AI Fic? It already exists.

[bloodwrites]

Evidence has been found that AI's are being trained on AO3. I'm uncomfortable, but not panicked, though I've taken the precautionary step of locking my fic to archive only for the moment.

I don't think that training AI's using publicly accessible fiction is straight up plagiarism, and until there's evidence that AI's are lifting sections of existing works that'll remain my stance, but I do think AI's being used to write fiction is going to be kind of soulless, and maybe even a little bit cheaty?

It's got to be tempting. Blocked? Prompt the AI to give you your next scene starter, or the entire scene, or hell, just let it write the entire fic and then collect all the sweet sweet kudos without having to do any actual work.

But when I'm reading, I want the fic to be emotion-heavy. I X-out of boring fic, whether it's got all the right tags or not, and I do believe AI fic is going to be boring as hell. You can have plot twists and action and all of that shit but if there's no human emotion I'm gone.

AI has already been used to write fanfic. I tried to read it, but it lacked any kind of emotion. Someone died and I didn't care. Sure, a human being can absolutely write boring fic, but I find it very hard to believe that an AI is going to be able to write fic that has heart and soul.

And one has to wonder if the cycle of scraping and writing and scraping and writing continues--and if AI fic becomes an acceptable way of writing--what AI fic will be like in the future.

Soulless, at the least. And probably really shitty.

xpost

Comments

[gekidasa]

I thought about locking, then I read the thing about existing fics most likely having already been crawled and how what you COULD do is lock future fics… and then I realized as things stand I don’t personally care enough to do that? I tend to avoid locking moat things down in general. I also think… people actually writing fanfic this way, it’s not likely to get much traction, I don’t think, and it’s unlikely I’d see my fics actually replicated in a recognizable way (THAT I would care about). Obviously the biggest use for this thing is outside fandom.

Anywya, obviously it’s a very subjective thing. May or may not change my mind in the future.

[bloodwrites]

Yeah I'm absolutely still on the fence about whether locking is useful or pointy or if I even care TBH.

I'm much more invested in whether AI fic will become a thing people do. If the tools are free to access I can see it being used by a certain type of fan, if there are people who plagiarise or convert for easy kudos there will be those who use AI fic for the same thing.

I really really don't want AO3 to get spammed with AI fic. I'm pulling a yucky face just thinking about it.

(I'm likely to come off elitist in my sentiments but goddammit writing is hard and I feel as though I earn the eyeballs on my fic, I really don't want to be competing against a churn of fic written by machines)

[gekidasa]

The thing is, that example fic you linked (is it an experiment) is super and this happened! then this! then this other thing! Like even if I don't know how obvious it would be if I didn't know what it was, it's objectively not a GOOD fic, you know?

If AI advances to the point where it writes legitimately GOOD fic, 1. we're approaching the singularity! 2. I don't care, if it's good, I'm reading it. I'm starving here.

[bloodwrites]

It looks like an experiment, and I can understand the desire to test these things out at this stage, but I guess I'm a pessimist.

There's the possibility that AO3 will be flooded with garbage vying for valuable eyeballs, but there's also the possibility that you could plug in a few specific parameters and the AI will spit out the perfect fic catered to your exact needs.

And that's scary. I'm not panicking but I can't help thinking about it.

Today's epiphany is that I define myself as a writer more than I realised and I really don't want to become obsolete.

And it brings me back to the mindless consumer fan who expects fresh content every time they refresh the page and AI fic (and art) could be how they get it.

[asya_ana]

For me the issue is some big company ("OpenAI, a company co-founded by Elon Musk") is harvesting (stealing) fandom labor without compensation, licensing, or even permission, and exploiting it to generate a product to profit from themselves. We made our work open and free -- but does that give them the right to profit off it?

[bloodwrites]

This is an excellent point and reminds me of part of the reason why I'm so militantly against shit like Fifty Shades while other people are just like "sure, it's shit, but good on her whatever".

We also saw it in shit like fanlib all those years ago, and fanlib is one of the reasons AO3 exists.

Fuck those guys.

I'm much more comfortable doing fandom shit in non-profit or at least ad-free, data-harvesting-free spaces. Now the harvesters and the for profit fuckers found another way of profiting off of us?

Fuck those guys too.