Nine Lives statement on the use of generative AI in fanfic
Hey, lovely readers and writers:
We've been talking about the uptick in people using generative AI to "write" fanfic, and thought we should make clear our position about it. Below is our collective statement.
As part of this process we've updated Nine Lives' Terms of Service and clarified our policy on plagiarism.
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If you outsource the act of being a fan to AI, what does that leave you? Fan creators are powerful because they’re deeply participatory media consumers—they don’t passively absorb a work, but grab onto it and reshape it to their will.
Elizabeth Minkel, “Where the Wild Stories Are”
Nine Lives emphatically rejects the use of generative AI in creating and publishing fan fiction. Among the many other concerns about their use, sophisticated large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT pilfer and plagiarize the writing of creators without permission, credit, or compensation to churn out prose devoid of personality or author voice. Generative AI is replicative, not creative. It can rearrange the words and ideas found in the sources it is fed, even "sound" like the writing of a particular author, but it cannot come up with its own, original prose. There is no human mind involved in the process.
There are legitimate, often beneficial uses for AI, including making text accessible to people with a wide range of disabilities. But having a computer crank something out in response to a set of prompts and calling it "writing" - that's at best a pale imitation of the real thing, and in our opinion has no place in fandom.
We have updated our Terms of Service (TOS) to clarify that AI-generated works are not to be posted on the Nine Lives Archive, for two reasons: 1) Because AI-generated works are not your work; it’s a computer doing your thinking for you. The TOS already explicitly states that works published on the archive must be your own. And 2) because those LLMs were trained on the works of other writers, using AI to generate a Caryl story constitutes plagiarism, which is also already spelled out as being against the TOS.
That said: we don’t have the resources to police your work, and we don’t want people to report “violations”. We’re just going to say, “Please don’t use AI to generate fic at all, and specifically don’t use it to generate Caryl fic and post it on Nine Lives.”
As Tumblr user Mikkeneko puts it, “Generative AI… fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.”
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For background information, additional viewpoints and concerns, here are a few links, starting with the Ellipsus blog guest post where the quote at the beginning came from. (The Tumblr post contains links to information about the environmental impact of the data centers required by AI. If for no other reason, that impact should be enough to stop you from using AI.)
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