Ao3’s Bots Have A.I. On and For a Brain

New Bot Comments on Fics Drive Reactivity to A.I.

All publicity is good publicity. This is something you see with misbehaving children sometimes, especially middle children or older kids who are getting dethroned by their younger siblings. A.I., fast becoming the red-headed stepchild of tech for its inability to function on a level even close to what the bros wished for and promised their investors, it starting to feel the weight of public disappointment. Desperate to keep a possible userbase from forgetting that A.I. even exists due to its relative uselessness for so many of its possible functions, they’ve started employing bots to keep a reactionary chain going in spaces that have been particularly vocal against it.

On January 12th, 2025, Reddit user YorYor_64 posted in the r/AO3 subreddit a post entitled, “This is very [sad] and I’m regretting posting my story” along with a shared screenshot of a line of “Guest” comments on their work on the Archive. Each comment was different but along the same lines, claiming that YorYor’s usage of AI in their story was “insulting to genuine writers” and stating that their “dull and lifeless” story must have been generated by A.I. Two of them specifically mention an A.I. “brand” that might have been utilized, almost like lifting up a Coca-Cola on the Truman Show. Obviously the bots’ A.I. can’t be that great in terms of targeting stories considering YorYor’s fic was over eight years old, meaning that it predates the popular usage of A.I. for storytelling by many years. Unfortunately for YorYor, they mistook these comments not as what they were, made by bots looking to drum up controversy around their particular A.I. brand to keep it in the fandom “news,” but as genuine criticisms made by genuine fandom goers. An easy mistake to make if you’re not keeping a sharp eye out for this very thing…after all, what company would degrade their own product in order to get people to use it?

See, friendos, they don’t need you to like their product. They just need you to know about it and talk about it and share it as much as possible to get as many eyes on them as possible. “But JD, you’re talking about it right now, aren’t you contributing?” technically yes—but this is for good reason. Anyone who writes on Ao3 needs to know that these are not real people writing real comments. These are machines meant to provoke you into the belief that fandom is against you so that you become hurt by the idea of being spoken to like this by a real person. Because if you know they’re bots, you’re not going to be hurt by them and you’re not going to go to Reddit to talk about them. You’re going to disable “Guest” comments on your stories and report any fake Ao3 accounts that are connected to this type of bot activity. Most importantly, you’re not going to react, you’re not going to share their brand, and you’re going to quietly delete these comments so that nobody else in your comment section has to be bothered by them. You’re going to curate your space so that real human beings are the only people who are reacting to your work, good or bad. Robots cannot (yet) make art. Because robots cannot be horny or spiteful.

That A.I. creators are targeting fandom is indicative of utter and complete disrespect for the culture of fandom—they know exactly what they’re doing. Vulnerable people who, like YorYor, may not even speak English all that well and may sometimes have to use a digital translator for word choice may not be able to recognize that these are not real people commenting on their fanfictions and may become discouraged by the how the comments are written and may stop writing or take down their stories because of them. These types of bots should be considered an existential threat to fics that they are posted upon and this is why we have to make sure that everyone knows that they’re out there—so that if you see one on YOUR fic or someone ELSE’S fic, we can make sure that we’re aware of their insidious and false nature.

Being accused of using A.I. by A.I. is nothing more than a tactic catering toward today’s common reactionaryism. We cannot allow them to catch us up in these traps. We have to make sure we stomp them down into nothing. If it were possible never to talk about A.I. again, I would jump at the chance. Unfortunately, that’s a little ways off.

Keep on keeping on. And write your own stories.