Last month, an account appeared on X under the name John Doe and with the handle @heatedrivalryai. John Doe soon posted a link to a 25-page document with the title “Fandom Has a Hidden Generative A.I. Problem.”
The document was a systematic takedown of writers of fan fiction inspired by “Heated Rivalry” — the enemies-to-lovers male-male hockey romance — who had used artificial intelligence to generate parts of their stories. It named 38 popular fan stories that had taken text from Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, including works by some of the community’s most read writers.
The document blasted the practice, saying, “The proliferation of undisclosed A.I. in creative spaces limits opportunities for human expression, whether in writing or other mediums, to shine through.” Then the anonymous account requested that fans “remember to treat each other with kindness.”
They didn’t.
Within hours, X feeds filled with posts about the “fan fiction Panama Papers,” as one “Heated Rivalry” fan put it, referring to the 2016 leak about the global elite’s financial dealings. The findings jumped to Threads, Reddit, Bluesky and TikTok. Thousands said they were shocked. Many began calling out the authors who had been identified, deluging them with comments, and naming and shaming dozens of other stories. Some writers deleted their accounts or locked their works.
“It was definitely a witch hunt,” said Maxine Hood, 29, a San Francisco software engineer and a fan of Rachel Reid’s “Heated Rivalry” novels, which became a hit television series last year starring Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie as the hunky skaters.
Many fandoms are sacred spaces where human creativity is prized and adoration for characters like Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, the “Heated Rivalry” protagonists, 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 A.I. models. These authors, who share their stories for free out of love for their favorite characters, began locking their works and stamping them with “No A.I.” disclaimers.
So when John Doe published the document, it touched a nerve, inciting a collective online meltdown that continues. Those who had spent years trying to keep the machines’ hands off their words had discovered the machines’ words hidden inside their community’s stories.
“It just feels like the space has been violated,” said Amen Zaidi, 29, a graphic designer in Connecticut who makes 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, 223 stories based on the romance existed on Archive of Our Own, a fan fiction database, according to the fan-run Fanlore site.
That month, “Heated Rivalry” premiered on HBO Max to huge buzz. Suddenly “Heated Rivalry” theme nights began selling out at clubs across the country. Mr. Storrie and Mr. Williams each carried the Olympic torch in January before the Milan Winter Games. In May, they walked the flower-themed carpet at the Met Gala.
On Archive of Our Own, “Heated Rivalry” fan fictions surged. Roughly 180 stories were uploaded a day after the show aired, and the total now exceeds 43,000.
In the stories, writers built an enormous playground. Many pieces are erotica. Others imagine the hockey players in alternate universes as rival college professors or astronauts.
The most popular story, “please leave a message,” imagines the wives and girlfriends of players on Mr. Hollander’s team accidentally adding Mr. Rozanov to their group chat, believing he is Mr. Hollander’s girlfriend. Presented as a collection of text messages, it has more than 115,000 kudos, the equivalent of a like.
“Heated Rivalry” became “one of the most popular fandoms in the world,” said Lauren Rouse, 30, a Northwestern University postdoctoral scholar in writing studies who co-hosts a “Heated Rivalry” fan companion podcast.
But as the fan fictions multiplied at improbable speed, so did the whispers.
“Some of these fics were so long, the word count was outrageous, and they were posted within a period of time where these people would have to be writing like 20,000 words a day,” said Robin Ziolkowski, 29, a nurse in New York and fan of the show. “Does anybody have jobs?”
In April, Ms. Zaidi, who once rated A.I.-generated writing for a data-labeling company, posted a two-minute TikTok about one story she was certain had been A.I.-generated. She quoted passages with meandering sentences followed by short fragments, a style typical in A.I. writing.
The comments poured in. Some fans agreed A.I. was at play. Others said it was unacceptable to accuse a writer without proof. 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 tell was human anatomy. A.I.-generated prose gave itself away when describing how bodies move, especially in sex scenes, like hands resting where they couldn’t reach. Few examples can be detailed here, but one PG-rated instance was in the viral story “Wolfbird,” where Mr. Rozanov was lying on Mr. Hollander’s back. Ms. Ziolkowski was thrown off when the story said Mr. Rozanov could still see Mr. Hollander’s abs.
Representatives for Ms. Reid and Jacob Tierney, the television 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 @heatedrivalryai account. The fans I talked to, including a moderator of the “Heated Rivalry” page on Reddit, said they had no idea.
After I reached out to the account for comment, someone using the pseudonym Ghostiesdagger emailed to claim to be part of the group behind it. “I’ve helped with exposing numerous A.I. fan fiction writers and catching them in their lies,” Ghostiesdagger wrote.
Ghostiesdagger would not give a real name or chat, except to defend the document’s premise: that fan fiction should stay human and flawed. “We are a group who believes fandom is about building community,” Ghostiesdagger wrote.
The account’s “Fandom Has a Hidden Generative A.I. Problem” document was highly detailed. It explained that when Claude writes, it labels the text with a snippet of HTML code: “font-claude-response-body.” When authors moved writing from Claude into Archive of Our Own, that snippet went with it. John Doe simply looked for that code in “Heated Rivalry” fan fictions. (The method caught only Claude and not writing from any other chatbot.)
The document also included custom code that anyone could apply so that texts with that HTML code would glow bright red.
Some stories contained hundreds of instances of the code. “A lot of those fics were just pure red,” said Kinsey Kaiser, 25, who works in museum collections in South Carolina and writes “Heated Rivalry” fiction in her free time.
Several fans said they knew of no earlier case in which a fandom had hard evidence that a particular A.I. had touched its fictions, unless an author had revealed it. People ran the custom code across other fandoms like “The Pitt” and “Stranger Things” — and found hits.
One of the loudest outcries was over a “Heated Rivalry” story titled “Nutcracker!” by a popular Archive of Our Own account with the handle OpalApparition, who also published “Wolfbird.” The tale, in which the hockey players are a ballet dancer and a stage manager, has more than 283,000 hits and 11,000 kudos. The document found just two instances of Claude code in the piece, but the account had publicly opposed A.I.
Mikayla Hoover, 26, who works in customer service in Arkansas, said she loved “Nutcracker!” and was hurt by the discovery. She had read everything OpalApparition had produced and cried at some of it, she said.
“It just feels like losing somebody that I really had come to respect in the fandom,” she said.
OpalApparition, who stopped posting “Heated Rivalry” stories in April citing intense pressure, did not respond to a request for comment.
Of the 38 stories flagged by John Doe, 10 were deleted and seven were locked so only registered Archive of Our Own users could see them. Ten added notes explaining their use of A.I.
One author apologized “to anyone who feels betrayed or let down” and promised never to use A.I. tools again. Another blamed a friend who had edited a chapter in which six A.I. instances appeared, restored the original text and wrote that “lessons were learned.” None responded to requests for comment.
Not everyone read the document as a public service. Ms. Hood, the San Francisco software engineer, said the document’s premise was that any hidden A.I. use was betrayal, however small. But it also tallied how popular each story was in hits and kudos. To Ms. Hood, that undercut the principle: If a single instance was the problem, a story’s popularity should not matter.
“That shouldn’t be relevant if you had pure intentions,” she said, adding that the document read like a way to humiliate the fandom’s most popular writers.
Rules of Their Own
Four weeks later, some fans are trying to find a way forward.
How to do so is the question. The Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit that runs Archive of Our Own, condemns A.I. scraping and has built technical barriers against it. But its terms of service do not ban A.I.-assisted works.
“We do not and cannot know how works are created before they’re posted,” said Betsy Rosenblatt, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and a leader of Archive of Our Own’s legal committee. A rule against A.I. use “would be an engine for harassment,” she said, which might invite accusations that the site could never fairly judge.
So fans have started writing their own rules for A.I. On Reddit, moderators of the “Heated Rivalry” fan fiction page posted a poll to its 60,000 members this month, asking whether to remove links to stories with proven A.I. use from the site, or to remove links to every story by any author caught using it.
Three days later, 642 had voted to ban links to every story by any author using A.I.; 529 voted to erase individual stories. The moderators have begun removing links.
The intense reactions have made some people afraid to write, Ms. Ziolkowski said, “because there is a mob mentality around it.”
Rebecca Tushnet, 53, a Harvard Law School professor who leads Archive of Our Own’s legal committee with Ms. Rosenblatt, said she had not been able to bring herself to check whether her favorite “Heated Rivalry” stories were on John Doe’s list.
“I haven’t wanted to know because it would disappoint me,” she said. Fan fiction, she said, is supposed to be the one place where the stakes are gloriously low.
