actually i'm going to use this post to talk about something that i've been thinking about a lot (for obvious reasons) which is gen AI in fanfic spaces! when i mentioned the above to a friend of mine (who i adore, but is in very different fandom spaces than this one) she suggested that i could cut the work down for myself and upload chapters 2 & 4 to chatgpt and ask it to create a chapter 3 that would tie everything together. "don't worry!" she said. "you can even give it plot beats to hit and dialogue to use to make sure it all goes quickly."
this was, as you can probably guess, an outrageous suggestion to me that i took a lot of offense to, but she had no idea why, and that really got me thinking about the two different fandom mindsets at play here and how they each work and i want to talk my way through it here and it's my blog so you can't stop me.
let's put aside the other arguments against generative AI like the environmental impact or the plagiarist way LLMs are trained (not because those aren't important or relevant! they very much are! they are a huge reason why generative AI is bad! they're just not the thing i want to talk about right now) and look at why i think my friend and i had such differing opinions on the topic: fandom as a creative space vs. fandom as a consumerist space.
from a consumerist lens, her suggestion makes perfect sense, right? if fandom is a place you go to consume content, a tool that makes finished content for you to consume quickly and with minimal effort is kind of a no-brainer, right? the disconnect we had is that, well, content and consumption are not the point of fandom for me, because for me, this is a creative space. my goal isn't to have as much finished work as possible available for others to read. my goal is to create something! that's the fun part for me! coming up with an idea and figuring out how to execute it and getting to play with imagery and wordcraft and themes is the whole point. why would i outsource that?
it makes me think about that famous clip of professional chef jamie oliver showing a group of young kids how fast food style chicken nuggets are made. he presents them with a basically nutritionless pink slurry that eventually gets breaded and deep-fried into the nuggets they know and love, and he asks them "how many of you still want to eat these?" and then every single child raises their hand while jamie oliver stares at them despondently.
now, i'm not a chef or a foodie, so the delicious chicken nuggets i definitely still eat are not really the point here. the point is: kids are not chefs and they do not care how the nuggets are made. you can show them the ugly process and it really doesn't change anything about their experience of the nugget, because they only consume it, they don't create it.
i think the fandom divide is kind of functioning in this same way. i don't know how to make the kids care about where the nuggets come from.
you could say maybe it boils down to readers vs. writers but there's always been more people who read fanwork than who write it. there's also, obviously, people who have been writers for much longer than generative AI has been around who have decided the content is more important than the process. if you've decided your goal is to have as many words posted to your ao3 as quickly as possible with as many hits and kudos as you can get, then, yeah, gen AI seems like a pretty easy way to achieve that.
i think fandoms at large need to figure out why that's become a goal for so many people. what are we (big we, like, societal we, media landscape we) doing that's encouraged this? what can we (small we, individual spaces, communities) do instead to make the process valuable to people, including the people who have no part in the process? i don't have the answer. it's easy to sit on the anti-AI hill and say that it's bad, as in both immoral AND low-quality, but saying that does nothing to make people not want chicken nuggets, whether you're making them or eating them.
i don't know! if they made an AI model that somehow trained itself entirely on its own and had zero environmental impact, i still wouldn't use it to create fanwork. i know most of you feel the same way. conversations focusing on how the nuggets are made seem sort of counter-productive in that respect. how do we teach people that cooking for yourself is the point? how do we present the skills as desirable beyond what they can provide for you at the end of the process?
i want to make something out of nothing, not to have something at the end, but to know that i made it. making it is the whole point. i wish more people felt the same.
