kind of wanna reinforce this here. because i’ve seen ai writing become so popular on tik tok.

ai writing is not okay.

it’s literally theft. just like how ai art steals, ai writing steals. it’s using authors’ very real work to generate whatever you type in. and this also needs to be said as well.

writing is a form of art. fanfiction is a form of literature.

seeing this all over my fyp is REALLY discouraging. fanfic itself is already a labor of love and we love it when you interact. but please do not use ai writing for your fanfic needs when this writing literally steals from fanfic authors.

genuinely don’t know if this post will go around because my interactions outside of hcs are shit, but i hope it does.

This is a screengrab from Findaway Voices (the big audiobook distributor everyone who is not Audible exclusive basically uses) Rights Holder Agreement. The Rights Holder is generally the author (sometimes a publisher) but almost never the narrator.

SO. This is a Big Fucking Yikes from me. AI-generated audiobooks are a Thing that Apple is now doing - they sound horrid because they don't give the intonation or emotion that a human narrator can - and this agreement is an absolutely naked rights grab for rights that the author doesn't actually possess. That is, the right to use the narration to train Apple's AI to do better narration, and, incidentally, the right to use the WRITING to train the writing AI's to replace authors too. Double fucking yikes. As a narrator, I'm absolutely fuming. You have to choose to opt OUT - or rather, the authors I have worked for have to choose to opt out FOR ME, because apparently I don't even have the rights to my own voice in this situation. Well, you can bet I posted this in the big narrator group (8,000 members) on Facebook and I'm putting it all over Twitter as well, because Apple can absolutely fuck all the way off.

GUYS DO NOT GIVE YOUR MANUSCRIPT TO AN AI THIS IS A BAD IDEA ON EVERY LEVEL DON'T DO IT

original tweet from @jamesjyu reads: "We launch Shrink Ray today on Sudowrite! Upload your manuscript and get loglines, blurbs, synopsis, and full outlines automatically. Takes a ton of legwork out of book marketing. Below the tweet are two images of the program."

original quote tweet from @sudowrite reads: "New in Sudowrite: Upload your whole novel/script, get instant longlines (sic), blurbs, synopsis, and outline!"

tweet from @FantasyFaction reads: "Oh jeez! Bad bad, very bad! Writers DO NOT willingly give your manuscript to an AI so it can "learn" by stealing your work! I know blurbs and synopses are hard, but PLEASE do not do this! - JI 🐉

(stolen from ML Brennan & Sravani Hotha so I can include alt text)"

Must read. Here' s a snippet to motivate you :

For the still-not-convinced: If you need an AI to come up with ideas for you, you don’t even belong in the fucking room, because ‘coming up with ideas’ is literally the most basic level skill to have. A basketball player who can’t dribble doesn’t belong in the NBA, so why the fuck do you think you deserve a spot on my writing team if you need a computer to do what any goddamn fucking eight year old can do? Take the fucking hint, you fucking fraud: if you need AI to do the most basic tasks required of you as a writer, then you aren’t employable as a writer. Period. Fuck you. You’re a waste of everyone’s time.

This morning I was reading a fanfic (ao3) and everything was fine until in the comment section the author answered a question about the writing AI she was using. I felt such visceral disgust at that. I dropped the story like it was acid.

To those that use AI. How dare you? How dare you to have the audacity of using a program that steals people's creativity? How dare you feed it, taking that which was granted with love and passion and then transform it into a soulless program? How dare you bend yourself to these corporations that only seek to exploits us further?

I would 100% prefer to read a fic that has mistakes but that has care into every word and a person behind it with immense love for the fandom, than to read Shakespeare vomited by a code that it was written by a thousand cunts that wank themselves at a picture of Mark Zuckerberg.

If you're doing mental gymnastics to justify art theft and exploitation, then there's no mistake. You are wrong. Nothing will change that.

I’m convinced the executives who think AI can replace actual writers don’t realize how soulless the average ChatGPT pitch can be.

got anything good, boss?

Sure do!

-

"Weeks after The New York Times updated its terms of service (TOS) to prohibit AI companies from scraping its articles and images to train AI models, it appears that the Times may be preparing to sue OpenAI. The result, experts speculate, could be devastating to OpenAI, including the destruction of ChatGPT's dataset and fines up to $150,000 per infringing piece of content.

NPR spoke to two people "with direct knowledge" who confirmed that the Times' lawyers were mulling whether a lawsuit might be necessary "to protect the intellectual property rights" of the Times' reporting.

Neither OpenAI nor the Times immediately responded to Ars' request to comment.

If the Times were to follow through and sue ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, NPR suggested that the lawsuit could become "the most high-profile" legal battle yet over copyright protection since ChatGPT's explosively popular launch. This speculation comes a month after Sarah Silverman joined other popular authors suing OpenAI over similar concerns, seeking to protect the copyright of their books.

Of course, ChatGPT isn't the only generative AI tool drawing legal challenges over copyright claims. In April, experts told Ars that image-generator Stable Diffusion could be a "legal earthquake" due to copyright concerns.

But OpenAI seems to be a prime target for early lawsuits, and NPR reported that OpenAI risks a federal judge ordering ChatGPT's entire data set to be completely rebuilt—if the Times successfully proves the company copied its content illegally and the court restricts OpenAI training models to only include explicitly authorized data. OpenAI could face huge fines for each piece of infringing content, dealing OpenAI a massive financial blow just months after The Washington Post reported that ChatGPT has begun shedding users, "shaking faith in AI revolution." Beyond that, a legal victory could trigger an avalanche of similar claims from other rights holders.

Unlike authors who appear most concerned about retaining the option to remove their books from OpenAI's training models, the Times has other concerns about AI tools like ChatGPT. NPR reported that a "top concern" is that ChatGPT could use The Times' content to become a "competitor" by "creating text that answers questions based on the original reporting and writing of the paper's staff."

As of this month, the Times' TOS prohibits any use of its content for "the development of any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system.""

-via Ars Technica, August 17, 2023

This was posted on Twitter May 10th, 2023

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(link to post)

You expect me to believe that ai could ever possibly match the human ability to write something as completely fucking stupid as "the epic highs and lows of high school football."

just watched the hbomberguy video and omg

the parts where he says that business people don't know how to be creative so they just steal

like so true literally the source of so many of our problems in creative fields with AI and plagiarism and copyright is just business people who aren't creative stealing instead of practicing creativity

Alrighty, I'd like to take a minute to address something that's been cropping up recently, which is stuff like this:

I've been getting an increasing number of asks and comments like the one above (I've deleted the Ao3 comments and turned on moderation). Normally, they don't bug me, but when I keep getting them over and over it kinda feels like a moth buzzing around my room that I can't keep ignoring.

Basically, some people have been wondering if I use an AI to create my posts and fics as they are becoming more common.

Let me state for the record: I don't, nor will I ever.

Without getting into the rabbit hole of my personal opinion on using AI for creative works, I started posting consistently for the DC/Batfam fandom on Tumblr and Ao3 in 2018 and 2020 respectively. Many popular programs came out post-pandemic, such as Sudowrite in 2021 and ChatGPT in 2022.

I don't blame folks who may think that, though. Incorrect quotes already tread on thin ice when it comes to some people not perceiving them as actual fan content—tale as old as time. Coupled with that, I often answer asks with an easily digestible format and write fics on a time crunch that aren't planned out in great detail. I'm fully aware the quality is somewhere in the middle. (This isn't inviting people to tell me I'm amazing and transformed their lives—I'm here to give people a quick chuckle as they go about their day.)

The issue is all of this is now within the capabilities of AI and it's getting harder to differentiate, which in turn is altering our expectations of each other. You can't draw characters with wonky anatomy, you have to get every feature right or you're using a generator. You can't post a drabble with bad grammar and overplayed tropes, you have to be the next Great American Novelist or you're relying on an algorithm. Fan creators—who are doing this for free, keep in mind—are being held to increasingly higher standards just to prove they are genuine.

Some of you are probably thinking, "it's just fandom, quit making a big deal." The thing is though, fandoms are built on people with different abilities creating for the love of it. This isn't to deride those who use AI as a tool—you do you, it is a hobby in the end. However, when we ascribe mediocrity to inauthenticity, we're reinforcing the notion that if you can't be perfect, you shouldn't bother trying. It's frustrating and frankly has no business in our community.