The AI smut peddlers have come for Warhammer 40,000 now
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(Image credit: Slaanesh O'Pleasure)
"Sister Aurelia of the Adepta Sororitas was trained to fight, pray, and die for the Emperor. But when a hulking emotionally available Tyranid warrior spares her life and takes her deep into the hive, captivity becomes something far stranger than torture. He feeds her, protects her, even… listens to her... And when their minds and bodies begin to entwine, Aurelia discovers that love can bloom in the most heretical soil imaginable."
This is the blurb for Taken by the Tyranid: A Romance in the Far Future, a 65-page story recently uploaded for sale on Amazon with cover art that's obviously AI-generated. You can tell it's AI because there's weird wobbly text on the protagonist's dress—partially hidden by the placement of the author's jokey pseudonym, Slaanesh O'Pleasure—and it's all weirdly yellow-tinged in the way the latest generation of AI art seems to be. I don't know why LLMs have decided the piss filter from Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the hot new look, but apparently they have.
Maybe the actual contents of Taken by the Tyranid aren't written by AI, but I wouldn't bet on it. Amazon's been flooded with AI knockoffs, which Rolling Stone investigated last year. In that article Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, summed up the situation: "These are garbage books that exist to suck up money from the inattentive and get away with ripping off readers as well as writers."
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The formula Taken by the Tyranid seems to be ripping off is that of the dinosaur-erotica subgenre, an unusual niche that's also weirdly popular. Specifically, it's based on Taken by the T-Rex, though that was written by an actual person with a whole catalogue of monsterfucker books to her name.
The oddest part of this is if you want some 40K-themed smut, there's loads of it freely available. Fanfic authors provide and it's all filed on AO3 with impressive specificity. Fans of the Inquisitorial interrogator from Owlcat's Rogue Trader will enjoy the Pining Heinrix van Calox category, but if it's the tyranids you're into then, God help you, the fanfic writers have got you covered there as well.
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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.
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2 hours ago
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English (US) ·