — the use of AI in fanfiction

Fanfiction exists because someone loved something so much they couldn’t leave it alone. VAGUE Resident Sara asks what we lose when we automate the one corner of creativity that was never about productivity in the first place.

For as long as there have been works of fiction, there have been efforts made by the everyday people who love them to expand beloved worlds, characters and storylines. Starting with Virgil’s Aeneid as an exploration of The Iliad’s background character of Aeneas over 2,000 years ago, to more contemporary examples of Star Trek fans creating universes in which things go exactly according to the plan for their favourite characters and often being credited with the birth of modern day fanfiction, the concept is far from new. The birth and expansion of the internet, of course, expanded its world in ways unfathomable to those who begun the tradition millennia ago.

At its core, written fanfiction is a labour of love, born out of a genuine adoration for art and a desire to keep it alive and breathing through contributions by those who have a true respect for it. It comes with an inherent birth of a community that shares an interest and a passion — one that becomes jeopardised with the introduction of artificial intelligence.

There is no longer room for denial of the fact that we live in the age of artificial intelligence. It has become an inescapable fact, protruding even in the most mundane of tasks, like choosing a restaurant or writing a response to a dating app text. There may have been a moment, however brief, in which it seemed like fanfiction would remain immune, mostly because of the premise sitting at its very core — a genuine, human desire to elaborate on a world created by another artist.

And yet, those who turn to AO3, Tumblr, Wattpad or any other platform known for its publication, have expressed a justifiable discontent at the recent appearances of ChatGPT prompts in published work, a notion that practically erases the essence of fanfiction completely.

“...fanfiction is a labour of love, born out of a genuine adoration for art and a desire to keep it alive and breathing...”

Although there have been examples of fan-generated edits being refined and monetised in recent years, from E.L. James’ Twilight fanfiction turning into the immensely (and somewhat unpleasantly) recognisable 50 Shades of Grey franchise, to Anna Todd’s After, born out of a One Direction fanfiction. At its core, the process of creating comes from genuine love and appreciation for media and art. Without huge rewrites and edits to avoid copyright issues, there is fundamentally no potential for profit in the sole act of writing fanfiction.

As ChatGPT takes over writing in diverse forms and contexts, various fan fiction “writers” on various platforms have been caught with the prompts they’ve fed it left in published pieces of work. but fanfiction is by no means compulsory or profitable, and writing it can even be quite thankless, so what’s the point in turning to AI to create it?

Turning to AI to create something that turns a profit is inexcusable in its own right, but what kind of state has art creation reached when something as benevolent as wanting to expand on a fictional universe or storyline that isn’t even legally viable for profit is something people are turning to AI to do? Does it not defeat the entire point of delving into writing fanfiction in the first place?

There is much to state and discuss about the use of artificial intelligence in various artistic disciplines in general, but fanfiction was born in hopes of expanding on passions with a community of those who share them. Not only does turning to AI to write it defeat its point, but it also means stealing work from those who created it with effort, originality and genuineness. There is no way in which AI can comprehend the purpose, intention or emotion behind the core concept of fanfiction, no matter how many pieces of writing it has been fed.

Expanding from the ignorance of what lays at the base of writing fanfiction in the first place, the question has to be raised of whether it remains plausible for fanfiction writers to publish their work on websites like AO3 without having to worry about their work being fed into AI software and practically transposed into whatever scenario those too lazy to write themselves choose.

Those who find it easy to turn to AI to create without any doubt or moral questioning have gone as far as to feed chapters of beloved fanfictions into ChatGPT in order to generate new chapters faster, an action that is morally completely corrupt, and only emphasises how fruitless the action of genuinely writing fanfction can be.

The issue becomes even more complex when the notion of what legal rights these same writers have when their own work is stolen by AI. Writing in the public domain, with the intention to elaborate on copyrighted material, walks a fine line when it comes to fair use, inherently means there are next to none. There is no legal protection when it comes to the intellectual property of fanfiction writers, but it seems that the lack of legality has also encouraged a lack of morality in communities that were supposed to be at least somewhat united in a desire to remain ethical and original.

The ethics of it all inarguably melt into the aforementioned aspect of community — how can those who actively seek fanfiction possibly have trust in what they’re reading being a piece of writing made by a fellow fan and not a robot who has been fed other people’s work without their knowledge or consent and put it together like a dysfunctional, unoriginal puzzle in order to make something ever so slightly different (and ultimately worse).

AI has leaked into every facet of our lives — even those we thought were fully founded in their human element — for the sake of impatience and creative apathy. losing the community aspect of written fanfiction, the data colonialism involved in using AI to create it and the questionable ethics behind using the free creative labour of those who choose to publish it, is an indisputable sign of the times. It brings up questions about how long it will be until the next New York Times bestseller is completely AI generated, created from the work of those who care enough to write it themselves.

sources

ayesha mumal, “the renaissance of fan fiction”, open book (2024)

ct jones, “fan fiction is about community. could AI ruin that?”, rolling stone (2025)

emma lashely, “basically fan fiction”, crawfordsville district public library (date unknown)

credits

words — sara fares zovko

design — gloria ukoh