It's not a new phenomenon at all, but I want to point out a few anons that I've seen floating around. they generally follow the format of "hey, [username] did something similar, "you should credit them"/"they're copying you"/"why is everyone doing this trope?"
fandom is a potluck. we're here to share what we've made with our community. please stop trying to pit authors and artists and creatives against each other. in general, we're not in competition. we like what we like and we share what we like with other people who like what we like. that means that a fandom can end up with a lot of similar ideas floating around, but they're unique to each individual author.
also (and this could just be my corner of things) we talk to each other. if we want credit we ask for it, but more often than that, we ask "do you want me to credit you for this?" in the middle of a long text thread. we thank each other, we share resources, we remind each other of past ideas we were so excited about, and we cheer each other on.
unless you're seeing genuine plagiarism please just enjoy the potluck.
if you read this far, please go leave a nice comment on something you've liked today.
Don't repost other people's work without the permission of the creator. For any reason. Yes, even that super duper great reason that you just thought of. Yes, even you, the person with nothing but good intentions.
If you're worried about fanworks getting deleted or lost, reach out the the OTW Open Doors project so they can do everything possible to reach out to creatives and their communities to preserve those works.
Feeding your favorite artist's or writer's work into any form of gen ai feels profoundly sad to me. It's like... Taking popcorn we've popped to share with anyone who wants some, carrying a sack of it outside of the room, and feeding it through a machine that produces... stale, slightly damp popcorn. And all of the reasons given are things like "I couldn't wait for the next part" or "I don't know how to write myself" or "I don't want other people involved in my fandom experience, I just want this template."
Do you really dislike us that much? Are we so bad and scary?
Every author that I've ever spoken to by saying "hey, I really love this aspect of your work," has been really kind and excited to talk to me about it. So many people here dedicate hours at a time to talk about their head cannons and play in the sandbox with anyone who bothers to answer a question, via text and art and audio. Not everyone can, but it's fun when we do. And every single one of them would love to talk about their process, how they got to where they are, and any resources or exercises they use.
Is it that you don't believe we don't deserve the time we need to make something we like enough to share it? We should give you content no matter what, on your schedule?
I don't have time to write as often as I would like because I work a very stressful job, and the mental toll can sometimes be... a lot. When I force myself to try to make anything in that condition, I end up with something I don't like. It takes time to get in the right mindset. And then it takes time to actually put the words down - even if I'm not editing much, I only write at about 20hsh words a minute. My boyfriend writes 2 thousand of words in a good day, but when each chapter is 3k+ words that is still more than a day of writing. The author's giving you 17, 18k words per update? They're amazing, and still people. We're not machines, literally, so... Let us have the time?
I think most people who use gen ai would say "no, that's not it!" But I think if that's you, you should ask yourself if you ever actually thought to ask yourself those questions.
‘Generative AI invites users to bypass mindfully engaging with the physical act of creating’ this hit me like a bag of fucking bricks, you’re a gem darling
I've been thinking about this again, and I want to expand.
A lot of us look at writing or making art as focused on the end goal. The point seems to be that final, publishable draft, the thing that makes us look at it and say "yeah, that's it! that's the idea, the feeling, i've captured it!"
But in our world of instant gratification, the sense of satisfaction involved with the process is diminished. The actual practice of creating, and learning how to create, has been framed as the thing "keeping" you from reaching the goal. It's almost a punishment - the time and effort is a cost to pay for an end product.
So of course people would try to reduce the time and effort. They think they're saving something by doing it. But the time and effort saved come at the cost of fun and connection and physical satisfaction.
This isn't a surprise. A lot of the things that are "good" for us have been muted and dulled and repackaged for "convenience" or "maturity" or a demonstration of "natural skill."
The easiest comparison I can make is movement. How many of us would look forward to moving if we were playing low-stakes kickball, or taking a walk and chatting with friends, or splashing and laughing in some water? Who remembers Pokemon Go summer, and how people were out and about? And how many of us have ever felt anxious, uncomfortable, or discouraged by the very idea of hopping on a treadmill or going to the gym? For a lot of us (me included) going to the gym feels like working toward a goal, not an actually fun time for its own sake.
Writing, in my experience, can be enjoyable as an action, not just a means to an end. I like writing! I love putting pen to paper, and I love the purple ink I use. I love my dot grid notebook, I love writing in messy cursive and rediscovering my penmanship. I love typing on my computer (except when my E key sticks when I'm typing really fast), and I like using scrivener and figuring out the music for the story I'm working on. I love using a thesaurus to look up just the right word. I love sharing a first draft with my partner, my boyfriend, my friends, and asking them "does that make sense?" so we can all laugh and screech and cackle. I love looking back on some of my writing and saying "what was I thinking????" I love rediscovering some of my favorite lines and saying "yeah, that? that slaps."
When you have generative ai make your process more "efficient," you don't learn what physically feels good about writing. You don't figure out what gives you those warm fuzzies, what makes you smile about your own action. And you deserve to feel good in that way.
Happy Juneteenth! A reminder that none are free until all are free, and slavery and subhuman treatment has never been stopped by legislation alone. It takes all of us to care about one another and commit to justice for all, actively, in the ways that we can.
Slaves were emancipated in 1863, but Antoinette Harrell says her genealogical research revealed many of them were kept on plantations, inclu
"1973 is really, really not long ago," Harrell said of when the modern day slaves finally left Waterford Plantation. "That's in my lifetime. I was 13 years old, and the history books are teaching me that slavery was abolished and Lincoln freed the slaves. Was this just on paper? What about the people left on Waterford Plantation? Whitney Plantation? The history books failed to teach us that slavery wasn't truly abolished, just on paper, but in actuality it was not for hundreds of thousands of people left behind."
In the wake of early announcing that their blog will no longer be posting fanfiction, I wanted to offer a different perspective than the ones I’ve been seeing in the argument against the use of AI in fandom spaces. Often, I’m seeing the arguments that the use of generative AI or Large Language Models (LLMs) make creative expression more accessible. Certainly, putting a prompt into a chat box and refining the output as desired is faster than writing a 5000 word fanfiction or learning to draw digitally or traditionally. But I would argue that the use of chat bots and generative AI actually limits - and ultimately reduces - one’s ability to enjoy creativity.
Creativity, defined by the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus, is the ability to produce or use original and unusual ideas. By definition, the use of generative AI discourages the brain from engaging with thoughts creatively. ChatGPT, character bots, and other generative AI products have to be trained on already existing text. In order to produce something “usable,” LLMs analyzes patterns within text to organize information into what the computer has been trained to identify as “desirable” outputs. These outputs are not always accurate due to the fact that computers don’t “think” the way that human brains do. They don’t create. They take the most common and refined data points and combine them according to predetermined templates to assemble a product. In the case of chat bots that are fed writing samples from authors, the product is not original - it’s a mishmash of the writings that were fed into the system.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is a therapy modality developed by Marsha M. Linehan based on the understanding that growth comes when we accept that we are doing our best and we can work to better ourselves further. Within this modality, a few core concepts are explored, but for this argument I want to focus on Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation. Mindfulness, put simply, is awareness of the information our senses are telling us about the present moment. Emotion regulation is our ability to identify, understand, validate, and control our reaction to the emotions that result from changes in our environment. One of the skills taught within emotion regulation is Building Mastery - putting forth effort into an activity or skill in order to experience the pleasure that comes with seeing the fruits of your labor. These are by no means the only mechanisms of growth or skill development, however, I believe that mindfulness, emotion regulation, and building mastery are a large part of the core of creativity. When someone uses generative AI to imitate fanfiction, roleplay, fanart, etc., the core experience of creative expression is undermined.
Creating engages the body. As a writer who uses pen and paper as well as word processors while drafting, I had to learn how my body best engages with my process. The ideal pen and paper, the fact that I need glasses to work on my computer, the height of the table all factor into how I create. I don’t use audio recordings or transcriptions because that’s not a skill I’ve cultivated, but other authors use those tools as a way to assist their creative process. I can’t speak with any authority to the experience of visual artists, but my understanding is that the feedback and feel of their physical tools, the programs they use, and many other factors are not just part of how they learned their craft, they are essential to their art.
Generative AI invites users to bypass mindfully engaging with the physical act of creating. Part of becoming a person who creates from the vision in one’s head is the physical act of practicing. How did I learn to write? By sitting down and making myself write, over and over, word after word. I had to learn the rhythms of my body, and to listen when pain tells me to stop. I do not consider myself a visual artist - I have not put in the hours to learn to consistently combine line and color and form to show the world the idea in my head.
But I could.
Learning a new skill is possible. But one must be able to regulate one’s unpleasant emotions to be able to get there. The emotion that gets in the way of most people starting their creative journey is anxiety. Instead of a focus on “fear,” I like to define this emotion as “unpleasant anticipation.” In Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown identifies anxiety as both a trait (a long term characteristic) and a state (a temporary condition). That is, we can be naturally predisposed to be impacted by anxiety, and experience unpleasant anticipation in response to an event. And the action drive associated with anxiety is to avoid the unpleasant stimulus.
Starting a new project, developing a new skill, and leaning into a creative endevor can inspire and cause people to react to anxiety. There is an unpleasant anticipation of things not turning out exactly correctly, of being judged negatively, of being unnoticed or even ignored. There is a lot less anxiety to be had in submitting a prompt to a machine than to look at a blank page and possibly make what could be a mistake. Unfortunately, the more something is avoided, the more anxiety is generated when it comes up again. Using generative AI doesn’t encourage starting a new project and learning a new skill - in fact, it makes the prospect more distressing to the mind, and encourages further avoidance of developing a personal creative process.
One of the best ways to reduce anxiety about a task, according to DBT, is for a person to do that task. Opposite action is a method of reducing the intensity of an emotion by going against its action urge. The action urge of anxiety is to avoid, and so opposite action encourages someone to approach the thing they are anxious about. This doesn’t mean that everyone who has anxiety about creating should make themselves write a 50k word fanfiction as their first project. But in order to reduce anxiety about dealing with a blank page, one must face and engage with a blank page. Even a single sentence fragment, two lines intersecting, an unintentional drop of ink means the page is no longer blank. If those are still difficult to approach a prompt, tutorial, or guided exercise can be used to reinforce the understanding that a blank page can be changed, slowly but surely by your own hand.
(As an aside, I would discourage the use of AI prompt generators - these often use prompts that were already created by a real person without credit. Prompt blogs and posts exist right here on tumblr, as well as imagines and headcannons that people often label “free to a good home.” These prompts can also often be specific to fandom, style, mood, etc., if you’re looking for something specific.)
In the current social media and content consumption culture, it’s easy to feel like the first attempt should be a perfect final product. But creating isn’t just about the final product. It’s about the process. Bo Burnam’s Inside is phenomenal, but I think the outtakes are just as important. We didn’t get That Funny Feeling and How the World Works and All Eyes on Me because Bo Burnham woke up and decided to write songs in the same day. We got them because he’s been been developing and honing his craft, as well as learning about himself as a person and artist, since he was a teenager. Building mastery in any skill takes time, and it’s often slow.
Slow is an important word, when it comes to creating. The fact that skill takes time to develop and a final piece of art takes time regardless of skill is it’s own source of anxiety. Compared to @sentientcave, who writes about 2k words per day, I’m very slow. And for all the time it takes me, my writing isn’t perfect - I find typos after posting and sometimes my phrasing is awkward. But my writing is better than it was, and my confidence is much higher. I can sit and write for longer and longer periods, my projects are more diverse, I’m sharing them with people, even before the final edits are done. And I only learned how to do this because I took the time to push through the discomfort of not being as fast or as skilled as I want to be in order to learn what works for me and what doesn’t.
Building mastery - getting better at a skill over time so that you can see your own progress - isn’t just about getting better. It’s about feeling better about your abilities. Confidence, excitement, and pride are important emotions to associate with our own actions. It teaches us that we are capable of making ourselves feel better by engaging with our creativity, a confidence that can be generalized to other activities.
Generative AI doesn’t encourage its users to try new things, to make mistakes, and to see what works. It doesn’t reward new accomplishments to encourage the building of new skills by connecting to old ones. The reward centers of the brain have nothing to respond to to associate with the action of the user. There is a short term input-reward pathway, but it’s only associated with using the AI prompter. It’s designed to encourage the user to come back over and over again, not develop the skill to think and create for themselves.
I don’t know that anyone will change their minds after reading this. It’s imperfect, and I’ve summarized concepts that can take months or years to learn. But I can say that I learned something from the process of writing it. I see some of the flaws, and I can see how my essay writing has changed over the years. This might have been faster to plug into AI as a prompt, but I can see how much more confidence I have in my own voice and opinions. And that’s not something chatGPT can ever replicate.
Me and my friends, at the fandom potluck: oh wow, I love your ghost macaroni and cheese, so flavorful. what? you made a price mac and cheese? amazing, 10/10. soapgaz mac with a bit of spice? i'm in love! and my ghost macaroni inspired you to make ghost spaghetti??? the flavor! the creativity! and you!!! you made 141 macaroni with penne noodles and it's VEGAN???? show me your ways, this is so good, oh wow oh wow oh wow.
some people, for some reason: ugh, why is there so much macaroni and cheese? hey, you, someone else already made macaroni and cheese!
