actively on fire

25 - fandom melting-pot sometimes i art | fanfic addict

[jillflame]

The witch that cursed me is marrying my ex best friend.

Ok, thats a bit misleading. She's officiating her wedding. But still, I feel like the protagonist of an isekai comedy.

[strandnreyes]

“I don’t like this song because I can’t relate to it” skill issue. I’m mad at my husband I love my girlfriend I’m a lone cowboy I’m growing old I’m growing up I’m depressed I love my friends I’m perpetually horny I’m drunk at the club I love my husband again

[strandnreyes]

this is exactly what I’m talking about

[pinene]

Why are we forgetting the old texts

[newtsfrogstoads]

Going from being an introverted lurker on reddit to trying to post my own stuff here is so wild. I keep typing out a post, deleting it, then retyping because I think it's not good enough but then I look at other posts and why am I so worried?

It's like I'm at a fancy Italian restaurant and keep glancing around the room to see which hand people use to pick up the forks. But then I realize that everyone is shoveling spaghetti into their mouths using their bare hands and I'm like ah okay so I'm clearly overthinking this

[newtsfrogstoads]

This restaurant is absolute chaos and I'm giving it 5 stars

[souplover13]

when times are tough we turn to our ultimate ally: writing aromantic fanfictions

[bluebellbouquetswp]

probably aroace but i’m stuck in a different solar system so can’t really be worried about that rn

[writingdose]

***not my own screenshot***

AO3 saying they will not be banning AI-generated works on their platform

I agree with them and I respect them for this. 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.

[hawks-flat-ass]

I’ve said it before, but I’m starting to think I might need to staple it to the ceiling: I would much rather people tag their AI stuff correctly so folks can make informed choices than start marching down the censorship slope. That slope is greased with bad faith and ends with someone weaponizing it against the wrong people.

Do I like AI fic? No. Do I want to be the Fun Police? Also no.

And listen. I am human. I have absolutely misflagged human-created work, both writing or otherwise, as AI before. It happens. In writing, this is especially likely to happen when the writer is neurodivergent or has a weirdly specific vocabulary (hi, it’s me; I’m the problem). The more robust these models get, the harder it gets to tell the difference.

Example: I typed up a Compliance assignment in Grammarly’s doc manager. Generative OFF, Authorship ON. I pasted only the assignment notes. The company wasn’t real. The modules weren’t real. The only real things were the regulatory frameworks (specifically GDPR and PIPL) that Fake-Ass Cloud Payment Service™️would need to consider for an EU/CN launch.

Yeah, Grammarly still flagged the entire thing as AI.

Why? Because these models are trained on mountains of corporate documents, legal statutes, and (surprise!) scraped user content from places like AO3. And the free “AI checkers” people keep using? Congrats, you’re training an AI every time you run a fic through them.

Also, a friendly reminder: AI-generated content is not protected by copyright under current U.S. law. SCOTUS refused to hear the case, so it’s been marked cert. denied. That leaves the intermediate appellate court’s decision (U.S. Court of Appeals) standing, but not endorsed, by SCOTUS.

What does this mean for you? If you feed your writing into an AI model, be it Character.AI, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc, and ask it to spit something back out, the company that produced the app owns the output, not you. You have limited recourse if your uploads are included in a dataset. It also makes it harder for AO3 to CYA.

Personally? Not worth it. Never mind the pride I take in my own writing. I put a lot of research, detail, and psychological nuance into my character-driven fiction. That’s mine, and I will go down swinging.

But, you do you. Genuinely. Everyone has to run their own internal audit and cost/benefit analysis. I’m just waving a little caution flag so you don’t get blindsided later.

[marimbles]

underrated tumblr feature is being able to catch up to yourself on your dash. so there is an END POINT. and you can say “ah, I have reached where I left off, there is no more to see! I’ll take my leave now and come back later when there are new posts.” instead of being stuck forever in a bottomless algorithm pit digging deeper and deeper till you have to summon monumental strength to climb out

[crokitheloki]

everyone say thank you ao3 volunteers you're the best ao3 volunteers ily ao3 volunteers

[raisedbylibrarians]

[riuzu7]

Yellow light

[neenarchive]

companies make billions from you thinking you're ugly btw. only ugly thing is their bottom line. log out of tiktok right now.

[neenarchive]

learning to ask 'is this an ad' will save your life

[robdogrbs]

"guys i just got this new" it’s an ad

"let me show you what i just bought from" it’s an ad

"how am i just now discovering" it’s an ad

[tumbleaboutit]

I had to interview someone about their job for a project in graduate school, and I decided to seek out a position that I'd never in a million years be interested in doing myself: marketing. It was a very informative interview, but what has stuck with me for the past decade and still rings in my ears is "marketing is a form of storytelling". The purpose of marketing is telling you a story where they have the solution to a problem you didn't realize you had.

As someone who loves to tell stories, this completely turned my brain around.

[jillflame]

This is how Taylor Swift makes money.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

(feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, this is just what I’ve discovered from some research reading.)

one of the things I’ve recently learned about AO3 and believed it was the right thing for them is that AO3 legally cannot get involved in politics — they legally cannot express their political stance, because the second they do, they risk losing their nonprofit status, and if AO3 is no longer a nonprofit organization, that’s when legal action can be taken against the platform, fanfics and fanfic writers, that’s when you risk getting sued for writing about other people’s copyrighted characters.

so yes, AO3 is doing the right thing by staying out of politics and current world events. they are a nonprofit organization, an archive (which is also why censorship has no place on their platform). they’re not an activist group.

if you have a problem with this, may I kindly suggest you looking for other platforms to post or read fanfics?

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

people getting mad at ao3 for rightfully being firmly against censorship and allowing dark fics that depict taboo subjects in explicit details to be on their platform is so funny to me because ao3 was created specifically to be a fuck you to capitalism and censorship. the point of ao3 is that it’s a place to host and archive any fanwork, which includes fanwork about taboo topics that are not allowed on other platforms like wattpad or fanfiction.net

the whole point of ao3 is that it’s a safe space for all fics, and that includes fics about taboo subjects

ao3 has always been firmly against censorship since the day it was created, that’s why it’s run by fans, for fans, on fans’ donations, why it’s a nonprofit organization, that’s also why it has no ads or algorithms or any of those capitalism bullshit

if you have a problem with that, go to fanfiction.net or wattpad. no one forces you to stay in the house made specifically for the (affectionate) freaks

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

personal opinion but, in fandom space, ai generated works are not fan-created contents. because a soulless robot cannot be passionate about something nor can it be “a fan” of something the way human artists are

[phenomenallyextraordinary123]

So going through ol’ FMA interviews I found something really interesting the director said about Edward’s character and to be honest it’s not unsurprising. and feels….

[sowedpearls]

[toxiclizardwrites]

This is so hard to get past but I promise you it is worth it. I went back to school at 26 and graduated at 29. I now have a great job that I love. Life doesn't end just because you age.

[redball42]

I started ballet at 27 and now I’m 2x sexier, almost entirely unafraid of public humiliation, and entirely unaffected by pain. Life really is beautiful

[puffbirdstudio]

My husband didn't finish his bachelor's degree the first time around. He went back to school at the age of 40, and graduated at age 45. He now has his dream job as a high school choir teacher and it was absolutely worth it.

The advantage of going to school at a more advanced age is that you're more advanced in a lot of ways.

You know who you are. By age 40, you've had a while to be an independent adult. You've explored yourself well enough that you're not still figuring things out.

You know what you want. I promise, at age 18 you have no idea what you really want. Not only do a lot of people change majors in college, a lot of people get into their career and decide they hate it. By age 40, you have a pretty good idea of

You're willing to do the work. I can't count how many people I met in college who were so enamored with their newfound freedom and lack of parental oversight that they spent their time partying and drinking and ended up failing their first year of college. My husband had three kids and a wife at home. He was definitely not partying and drinking. And I definitely did my part to give him time and space to study.

You don't care what people think. When you're on campus as a student at age 40, everyone around you is a baby. They don't feel like your peers. They could be your kids. What they think of you doesn't matter.

In any case... it's never too late. It takes some people a little longer to figure out what they want, and that's okay.

[animedreamworlds]

Official Hawks pic from MHA Vigilantes series illustrator, Betten Court

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

Thought I should make a separate post regarding this debate too.

"Do you think AO3 should ban AI generated works?"

Well, in theory, it may sound ideal. But in reality? No.

I am not a fan of AI, but "do you think AO3 should ban" never actually solves a problem. Because how can you tell what's AI and what's human made? It is extremely hard to tell, and going around accusing authors of using AI — just because you suspect they do — does more harm than good. Chances are that you're accusing real writer of being AI and ruining their day at best, making them quit writing at worst.

And the act of banning never stops something from existing. It only makes it more difficult to find or avoid. Tumblr bans porn, but you can still find porn on Tumblr. The only difference is that they're no longer tagged as porn, which means you're more likely to stumble upon them because blocking the tags no longer works when they are not tagged as porn.

The same applies to AI generated works on AO3. For now they are tagged as "AI generated". You can avoid them if you don't want them.

Once they're banned, people will no longer tag them as AI, which means you have more chance of unknowingly reading and leaving kudos on AI.

Also, no, unless an author says "this was written by AI" you cannot tell for sure if something was written by AI. Em dashes aren't evidence of AI. Long and overly described paragraphs aren't evidence of AI. Real human writers do write like this and AI was trained to mimic real humans' works.

If AO3 bans AI, you will be dealing with witch-hunting, genuine writers getting wrongly accused of using AI left and right, and AI works no longer being tagged as AI (meaning they are almost impossible to spot and avoid)