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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20067 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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I think the simplest answer is that they're not indexing on fanfic. There's no benchmark that they're using to train models that rates the level of Evangelion fanfic it produces, especially not fanfic where Shinji convincingly cums inside of Asuka. I mean, it'd take a lot of dedicated annotation work to see how many men can orgasm from reading AI-generated fanfic, it doesn't scale well. Contrast it to most things that are trained on that are very easy to scalably judge, like getting the right answer on multiple-choice questions; you can check that over with a simple string comparison. I'd say you're lucky to have found any LLMs that can produce fanfic and erotic fanfic that as good as the ones you have.

I mean they've got a gigantic locus of horny fanfic that has surely been ingested into the models through websites like Fanfiction.net and AO3 that is a huge output of the internet. Whilst you can argue how 'quality' most of it is I'd expect a pretty good model to be able to output AO3-level fanfiction easily for major characters.

Maybe I'm pessimistic, but I suspect we've reached the top of the sigmoid for the original "train a GPT model on all the human-written text in the world" idea, and it turned out not to be possible to generate arbitrarily long/coherent/good fiction that way. The recent advancement in AI models has come from other ideas, like "multimodal" training (training on image data / audio / etc), or doing reinforcement learning on synthetic tasks.

Those other ideas can incidentally benefit fanfic -- maybe the reinforcement learning also helps the AI keep track of plots for longer, for example -- but even then I sort of suspect we're at a point where you shouldn't expect models to get much better at fanfic unless AI labs take specific action to target that use case (or they try some significantly different architecture, like text diffusion models). You definitely shouldn't expect them to be great at fanfic just because fanfic is in the training data.

Yeah, but they're not indexing on it for training the model better for those use cases. So, sure, the model be able to produce it. But it won't be consistently getting better over time because no one is working to make it get better over time. Or at least it won't be getting better as fast as things people do care about and can easily measure, like generating code, doing business analytics, business writing, image recognition, all that stuff.

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