In the age of Heated Rivalry and Off Campus, it seems like every day now a new book-to-TV adaptation is being promoted. In 2023, it was announced that Prime Video would be taking on an adaptation of Rebecca Yarros’ insanely popular novel Fourth Wing. Fans of the book immediately took to the internet, trying to guess who would be cast to play the main characters Violet Sorrengail and Xaden Riorson. After years of speculation, it was finally announced that Esther McGregor and Emilio Sakraya would be starring in the series, and the internet had a lot to say.
While some book fans were happy with the casting, there were just as many who had a lot of complaints. Book fans being disappointed in the casting for the characters they love isn’t something new; however, this time around I noticed something that I had never seen before. While some readers had specific actors they would’ve liked to see cast, many others had a different comparison in mind: AI-generated photos. Comment after comment expressed their outrage that the real-life actors picked didn’t resemble the AI-generated fan art of the characters.
Some even took to using AI to change the actual features of the actors picked to more closely resemble the character descriptions. While it may seem harmless to change the eye color of an actor in order to make them match the character description, it starts to become a problem when people are sending the actors hate in real life because they don’t look like an AI-generated image. It’s nearly impossible to find an actor who has both acting talent and the exact physical description of a fictional character. But for die-hard fans, a mismatched hair color is enough to warrant demands for a recast. Now, not only do the actors chosen have to face comparisons to other real-life actors who may have more of a resemblance to the character description, but they also have to face comparisons with AI-generated images. Up-and-coming actors are no longer going to want to take on roles for book adaptations if they continue to receive extreme hate for not matching up with the flawless images produced by ChatGPT that set impossible standards.
The book community isn’t the only fanbase that has been corrupted by the rise of generative AI. Some music fans have also started comparing real songs to AI ones. When Taylor Swift released the track list for her album The Tortured Poets Department, some users online took to the internet to use AI to predict how the songs would sound.
When the actual album came out, individuals online shared that they actually preferred the AI-generated version rather than the real song. Songwriting is a skill that takes significant human artistic ability, and AI-created songs just can’t compare.
Another community that has been tainted by the rise of AI is the online fanfiction community. Fanfiction is a popular way for fans of certain media to further interact with that world by writing their own stories about preexisting characters. In the summer of 2026, an anonymous Twitter user released a guide on how to catch which works of fan fiction were AI, exposing hundreds of popular fanfics as actually being completely AI-generated.
Fanfiction and other online fan spaces used to be a way for people to find other humans who enjoy the same media that they do. Now every story you read has the potential to be completely AI-generated.
AI-generated work can also be pumped out significantly faster than things created by real people. It takes a matter of minutes to generate a full-length story using ChatGPT or Claude. Writing a real story can take months. Work created by real artists is also being drowned out by the thousands of AI-slop stories that can be published with little to no effort. It also leads to people second-guessing whether the stories they’re seeing are real or AI-generated. AI works by stealing things online from other artists and compiling them into something “new.” Since AI trains itself on real work done by real artists, it’s become harder and harder to tell what’s real and what’s AI. Trying to root out AI-generated work and protect real artists is making a lot of actual writers fear being falsely accused of using AI for their work and being harassed without proof that they even used AI.
AI probably isn’t going away any time soon, and it’s started to affect many aspects of life as we know it. However, online fan spaces have historically been a safe space for like-minded people to have a human connection over the things they love. When human art is increasingly being compared to AI-generated creations, the real-life people who create this art are losing motivation and quitting, unable to compete with the vast amount of AI-generated content. It’s impossible to try to compare human creation to a soulless creation made from a computer plagiarizing work from real people. Fandom cultures are at risk of being destroyed forever if AI continues to permeate online communities.Â