I must say as much as I hate so so many aspects of generative ai (associated environmental impacts; emerging data on mental health effects; the way it makes up/hallucinates shit; the way it plagiarizes shit; the job losses particularly in creative spaces; huge enormous dangerous blind spots and biases; the way searching the internet for fucking anything has become 12 times harder and more irritating; the way a lot of the so called “benefits” involve repackaging social services into a shittier automated version that benefits the tech owners more than the person who is supposedly benefitting; how people have used it as an excuse to be mentally lazy and feel more confident when they’re being loudly wrong; the possibility that people are using it to get through degree programs in important shit like medicine and mechanical engineering; the terrifying thought that some construction or aeronautics or etc company will trust it, or those “educated” by it, to do something it should not be trusted to do safely; the potential for an epidemic of cognitive decline and brain atrophy from millions of people outsourcing emotional intelligence, creativity, and *thinking* ffs… I could go on), people using it to write fan fiction is very very very fucking low on the list of “why you should be upset about it”.
It is literally the lowest stakes usage. It is not unsafe, except maybe cognitively for the person doing it. It is not even taking jobs from creatives, because writing fan fiction is not a job. Is it annoying or deceitful or uncreative? Sure. Is it unfair if someone gets accolades, clout, serotonin boosts, etc, from sharing work they didn’t create while others who actually work very hard to create get less or none? Sure. To be clear, I don’t wanna read ai generated fic. I don’t wanna see ai generated art.
In the grand scheme big picture totality of it all, it is simply not that fucking important. It’s just not. I know this is a fandom blog and ai is being discussed in a fandom context, but I think it would behoove a lot of people to step back. Have perspective. If anyone thinks identifying who’s writing fanfiction with chatgpt or claude or whatever the fuck, and spreading that information around, is in any way useful anti-ai activism, I promise it is not. In fact, specifically focusing on non paid, “I do this in my spare time” ai users because it’s fun to stir up drama, is possibly the most net-negative of any anti-ai activity aside from maybe setting your own laptop on fire.
Marvel and Dune and Mad Max franchises have used gen ai in their films. Music producers are using chatgpt to “spark inspiration”. Reuters and the New York Times and countless other news organizations and journalists are openly integrating ai. Epic EMR is using it to listen to your doctors visits and fuck up clinic notes. Massive corporations are laying off thousands of people to let ai take over their jobs. Hell, I lost MY OWN part time job because ai took it over. These are all examples of some rich asshole making YOUR LIFE WORSE for their own imagined/projected gain.
Grok, the ai that’s built into the fucking social media platform where so many people whining about ai fic do their whining, has been used to create sexually explicit images of actual people, including CHILDREN, and yet if you scroll the Twitter of someone Shocked! Shocked to find out gen ai is going on in ao3! 99 times out of 100 they haven't said shit about that.
It’s cool to not want ai fic. Its cool to check for ai fic or have an opinion about whether something is ai. Message your pals about it. Make a list, even. Whatever. Cool. Reasonable, even. Beyond that, though, it’s performative and weird and the motives behind it are base and transparent. To folks investing significant time and energy into callouts and "spreading awareness", i would ask perhaps consider putting that energy into something that could actually help. Or at least admit that the Twitter threads and jokes and tongue-in-cheek pearl clutching are akin to middle school schadenfreude and not any kind of real direct action.
Like. Fuck. I love that people hate gen ai. But I wish they'd do something useful with the hate or just shut up about it. Posting loudly and publicly for days about ai fic writers on the “we’ve got ai that will make porn of anyone if you ask it nicely” platform is fucking BONKERS. Christ. Have some courage of your convictions when it comes to stuff that's higher stakes than fandom wank. Fuck. God damn.
also if you read that and think "what the fuck can i even do?":
Check out the ai resist list
Join the campaign against autonomous/algorithm driven weaponry
Keep track of global ai regulations
Consider boycotting or petitioning companies that use ai in ways you don't agree with like those listed here, ikea, duolingo, pinterest, netflix, or every god damn local coffee shop or pizza place that uses shitty ai generated photos on doordash or shitty ai generated art on their menus, the list goes on and on my friend.
check out anti-ai movements like stop ai, pause ai, and together against ai
understand the difference between generative ai/LLMs and other types of ai that don't always suck
be aware of the fact that there is a broad spectrum of anti-tech ideologies. Extremists are happy to exploit people's hatred of ai and manipulate it into something more sinister (and I don't mean "anti tech extremists" in the way the FBI uses it, or even ted kaczynski neo-luddite extremism, I mean real anti-science, anti-progress extremists). The more comfortable and gleeful someone is in naming names and suggesting punitive action, the more enticing they are to folks that are truly up to no good.
anywayyyyy. gen ai bad. gen ai fic bad. many many many many many other gen ai things way more bad. pick a battle like you want to defeat gen ai, not a handful of people who used it. or hate the game not the player or whatever.
or don't, i'm not your dad.
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