There are a lot of reasons I think it's an ethical good to minimize engagement with proprietary gen AI, many of which are materialist (minimizing contributions to techno-fascism, to ecocide, to the demoralization and deskilling and global stratification of labor, etc.). But in the specific context of fandom I think a big part of what bums me out about the proliferation of proprietary-AI use is the way it erodes the human collaboration that can be one of the greatest affordances of fannish creation. Even if people are using gen AI for things that seem ancillary to writing, like brainstorming or editing or translating (and I would personally argue that those activities are in fact integral to writing), that's still outsourcing to a corporately owned tool of knowledge enclosure what could be the foundation for building relationships and learning with other people. It can be scary and hard and lonely to look for those people when you're new in a fandom space, or if you're shy or experience social anxiety, but like so many other things, if one stops putting in the effort, one stops building the skills. And thinking about a version of fandom where fewer and fewer people collaborate: that really feels like a loss.
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