just got a second official warning for my use of "from the river to the sea, palestine will be free" on the OTW volunteer slack
people are also currently asking board to ban saying that the founding of israel was colonialism—equating this to saying racial slurs—and were complaining about my status back when it was "palestine will be free", too
suffice to say, fuck that place, don't give the OTW your money, and don't fucking volunteer there
(the second screenshot is from the warning I got a few days ago)
Arabic calligraphy of Miguel O'Hara from Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse drawn by Twitter user alex_adamantius, shaped into the spider that adorns his suit
So, I made a tool to stop AI from stealing from writers
So seeing this post really inspired me in order to make a tool that writers could use in order to make it unreadable to AI.
And it works! You can try out the online demo, and view all of the code that runs it here!
It does more than just mangle text though! It's also able to invisibly hide author and copyright info, so that you can have definitive proof that someone's stealing your works if they're doing a simple copy and paste!
[Text reads "To humans, this text looks normal, but to computers, it's unreadable!"]
Of course, this "Anti-AI" mode comes with some pretty serious accessibility issues, like breaking screen readers and other TTS software, but there's no real way to make text readable to one AI but not to another AI.
If you're okay with it, you can always have Anti-AI mode off, which will make it so that AIs can understand your text while embedding invisible characters to save your copyright information! (as long as the website you're posting on doesn't remove those characters!)
Thank you SO MUCH for giving me an excuse to go on an incredibly nerdy rant about how the entire thing works!
More details under the cut!
Part One: How the Anti-AI mode works
So, basically, back when computers were first being made, developers had to figure out how to convert text into numbers (because computers can only handle numbers).
Of course, the problem with that is that different countries came up with different ways to do that (called encodings), leading to all sorts of messes, where the same number would show as different letters on different computers, something that really doesn't work in the interconnected era, with all different languages going together.
At least, until the Unicode Consortium was created, making a new encoding that includes every single letter of every single language + every single emoji in existence. It's an absolutely crazy idea that somehow actually works. This text that you're reading right now is encoded in Unicode!
Now, with Unicode having every single character in existence, from every single language, there are bound to be some duplicates. As an example, the cryllic lowercase "а" looks the same as the small latin letter "a" that most people use.
These characters are called "lookalikes", and what Scrawl does is that it has a big list of these lookalikes for every latin letter. It then runs through every letter and randomly replaces it with a random character, so you get completely different characters that look exactly the same!
Part Two: The Invisible Character Copyright
So, onto your actual question, I wanted to find a way to encode copyright information into your text in a way that couldn't be easily found, so that people who just copy and paste stories to steal credit would be inadvertently also copying the real author's information.
As it turns out, Unicode has some special characters that you're never meant to see in day to day use, such as character U+200C, also known as the "ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER" character. This character is completely invisible, and has no width (meaning that it doesn't move other characters around.
In fact, here's one of these characters: "". There are so many of these characters, that you can actually encode numbers in them! You've probably heard of binary, or maybe hexadecimal. Both of these are numbering systems, with binary having 2 possible digits, decimal having 10, and hexadecimal having 16!
Now, because some of these characters do strange things, it's not really possible to do all of them, in fact, Scrawl uses about 9 different invisible characters, so we need to use octal a system that has 8 possible digits, and we can use the last one as a separator!
So basically, in the same way that letters are encoded into numbers (like we said in Part One), we can change the text that the user puts into the copyright boxes into numbers, then change the numbering system of those numbers, and finally use a lookup table to convert the number 0 to the character "" and so on.
We can then do the same thing in reverse to get back the information later when we get text that's been encoded before.
I feel like there’s a lot of stuff coming to light lately about ao3’s glacial pace at adopting transparent and actionable antiracist policies (and the fact that a longtime head of the abuse team who helped draft their abuse moderation bylaws was documentably quite racist herself). And on the one had, like what you brought up about it taking a while for the archive to address the AI issue because of organization size and slow ability to pivot, I can see why it took some time to iron out the code etc for the new block mute functions. But on the other hand, I feel like not much else has happened, and more volunteers are coming forward about it having been a kind of catty and clandestinely bullying environment. Since you’ve been active for a long time and run an (albeit much smaller) archive of your own (pun, haha), I was wondering if you had any thoughts on this. And if there’s anything unique or cool in the SWG bylaws or structure to either prevent this sort of 1) buildup of crappy user behavior and 2) insular and punitive moderator culture, or if you’ve dealt with anything similar on the site etc etc. and maybe if you have any advice for folks who want to open their own archive or who just mod a large discord etc etc.
Oh yes, anon, I have tons of thoughts and ideas, and thank you for these wonderful questions! <3
First of all ...
ao3’s glacial pace
I recently wrote about the OTW’s fumbling of the AI issue and compared change on a large organization to port-rounding the Titanic. The AI issue is an apt illustration of that. In the time it took for the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild to 1) decide we needed an AI policy, 2) write said AI policy, 3) open it for public commentary, and 4) research how to block and then implement blocks on AI scrapers to the best of our abilities (since this will never be 100% since not all scrapers follow the rules), the OTW managed to ... assure a distressed membership base that the thing they were worrying about (AI scraping) had been blocked in December. Why did it take a week just to say, “Hey guys, we actually did this months ago”? When we (with far fewer resources!) took the exact same span of time and managed to write a policy, release it, and research and implement AI bot blocks?
Part of it is that, yes, smaller orgs have the ability to be more nimble. On the SWG, there is me at the helm, three active site mods, and two Discord mods who work on policy, involving volunteers (like our inclusivity focus group) as needed. We generally go with a majority rule, and we’re not bogged down by the legal obligations of a nonprofit as far as our governance. But it also reaches a point where the size of an organization is not the only reason why it can actually get things done, and when it takes a week to offer reassurance to your membership that you have in fact done what they want, it really begs the question of whether that organization is able to effectively function at all.
Without commenting on the viability of the specific demands of @end-otw-racism, they are absolutely right that three years is too long to go without action. That's absurd, and it’s hard to see it as anything but thinking that the right words following George Floyd’s murder were all that would be required and hoping that promises of actual action would be forgotten. Actually, I’m more sympathetic to the time to implement new block/mute code than I am to the failure of the Board to take the promised action against racist harassment within the OTW: the coders are purely volunteer, not elected, and the burnout of “techno-volunteers” is a known reality (e.g., De Kosnik 2016) of running fandom sites because it is a hard job, invisible and unappreciated, and it is never done. I know that I have new features and improvements on my to-do list for the SWG for more than a year now because maintaining the current site and fixing it when it breaks takes priority and a lot of my time. So when coders take a while to get something done? Okay, fair. But the Board? Were the ones who promised action that they don’t seem to have actually intended to take. In even the most cumbersome organization, we should be seeing goals set and progress, in however small steps, being made toward those goals. In three years.
if there’s anything unique or cool in the SWG bylaws or structure to either prevent this sort of 1) buildup of crappy user behavior
I think the OTW/AO3 and the SWG begin from completely different philosophical foundations.
I’ve been in Tolkien fanfic fandom since 2004 and founded the SWG in 2005, so at the risk of being all “I was there, Gandalf” ... I was there when the OTW and AO3 were first being discussed, largely lurking but definitely following the discussions. And I was there for the content purges on LiveJournal and FanFiction.net that precipitated those discussions, and I was a part of fandom when writing adult content--especially LGBTQIA+ adult content--was risky business, both within fandom and “IRL.” From this climate (and the fear it created) came the OTW and AO3: the idea that “we own the servers and run the organization so we can accept everything that is a fanwork on our site,” and fans would no longer need to fear waking up and finding years of their work gone in a single deletion spree motivated by gratifying fans who ascribe to purity culture or advertisers or anyone.
The OTW’s mission, in their own words: “The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms” (emphasis mine). The aim of the OTW (and consequently AO3) is and has always been to archive everything. They are a universal archive on order of Project Gutenberg or Archive.org. The OTW’s FAQ calls AO3 “fandom’s deposit library” (“Is the OTW trying to replace all other archives?”). In other words, the primary purpose is storing as many fanworks as possible, regardless of the content of those fanworks.
Yes, this means the OTW considers AI-generated fanworks as legitimate. Yes, this means that the OTW considers fanworks with blatantly racist (or sexist or homophobic or transphobic or ...) content as legitimate. The parallel I keep drawing is to the ACLU, which prioritizes civil liberties in the same way that the OTW prioritizes fanworks preservation, which leads them to sometimes end up defending reprehensible people and viewpoints (and fanworks). They prioritize a principle above the harm that principle, taken to its logical extreme, could cause to people who are by and large already marginalized in and therefore harmed by society. That is not a critique of either organization, just a statement of fact, and this is where I feel like fans hoping for increased moderation or oversight of fanworks posted on AO3 are banging their heads against the wall. The OTW will never be that place; their very mission and reason for existence forbids it.
The problem is that, for most fans and fandoms, AO3 is their only option as an archive. Which brings me to the SWG ...
The SWG (which opened its archive in 2007, two years before AO3 entered open beta) originated during the same fandom era as AO3. The key difference is that where OTW/AO3 focused on fanworks and the values they embraced around the worth of all fanworks, the SWG focused on people and creating a fandom space that was open, welcoming, and civil. The Tolkien fandom was also a pretty messed-up place at the time. There were dozens of small, Tolkien-specific archives, most of which imposed some sort of content restriction, either in the sense of what they focused on (like the SWG focuses on Silmarillion fanworks) or in excluding certain content, such as adult-rated fanworks or slash. This certainly caused its share of hard feelings but I wouldn’t say was a problem in and of itself: There were so many archives and communities that there was someplace for everyone. The larger issue, from my perspective (as a new Tolkien fan when I started the SWG in 2005) was that bullying and harassment were extremely common in some places; homophobia and misogyny were acceptable under the guise of “canonicity” or “respect for Tolkien”; discussing racism, sexism/misogyny, homophobia, etc. in Tolkien’s works or in the fandom was Just Not Done in many spaces (you’d get pelted with a barrage of Tolkien Couldn’t Have Been Racist/Sexist/Etc. and Here’s Why if you tried); and new fans or fans who didn’t have full access to the texts were looked down upon and mistreated under the pretense of “correcting their canon.” Again, Tolkien fanworks fandom was very large and diverse, so this was certainly not all groups or sites, but it was true of many of the larger ones.
On the SWG, we decided we didn’t want to perpetuate this culture, so we set out to create guidelines (which we call our Site Etiquette) that prioritized civility and inclusivity. Again, we come from the same era of fandom history as the OTW, so we also ended up accepting most fanworks, but where we differ from the OTW and AO3 is that maximizing the fanworks we accept is not our priority. Instead,
Abusive or derogatory behavior will not be tolerated at any time or in any part of the SWG. We do not welcome or allow any content in our group that is designed to be hurtful or insulting.
This has been a part of our Site Etiquette since our archive’s inception, and it has persisted, unchanged, because it easily allows for the exclusion of anything--like the openly racist content identified on AO3 by End OTW Racism--that makes our group a hostile place for our members. We do also put the responsibility on our members to curate their own browsing experience on our archive:
Members are not required to like everyone, but they are required to be civil. If you dislike a fanwork, stop reading it and do not comment. If you dislike another member, do not interact with them.
To that end, we provide a number of warning tags that creators are expected to use (or else label their fanwork “Choose Not to Warn”), which includes a tag for “In-Universe Intolerance.” Unlike AO3, if a fanwork is mislabeled, the mods will work with the creator to assure that it is labeled correctly so that it meets the creator’s needs but also preserves visitors’ rights to curate what they read/view. That doesn’t mean that these systems will be perfectly implemented or will always meet everyone’s needs, but we have found that they generally do, in part because joining the SWG means you are agreeing to participate on an archive where civility and inclusivity are primary values.
Implied in all of the above but important to state, too, is that the SWG is a moderated community and site. We do not review everything posted to our site, but we will respond to “flags” or other reports of fanworks that violate our site guidelines, and on our Discord and other community spaces, we do hold our members to our standards around civility and inclusivity. We do address member behavior (mostly on our Discord) that creates a hostile culture, and we do ban members who demonstrate that they are unwilling to work on culling that behavior from their interactions on our spaces. That is not a preference and it is thankfully rare when we have to do so, but again, it becomes an option when you’re not looking at a person’s participation as the creation of a valuable cultural artifact that you are obligated to preserve but in terms of its impact on others who share those community spaces with them.
2) insular and punitive moderator culture
I honestly don’t see this as able to become an issue on a small site the way it appears to have become on the OTW.
By that, I don’t mean that small sites are incapable of having leadership who are cliquish, punitive, abusive, unresponsive, or any of the other charges levied against members of the OTW Board and leadership. However, the impact on a smaller site is much different than on a larger site: It’s easier for members to walk away.
There were definitely dysfunctional sites and groups in the Tolkien fanworks fandom’s history. What tended to happen is ... they didn’t last long. People went elsewhere with their stories and participation (because there were other places to go), the site’s reputation began to precede it so that people avoided it, and eventually it was just the rarefied few who had made it a miserable place to begin with making misery among themselves, which is really an ideal situation, when you really think about it. (In less extreme examples, my fandom history research using data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey has shown that users of small Tolkien archives tended to select where they posted on the basis of how the archive’s culture aligned with their own values.)
AO3, on the other hand, has developed a near-gravitational force in the fanworks world. Almost everyone uses it because we’ve reached a point where there are no other options for many fans. If you are in one of the few fandoms (like Tolkien) that still has independent archives, you can go there. If you can meet the content guidelines of FanFiction.net or Wattpad, those become options. But for many, AO3 is it. I guarantee there are many people right now, looking on at what is happening on the OTW with dismay, interested in at least crossposting elsewhere, but who have no place to go.
No one needs the SWG in the way that that need AO3; it is an “only option” for no one. Therefore, my comods and I, by necessity, have to create a site and community that people want to be a part of, and part of that (for us) is through our leadership: hearing and responding to our members’ needs, inviting member input wherever possible in our decision-making process, and being transparent in our decisions.
And again, so much of this comes back to our intentional work to create a community culture of civility and inclusivity and the fact that people who join us generally value those things as well. The SWG is a community archive, not a universal archive (to borrow De Kosnik’s terminology); it derives from our community values, collectively agreed upon, not the prioritization of massing as much relevant content onto our servers as possible in the interest of preservation and legitimization. (I have had, several times, conversations with people that led with, “I need you to consider if the values of this group are a good fit for you,” which is not a conversation that could happen on AO3, with its different goals.) Because we all agree on these central values when beginning our work, all of us--members and moderators alike--can generally work together to achieve our goals. That doesn’t mean that we always agree! The recent discussion of our AI policy is an example of discussions that got pretty intense at times. But I saved each of the three drafts of the policy as it evolved via the Wayback Machine, and those red comments at the top? Were by and large based on member contributions during the two-week discussion period. They, not the mods, were the reason the document ended up as complete and good as it was. But again, this can be done on a group that has, at most, several dozen active, participating members at one time. It is not possible on a site the size of AO3.
And again, if I disappointed the expectations of the SWG members? I know they would go elsewhere, and that is a pretty strong motivator to keeping them at the forefront of every decision I make.
if you have any advice for folks who want to open their own archive or who just mod a large discord etc etc.
I do! I wrote about the tech side of starting an archive here. Unfortunately, it’s pretty bleak right now, but I have hope that that could change. My exhortation to those dissatisfied with what’s going on with the OTW right now is to consider supporting small fandom sites and web development projects in any way you can, whether that’s donating money, providing tech skills or otherwise volunteering, or just making sure that you signal-boost and promote these projects when you can. (Seriously, when I see people link to a fanwork on the SWG instead of AO3, I want to send them a Valentine.) I am now less than three weeks from summer break and plan to spend that summer break trying to make the tech options less bleak. Watch this space.
As far as the non-tech side, I’d suggest first of all deciding who you want to be. What are your values? As I’ve said at several points in this (very long) post, the SWG values civility and inclusivity. We look at everything through that lens. That doesn’t mean that moderation decisions are made easy, but they are certainly made easier and more consistent/fair.
Once you know your values, be clear in what you expect from members/participants and hold them to it. Writing conduct guidelines is hard and is usually an ongoing process, but it is time well spent and, if done conscientiously, makes running a site or community much easier. It can be easy to be overwhelmed by a sense of urgency (“we needed to build this yesterday!!”) but spending a bit of time on this step will save you time and headache later.
Next: Moderation is not a dirty word. We, as Fandom, have gotten so used to these large, sprawling spaces like AO3 and Tumblr that are essentially unmoderated that we’ve forgotten that there was a time in the not-so-distant past where moderation was the norm. Again, that is not a panacea--there were plenty of awful “moderated” communities--but if you moderate with your community values and expectations in mind, you begin to build the culture you want to see.
Probably the biggest piece of advice I have is to think hard on the question: Do you really want to do this? Running a website or even a large community is a commitment. I do not have biological children, but I have pets and I have been a foster parent, and do you know what is the closest to a parenting commitment that I have? The SWG.
It is a lot of work, the work is often hard, it is usually thankless or invisible, and the buck stops with you. There is no higher-up to pass a responsibility off to. I have lost many evenings and days off to issues that arose out of nowhere with the site and that it was my responsibility to fix. Not gonna lie, that can be a bummer, and it’s worth asking if you’re up for it. A lot of small Tolkien archives died because of a combination of AO3, the ending of Yahoo! Groups, and plain loss of interest in those in charge of running them. This has contributed to the situation we are now in, where AO3 is the only option for many people, who are now not sure that they want all of their eggs in that basket, and yet here we are. Just like it’s 2008 again, and we’re wringing our hands over the lack of viable choices.
So just like taking on any large commitment, make sure you have what supports you need in place (who can help you? who would you rely on as a comod or coadmin? what are your limitations and how can you account for those in your plans?), do your due diligence to set your values and expectations, and then ... you do it.
Remember, it can be done. Many, many fans have done it before, and we can do it again.
this is an earnest and honest plea and call in especially to fandoms as i see it happen more - please don't use AI for your transformative works. by this i mean, making audios of actors who play the characters you love saying certain things, making deepfakes of actors or even animated characters' faces. playing with chatGPT to "talk" or RP with a character, or write funny fanfiction. using stable diffusion to make interesting "crossover" AI "art." i KNOW it's just for fun and it is seemingly harmless but it's not. since there is NO regulation and since some stuff is built off of stable diffusion (which uses stolen artwork and data), it is helping to create a huge and dangerous mess. when you use an AI to deepfake actors' voices to make your ship canon or whatever, you help train it so people can use it for deepfake revenge porn. or so companies can replace these actors with AI. when you RP with chatGPT you help train it to do LOTS of things that will be used to harm SO many people. (this doesn't even get into how governments will misuse and hurt people with these technologies) and yes that is not your fault and yes it is not the technology's fault it is the companies and governments that will and already have done things but PLEASE. when you use an AI snapchat or instagram or tiktok filter, when you use an AI image generator "just for fun", when you chat with your character's "bot," you are doing IRREPARABLE harm. please stop.
This is the same program that had a near 60% fatality rate among its test animals because they were using glue (medical grade but NOT brain safe) to hold the fucking chips in place.
Test animals died horrifically after having GLUE POURED IN THEIR BRAINS. Some died of infection in the head wound. Some killed themselves by ripping off their own body parts. Some died when the glue failed and the chip started causing hemorrhages. In one fucked case, they gust put the wrong chips entirely into dozens of animals by mistake, killing them.
If even a single test chimp dies in a normal program, it's halted immediately.
He killed DOZENS and now he's moving on to humans.
He does not perceive anything outside himself as alive.
Brain-implant company accused of causing needless suffering and deaths amid pressure from CEO
A public records request by an animal rights group revealed a shocking death rate among primate test subjects. “Extreme Suffering”: 15 of 23
This will kill almost everyone who tries it. Do not sign up for it. Do not let your loved ones sign up for it.
This is a rich man tricking the poor into suicide for his amusement.
Genuinely there is no benefit to having this done anyway. What are you hoping to accomplish by buying this. Google with your mind? Unskippable ads in your brain? Neurological hacks? I mean really even if it were safe (it isn’t, he just has enough money to bribe the FDA I guess) this wouldn’t be a benefit to you at all.
But yes, definitely do not sign up for the clinical study. I don’t care how much he offers to pay you. Money means little in the coffin.
Neural interfaces could have many, MANY useful applications. From being able to control sensory signals to reduce overload or pain according to a person's needs, to allowing for a person to regain motor control after nerve damage, etc. or even to simulate certain sensory signals to allow for sensations from certain synthetic materials so that a person could gain certain sensation (such as heat, or pressure) in synthetic limbs?
Yes, I have been informed this has been marketed towards disabled people.
Which is significantly more concerning.
Because if you ask yourself why the rich white man who grew up benefitting from apartheid and slave labor would be interested in implanting chips into the brains of the disabled, and you see how many trial animals died or were permanently mentally disturbed, the answer you come up with isn’t usually simple philanthropy.
I don’t trust that this is just incompetence and delusions of grandeur at this point. It feels purposeful when the victims are a severely marginalized group of people rather than his rabid fans.
We are not scientifically at a point where brain implants can be used to benefit the disabled, and even if the chips didn’t kill patients and worked as the manufacturer intended, it would open the door to far less ethical uses for that sort of technology.
Specifically, if your brain can send signals to a chip to do something for you, that won’t be a one-way street. Perhaps on the first day it will be used to give new freedoms to disabled people. By the third it will reach its natural conclusion as certain people realize you can use it to try to “cure” autism, or perhaps “cure” queerness. Not to mention how easy an interrogation would be if a person’s thoughts could be admissible in court, or if they can simply type a line of code to make a suspect feel the sensation of being on fire for twenty minutes if they don’t comply. Workers not productive enough? Just press the button that blocks all thoughts and memories irrelevant to work until their shift ends. Inhibit parts of the brain related to bond forming and rest, inhibit pain processing while you’re in there so if a worker is injured they only notice when they’re off the clock and don’t have to slow down.
I’m aware this sounds cartoonishly evil, but the USA is cartoonishly evil already. Any positive implication for this is strongly outweighed by the negatives.
“Only rich kids played with Barbie” is just an absolute insane take. Literally every family had at least one Barbie at some point. Like ok if you had like walls lined with tons of different Barbies you were probably rich but I cannot stress enough that turning “playing with Barbie” into a bourgeoisie thing is just ahistorical to the point that stupidity is the only explanation
The $5 bargain Barbie, and the even cheaper bargain store rip-offs, were absolutely a thing. Also, Barbie has been around forever, and the further back you go, the sturdier the dolls become. Could my family afford to get me brand new Barbies? No. But I had my mother's Barbies, and my aunt's Barbies, and various Barbies from garage sales and flea markets.
"Only rich kids had brand new" is a statement that can apply to anything, but I assure you, children of all socioeconomic classes had access to Barbie. Not 100% of children, but children.
Nah in '90s Indonesia only rich kids can have a wall lined up with Barbie dolls. Knock offs came after them though so now almost everyone can have barbie-like toys at home
Speaking of fanfiction.net, did you know that while it was seven years ago and therefore obviously well out of date (though given the declining traffic over the past few years, that's not the biggest issue), some insane person (positive) on archive.org managed to do the unthinkable and archive a full snapshot of the site despite its infamous unarchivability; I didn't until I went looking for if anyone had good tips on downloading from there easily and found a reddit thread from 2016. It's here. So while I continue to fret about how goddamn difficult archiving the website in full will ever be when it inevitably collapses on us randomly, at the very least we have a snapshot of it as of 2016, in fact.
I just saw perhaps the coolest art installation I have ever heard of.
This is a perfectly normal pin. On the head of it are 2.417 quintillion angels, give or take a few billion.
Joe Davis and Sarah Khan, the artist behind Baitul Ma’mur, (House of Angels) encoded the Arabic phrase “Subhan Allah” onto synthesized DNA, and then used that DNA to coat the head of a pin. According to some traditions, any time Subhan Allah is said or written, it creates an angel. With DNA being as dense an information storage medium as it is, this single pin has more created angels on it than have ever been born from human throats across all of human history.
And then in a fucking genius move, the art installation takes the form of a functional vending machine, loaded with an impossibly large quantity of angels. For $25, which goes right to the artists, you can buy a pin. I’m thinking about taking mine out of the test tube sometime and encasing it in resin to turn it into the highest % angel by volume earring ever worn, but that’s a project for the future.
There isn’t much else I can say that isn’t said by the documentation accompanying the exhibit. The photos aren’t the BEST quality but they should hopefully be mostly legible.
As of right now this installation is located at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and if you’re ever in the area you should totally check it out
Okay, this is very weird. The green leafy thing is what I’m seeing but apparently there are multiple people who can still access the site? I’m very confused right now.
I did not have access to fanfiction.net on my phone. Did have access to m.fanfiction.net. On my desktop PC, I’ve got access to both. Might be some sort of technical issue but if you have fic up there that you haven’t crossposted or saved, now is a good time to do it!
It’s somewhat difficult to download fics off fanfiction.net or even to copy-paste, so here is a link to a web-based downloader that will download fics from ff.net to your format of choice - it automatically downloads as an epub, but you can also get downloads for mobi, pdf, or zipped html. this side is also compatible with a number of other text-based fanfiction sites. this is what i’m using to archive my earliest fanfictions - 2002 and 2003!
ICYMI, there was fear that companies were scraping public AO3 fics to train their AI without the consent of AO3 or its users. That fear has been confirmed.
AO3 has written about what they’re doing (and what they’re not able to do), and they recommend restricting your work to AO3 registered users only. [Instructions here]
This gross misuse of the archive by techbros is why I’ve locked down my fics for the foreseeable future. I recommend the rest of you do the same.
The Silmarillion Writers' Guild just recently opened its draft AI policy for comment, and one thing people wanted was for us, if possible, to block AI bots from scraping the SWG website. Twelve hours ago, I had no idea if it was possible! But I spent a few hours today researching the subject, and the SWG site is now much more locked down against AI bots than it was this time yesterday.
I know I am not the only person with a website or blog or portfolio online that doesn't want their content being used to train AI. So I thought I'd put together what I learned today in hopes that it might help others.
First, two important points:
I am not an IT professional. I am a middle-school humanities teacher with degrees in psychology, teaching, and humanities. I'm self-taught where building and maintaining websites is concerned. In other words, I'm not an expert but simply passing on what I learned during my research today.
On that note, I can't help with troubleshooting on your own site or project. I wouldn't even have been able to do everything here on my own for the SWG, but thankfully my co-admin Russandol has much more tech knowledge than me and picked up where I got lost.
Step 1: Block AI Bots Using Robots.txt
If you don't even know what this is, start here:
About /robots.txt
How to write and submit a robots.txt file
If you know how to find (or create) the robots.txt file for your website, you're going to add the following lines of code to the file. (Source: DataDome, How ChatGPT & OpenAI Might Use Your Content, Now & in the Future)
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /
AND
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /
Step Two: Add HTTPS Headers/Meta Tags
Unfortunately, not all bots respond to robots.txt. Img2dataset is one that recently gained some notoriety when a site owner posted in its issue queue after the bot brought his site down, asking that the bot be opt-in or at least respect robots.txt. He received a rather rude reply from the img2dataset developer. It's covered in Vice's An AI Scraping Tool Is Overwhelming Websites with Traffic.
Img2dataset requires a header tag to keep it away. (Not surprisingly, this is often a more complicated task than updating a robots.txt file. I don't think that's accidental. This is where I got stuck today in working on my Drupal site.) The header tags are "noai" and "noimageai." These function like the more familiar "noindex" and "nofollow" meta tags. When Russa and I were researching this today, we did not find a lot of information on "noai" or "noimageai," so I suspect they are very new. We used the procedure for adding "noindex" or "nofollow" and swapped in "noai" and "noimageai," and it worked for us.
Header meta tags are the same strategy DeviantArt is using to allow artists to opt out of AI scraping; artist Aimee Cozza has more in What Is DeviantArt's New "noai" and "noimageai" Meta Tag and How to Install It. Aimee's blog also has directions for how to use this strategy on WordPress, SquareSpace, Weebly, and Wix sites.
In my research today, I discovered that some webhosts provide tools for adding this code to your header through a form on the site. Check your host's knowledge base to see if you have that option.
You can also use .htaccess or add the tag directly into the HTML in the <head> section. .htaccess makes sense if you want to use the "noai" and "noimageai" tag across your entire site. The HTML solution makes sense if you want to exclude AI crawlers from specific pages.
Here are some resources on how to do this for "noindex" and "nofollow"; just swap in "noai" and "noimageai":
HubSpot, Using Noindex, Nofollow HTML Metatags: How to Tell Google Not to Index a Page in Search (very comprehensive and covers both the .htaccess and HTML solutions)
Google Search Documentation, Block Search Indexing with noindex (both .htaccess and HTML)
AngryStudio, Add noindex and nofollow to Whole Website Using htaccess
Perficient, How to Implement a NoIndex Tag (HTML)
Finally, all of this is contingent on web scrapers following the rules and etiquette of the web. As we know, many do not. Sprinkled amid the many articles I read today on blocking AI scrapers were articles on how to override blocks when scraping the web.
This will also, I suspect, be something of a game of whack-a-mole. As the img2dataset case illustrates, the previous etiquette around robots.txt was ignored in favor of a more complicated opt-out, one that many site owners either won't be aware of or won't have time/skill to implement. I would not be surprised, as the "noai" and "noimageai" tags gain traction, to see bots demanding that site owners jump through a new, different, higher, and possibly fiery hoop in order to protect the content on their sites from AI scraping. These folks serve to make a lot of money off this, which doesn't inspire me with confidence that withholding our work from their grubby hands will be an endeavor that they make easy for us.
Nah you guys don’t get it. For all that Gandalf complained about Pippin, he better than anyone else knew that Pippin was absolutely crucial. Pippin accomplishes a very impressive feat: not only does he manage to see something in the palantír (most hobbits would perceive nothing, as these stones were designed for use by high elves), but he manages to close his mind against Sauron. That is a seriously impressive feat of ósanwë given Pippin’s youth and almost total inexperience. The only clue Sauron manages to glean from the meeting with Pippin is that he is in Meduseld: which Pippin probably did not even directly give to him. Pippin did not tell Sauron his name, so Sauron is led to believe that Pippin is Frodo. I remind you, in the books, the Good Guys manage to trick Sauron, by making him believe that Aragorn has claimed the One Ring. They can only do that because of Pippin’s ridiculous feat of ósanwë. Far from sabotaging the mission, he is the one who allows it to succeed (albeit, not on purpose). This is why Sauron doesn’t think anything is fishy when Aragorn wins the Battle of the Pelennor Fields by controlling ghosts: that would be consistent with the idea that he is using the One Ring. Which Sauron believes that Pippin brought to him. This is why Sauron pulls out his old “play nice and weak” card from his Númenor days. He first of all believes that Aragorn is a lot more powerful than he actually is, and secondly thinks that the Ring is beginning to affect him.
He should perhaps have remembered that Aragorn is named for Fingolfin. Fingolfin’s mother-name, Arakáno, would properly be translated to Sindarin as “Aragorn”. Most people would not show up to an enemy fortress with an army they knew was far too small, and start a battle they knew they would lose. But Fingolfin famously did exactly that.
When you read the line “fool of a Took!” It is important to understand that in the context of Gandalf calling himself a fool on several occasions. Galadriel too sees beyond the veneer of foolish naivety in Pippin. She gives him and Merry belts that almost definitely were once her brothers’. A golden flower on a gift from Galadriel can only be a golden lily, the sigil of the House of Finarfin. Galadriel, while all hell was breaking loose in Tirion, raided her brothers’ rooms and took their belts from when they were little kiddos, hauled them across the Helcaraxë, and then held onto them for three Ages before giving them to two hobbits she just met. Merry, of course, is comparable to Angrod and Aegnor: his great deed is done in a moment of beserk rage, and it is a feat of strength. This then implies that she is comparing Pippin to Finrod. That’s one hell of a complement coming from Galadriel: but as I just pointed out, entirely warranted. Pippin manages to reproduce Finrod’s feat of radio silence, in the face of torture by Sauron. Which again, is extremely impressive given that Pippin is far younger and less experienced than Finrod was.
Quick PSA, if you get one of those "Work scanned, AI use detected" comments on AO3, just mark them as spam.
Some moron apparently built a bot to annoy or prank hundreds of authors.
There is no scanning process, your work doesn't actually resemble AI writing, it's all bullshit. Mark the comment as spam (on AO3, not the email notification you got about the comment!) and don't let it get to you.
They are now also linking to a site they claim is able to scan works and tell you whether they were AI written or not, and that you should do that before reading a fic.
It should go without saying that you should not, under no circumstances, visit a site advertised in a spam comment.
In this case, I'd say there's even a chance that the "scanning" site is actually used to scrape fics and use them for future AI writing. What it definitely doesn't do is tell you whether something was AI written or not. That's a bullshit claim.
Don't use that site. Don't believe these spam comments, whether you get them on your own works or see them on someone else's.
Image Description: a screenshot of an AO3 comment by nlaoboh that says HoloAI pattern found in work. To all readers, before you read please scan the work with an AI detector like gowinston.ai and call out all AI using cheaters /end ID
a superior mirage caused by warm air resting on patches of colder air in an atmospheric duct that acts like a refracting lens. Objects on the horizon could appear to be mirrored, distorted, or float. This form of mirage could be the reason for the Flying Dutchman Legend.
