AO3 HTML Reveals Authors' Generative AI Use

This one's gonna be big for the coding fans AND the fandomgoers. Today, an anonymous account tweeted about a new way to recognize which fics are written by generative AI: by using a custom site skin that automatically checks the HTML of a fic for AI coding.

First, as most of us know, when you copy+paste a formatted piece of rich text, all of the HTML attributes come with it. AO3's site CSS is unique since it makes gaps between paragraphs larger so works only need to be single-spaced, but because most people learn how to write by double-spacing, other platforms like Google Docs have much smaller paragraph spacing so the formatting looks natural. This is why copying text from Google Docs and pasting it directly into AO3's rich text editor creates "extra" paragraph spaces: the blank paragraph in Google Docs translates to a non-breaking space (empty paragraph) in AO3, creating a much larger gap than looks natural.

The average person doesn't know HTML or CSS, so this is not something they understand, and over the years a lot of fan-made tools have popped up to let authors scrape their own HTML and remove all the non-breaking spaces. That's why I bring this up. The average AO3 user is not even glancing at the actual HTML of their work!

That brings us to: The generative AI problem. These anonymous users found information from non-fandom AI users about an HTML attribute that exposed their writing as AI, double checked that it applied to AO3 fics, and found that many works generated using "Claude" did still have an HTML attribute attached named "font-claude-response-body"! So they wrote an AO3 site skin (CSS that users can enable for themselves) that turns the background of any fic bright red if it finds that attribute, and created a document explaining how all of this works in layman's terms.

This is not the ultimate solution to ending generative AI in fandom. There are many other AI generators, and people using Claude to generate fics could simply learn to remove that attribute from their fics as non-fandom Claude users already have, the exact same way NBSP tags can be quickly removed from fics.

While I don't personally agree with some of the aspects of their manifesto, I do think this is a good option for people who want to avoid reading AI generated works, and it's also a really interesting solution from a coding standpoint!

Personally I would like to see more AO3 users getting into coding, because understanding even the simplest things (like what a NBSP is and how to easily remove it from your fics) really does completely change the experience you get on that website. HTML/CSS is an easy, accessible thing to learn! W3schools is a really great resource for beginners. IMHO, learning the basics of HTML made me better at utilizing rich text editors because now I understand what's going un "underneath the hood" per se. It's definitely worth taking the time to learn if you intend to post works.

I'm obligated to disclose that I volunteer for the Archive of Our Own/Organization for Transformative Works, but my opinions do not represent the organization.