I got beef with Ao3 for allowing AI (and R34 but we're here to talk about fanfic). Fanfiction is one of the most human thing to exist, we've been doing it for centuries, why would Ao3 allow that crap?
You gotta understand the frustration.
I have already explained why I agree with AO3's decision to not ban AI contents on their platform on my other blog here
But here are my reasoning and why it makes sense that AO3 will not and cannot actually ban AI-generated fics, as stated in the earlier post I've linked:
I agree with them (AO3) and I respect them for this (for not banning AI-generated fics). no, I am not a fan of AI-generated fics, but as I’ve said many times before in the past:
AO3 was built with the “complete anti censorship” stance. them banning AI-generated works would be them going against their own core values of “no censorship”. and “no censorship” means nothing is censored. and that includes works you dislike for ethical or whatever reasons.
as of now, most (I believe) of creators who use AI to write for them properly tag their works as “AI-generated”. so you can safely filter these works out if you don’t wish to consume them. but I have no doubt the majority (if not all) of them will stop tagging their works as AI if AO3 actually bans AI works, which means these AI works will be untagged. you can never know for sure if the fic you read is AI or not, since they aren’t properly tagged anymore.
whether or not you like it, AI is getting better and more human-like, meaning it’s getting harder to spot when a fic is AI.
speculation, witch hunts, wrongful accusations and harassment harm real writers, as well as writing community as a whole, as much as AI does, if not more.
it’s impossible for AO3 to effectively ban and remove “only AI-generated works” without innocent human-made works getting wrongly marked as AI and deleted in the process. so if AO3 were to ban AI-generated works, it would mean
there was a chance of a human-made work getting wrongly marked as AI and taken down
there was a chance of an AI-generated work being wrongly accepted as human-made
fandom drama could and would cause innocent writers to get their human-made works falsely reported as AI
human-made fics that “upset people”, in terms of contents, could and almost certainly would be reported as AI, because there were people who “found the fics inappropriate/disgusting and wanted them taken down” — and the only way they could do that was by falsely reporting these fics as AI
AO3 volunteers would have to decide which works were AI “based on vibes alone”. and not only was it impossible for them to always make the correct judgement, there simply weren’t enough volunteers and time for every single work that was reported as AI to be thoroughly read by a human volunteer
no, “AI detector” is unreliable and the machine itself is also AI — it’s known to have incorrectly marked human-made works as AI and AI-generated works as human-made.
TL;DR — no matter how much you hate AI-generated fics, banning them would do more harm than good.
origamiaround
gamechangershow
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