---
type: source
title: "Fanfiction in the Age of AI: Community Perspectives on Creativity, Authenticity and Adoption"
author: "Academic researchers (arxiv preprint)"
url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18706
date: 2025-06-23
domain: entertainment
secondary_domains: [ai-alignment]
format: article
status: unprocessed
priority: high
tags: [fanfiction, AI-resistance, authenticity, community-values, writers-vs-readers, stake-holding, qualitative-study]
flagged_for_theseus: ["Writers who CREATE resist AI more than people who only CONSUME — stake-holding drives skepticism, relevant to AI adoption dynamics in creative communities"]
---

## Content

Academic study examining how 157 active fanfiction community members perceive generative AI integration. Published arxiv June 23, 2025 (arXiv:2506.18706). Published in full at tandfonline.com (DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2025.2531272).

**Methodology:** 157 respondents (90 writers, 67 exclusive readers). Structured online questionnaire with multiple-choice, Likert scale, and open-ended questions. Data collection May-July 2024 across multiple platforms. Mann-Whitney U and Chi-square tests; qualitative content analysis with 86-99% inter-coder reliability.

**Key findings:**

Community values & resistance:
- 92% agreed "Fanfiction is a space for human creativity"
- 83.4% concerned AI would inundate platforms, overshadowing human work
- 79.6% feared AI reliance would stifle human creativity
- 76.4% worried AI threatens community's social aspects

Emotional authenticity concerns:
- 84.7% doubted AI could replicate emotional nuances in human stories
- 77.5% questioned whether AI maintains narrative authenticity
- 73.7% worried about low-quality AI-generated content flooding platforms

Writer vs. reader perspectives (the novel finding):
- 83.58% of those opposing increased AI integration were WRITERS
- 65% of writers found AI acceptable for idea generation (lower-stakes assistance)
- 45.5% of writers reported zero AI usage
- Only 10% of writers supported fully AI-generated fanfiction

Experience-based divide:
- Veteran writers (10+ years): strongest AI resistance
- New writers (1-5 years): greater openness to AI assistance
- Significant statistical differences across experience levels (p<0.05)

Transparency demands:
- 86% insisted authors disclose AI involvement
- 66% said knowing about AI would decrease reading interest
- 72.2% reported negative feelings upon discovering retrospective AI use

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** This is the most rigorous quantitative evidence we have for the "relational quality" finding from Session 6 — quality assessment in fanfiction is embedded in community values (specifically in the act of writing itself), not purely in technical output quality. The stake-holding correlation (writers resist more than readers) is a novel empirical finding with major implications.

**What surprised me:** The magnitude of writer-vs-reader split. 83.58% of AI opponents are writers. This means resistance scales with how much skin you have in the game as a CREATOR, not as a consumer. As fans climb the engagement ladder and become creators themselves, they develop MORE resistance to AI, not less. This is the opposite of what platform-mediated adoption might expect.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Data on HOW communities are enforcing anti-AI norms (moderation tools, disclosure systems, platform policies). The study identifies the values but not the governance mechanisms.

**KB connections:**
- [[GenAI adoption in entertainment will be gated by consumer acceptance not technology capability]] — this study gives the mechanism: it's a VALUES choice, not capability assessment. Enriches the existing claim with the stake-holding dimension.
- [[community ownership accelerates growth through aligned evangelism not passive holding]] — the inverse of this: community CREATION intensifies resistance to AI replacement. Active participants defend their creative space.
- [[fanchise management is a stack of increasing fan engagement from content extensions through co-creation and co-ownership]] — the engagement ladder has an unmodeled implication: the higher fans climb (toward co-creation), the more they identify as creators, the more they resist AI. This is a design implication for community IP.

**Extraction hints:**
- Primary claim candidate: "Stake-holding in creative communities (being a writer, not just a reader) amplifies AI resistance because creator identity is at stake, not just content quality — resistance scales with creative investment"
- Secondary claim candidate: "Fanfiction communities treat quality as relational rather than technical — the value is embedded in human effort and community connection, not output characteristics, making AI quality improvements irrelevant to adoption decisions"
- Could enrich: [[GenAI adoption in entertainment will be gated by consumer acceptance not technology capability]] with the stake-holding mechanism
- Cross-domain flag: Theseus — the stake-holding finding (creators resist more than consumers) may generalize to AI adoption in other knowledge domains (scientists, writers, doctors resist AI more than their clients/patients)

**Context:** Study conducted May-July 2024, published June 2025. Represents attitudes BEFORE the major 2025 AI video generation improvements (Seedance 2.0, etc.). The resistance predates the full quality improvement curve, suggesting it won't erode with capability improvements.

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)

PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[GenAI adoption in entertainment will be gated by consumer acceptance not technology capability]]
WHY ARCHIVED: Provides quantitative mechanism for why AI quality improvements don't convert resistance — the resistance is values-based, not capability-based, and it scales with creative investment
EXTRACTION HINT: Focus on the writer-vs-reader stake-holding finding as a novel claim; the 92%/84.7% figures are enrichment evidence for existing claims rather than new claims
