An open letter about AI
Please, if you read this and this resonates with you, please post this. I want the world to see my words. Go ahead and add your own stories to this, let's get this trending!
To Whom It May Concern,
I am sitting behind the computer, my fingers dancing across a keyboard, not entering a prompt into AI and asking for the words to come. I lay this writing on the twin altars of creativity and fandom, in hopes that my few words will be heard by someone. Anyone. During the day, I am a teacher, helping kids discover who they are, shaping them to be the next generation in this world. At night however, I am a fanfiction writer. No, I will not tell you the fandoms I write in, I will be judged enough for the above sentence and I sign off with my username, you can look me up. No, I do not steal from the creators, I am forever grateful to them for creating the characters who I get to play with, dolls made of words instead of physical materials. Also, no I am not ashamed of being a fanfiction writer, despite what my words above might lead you to believe. I have been a writer for my entire literate life, I still remember a story I wrote in second grade about me being the nursemaid to a queen. There was a period in which I spent my recesses with my then friend playing in a land I called Uno. Uno followed me for a couple more years into the name of a bread that I came up with in the kitchen, which I named Uno Cot because it looked like a cot. Furthermore, I have been telling stories to myself for the same length of time. My mind is never quiet.
Why do I write this? Why do I state that I am a fanfiction writer, and then follow it up with a history of my creative life? Because of AI scrapers, who have targeted the Archive where I post my works. I got started writing fanfiction long after I was reading fanfiction, it was a whim one New Year’s Eve resolution to write and publish one story, and it all spiraled out from there. Currently, I’m still working on the first story that has spawned from that resolution, it’s 31 chapters and just over 87,000 words. For anyone who is curious, that is longer than the first and second Harry Potter books, Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and in the next chapter or two I will have also passed Ninety-Eighty Four by George Orwell. All in all, as I write this letter, I have written (and published) 607,000 words, and that is not counting the many chapters I have floating around of various works. What about total works? Forty eight, and the majority of them are complete works. This might not seem impressive, but for me, who used to never be able to finish a story to save my life, this is amazing.
I am rambling, (hazards of being a writer), and I’m sure you are asking me why I’m telling you this. I mentioned AI scrapers and then launched into a ramble about my history with fanfiction. True, true, I’m sorry, let me elaborate. While I knew when AI arrived, that my works might be grabbed and used to feed into the soulless AI machine, and I was ok with that. Not happy, if it were up to me none of my work would be used, but as long as I wasn’t aware of it happening, I could ignore it. Then, the Archive got scraped and I went to see where my blood, sweat and tears had gone, only to find the person who had scraped the Archive dismissing fanfiction. The person claimed that we didn’t matter because we were fanfiction writers. Despite several people pointing out that original works are posted there as well, (including two of my own) it didn’t matter. We took what other people created, twisted it and so we do not matter.
Let me ask you some questions, who are the Triad of the Depths? Who are the Optimitit? In which Realm does the Sapaltet reign? What is a heartflower and why is it important? What happened five hundred years ago in Leiant?
First of all, if you actually know the answers, hi and thank you for reading my works, I hope that you enjoyed my stories. If you are still confused, let me explain;
The Triad of the Depths are a trio of deities who protect deep-water mers, they are the LIght Keeper, Cold Keeper and Vent Keeper. Light Keeper gives the mers bioluminescence as well as the protector of justice and knowledge. The Vent Keeper guides the souls of dead deep-water mers to Father of the Depth’s realm, as well as offering deep-water mers warmth and protection against the Cold Keeper. Which brings me to the Cold Keeper, he protects and guards deep-water mers while also being the death that stalks them should they leave the safety of their homes close to the vents.
The Optmitit are the five children of the Earth Lord, Mother Ocean’s ex-consort, they correspond to five different types of geographic lands. To refer to one of them, you would simply call them by their name and Optman, ie Hutba Optman.
In the Shadow Realm, the Sapaltet reigns with his consort. Blessed by the stars themselves, the Sapaltet is widely beloved, even more after he traveled to the Mortal Realm to take control of an abusive high school that had ground down two of his closest friends and his uncle. His consort is also blessed by the stars, for he was either conceived or born while a star from the Shadow Realm fell in the Mortal Realm and sees futures in his dreams.
A heartflower is the flower that blooms over the heart when two soulmates connect on the purest level, a flower that represents what the other person means to the one who carries it, it is linked to the rest of the soulvine by a string of first flowers, the flowers that lets a person know their soulmate is born in the world and what their core looks like.
Finally, five hundred years ago, Windsingers were accused of murder and the population of Leiant retaliated, forcing them to flee to the mountains. After they fled, there was a law on the books that called for the death of WindSingers found in Leiant, while the Windsingers settled in the safety of the mountains. Even five hundred years later, every Windsinger gets their feet hennad in red in memory of the bloody feet that carried the Windsingers to safety.
Is this starting to make sense now? All five of those are things I came up with, I was the one who gently crafted each and every thing, I have named all of the Optmitit, there is also a Triad of the Shallows, the counterpoint to the Triad of the Depths. These are my contributions to the world, the characters I write do not simply live in the real world, they live in worlds where soulmates are real, where there are a wide variety of Relams stretching out into eternity. I have written about gods of peace and chaos reincarnating into mortal bodies and in the process I have found that for me, peace can have teeth. Maybe that’s why I write this, because even though this is meant to stop people scraping fanfiction, or at least not to brush it off when the authors protest, citing ‘it’s just fanfiction’, I am much happier talking about my stories, about my creativity. I don’t know why I wrote this, maybe like that first true piece of fanfiction I wrote and published, I'm shouting into a void and hoping something echoes back to me.
So, will you please stop using my works to train something that will never understand the words it spits out? Who will never be able to put words down to describe things like depression without understanding the darkness that squeezes your heart and keeps you tied to the warmth of your bed when there is a world out there for you to explore? Will you stop using AI to create works that will never live up to what a living person can create? If you are using it because you are ashamed of your writing, as a teacher, I will tell you this, the only way to improve is by doing. Will you stop dismissing and looking down on fanfiction because it is something you don’t understand? There are authors of fanfiction who if I found out were published, I’d rush out to buy their books in a heartbeat, some people have told me I should be published myself, but I would rather not. I don’t understand video games, but I don’t look down on them, I don’t try to steal them to feed to an AI machine.
I will leave this, a piece of my heart, an excerpt from one of my stories on the altar as a final gift. Just think about this question as you read it, could a computer write this?
Grief, Pran had quickly learned in the few days after the disastrous concert, was a multi-tentacled monster that managed to wrap its arms around everything in its way. He spent the days with the inky limbs thrown around his shoulders, weighing him down, covering his eyes, darkening the world around him. They left a deep, unchanging cold, ice crystals in his veins that never thaws. As a Shadower who found strength in the light, the darkness unbalanced him, reminding him with every breath he took of his missing sae. It would have been better had his parents decided not to send him to Suppalo, the school that had slowly over the course of the past five years turned into the primer school for Realm Dwellers and mortals in the know thanks to Sapaltet Aye’s patronage. Surrounded by mortals, Pran was sure that the jagged lines of his soul would have slowly started to heal, under the strain of trying to blend in. However, because he was able to wear his true form inside the school and was surrounded by other Realm Dwellers the wound remained open and raw.
May your pen be ever sharp, your muse be kind to you,
Aka_nna
