Hi. I definitely felt refreshed reading your hard stance and information on ai in your pinned, but irrelevant to that, I only found your blog today and I feel like I missed something with AI and whumptober. Can I learn about that? I hope my language makes sense.
In the late summer of 2023, an anonymous user asked the Whumptober blog if AI-generated content would be allowed for the event. This anon did not come from any of us, nor do we know who originally send this ask, but one of us did see Whumptober's response which kickstarted this entire thing.
Whumptober responded that they would not be disallowing AI because they "do not want to police how other people create things" and "didn't want to exclude anybody" but that they would "discourage" AI-generated content "because it feels like cheating" (all direct quotes). They said it was allowed in the AO3 collection and tag, they just didn't want to reblog it because it's "controversial".
Myself, the other mods, and several more people, were very disappointed in this stance. several of us started replying to the post and got into a back-and-forth with the Whumptober mods about why AI-generated content is harmful and bad. These posts and replies have since been mostly deleted by the Whumptober blog, nor do we want to rehash the entire thing, but some of the stances that Whumptober took that really rubbed us wrong were (again with direct quotes):
"AI-generated content is not art theft". When pointed out that these sorts of applications very much scrape content without consent, Whumptober claimed that it's the AI that steals then, not the person who uses the AI. They also claimed that since the AI already scraped the content, you "might as well use it", that defending against AI scraping is "going down on an already burning hill" and that "if you don't want your content scraped/stolen, just don't post it online". We found these very concerning statements from an event made by and for creators.
"AI-generated content is a fandom issue and nobody in the real world is harmed by it". This is, obviously, factually incorrect. When we pointed out real creators in many creative industries are being hit hard because of AI-generation, they said "that's capitalism's fault, not AI-generation" (???) and they also told us to "touch grass". They ignored anything we said about the impact of generative AI on the environment aside from saying it probably wasn't that big of a deal and humans already use electricity/water.
"These sort of AIs are an accessibility tool for the disabled, so disliking them is ableism". Again, this is incorrect. They tried to liken it to predictive text or spell check. We pointed out that there's a vast difference between those machine learning tools and actually generative AI that subsides on scraped content. We said disabled people (many of whom were involved in the back-and-forth) are sick of being used as a strawman by tech bros. They then said "real disabled people probably feel differently" which was a slap in the face, and honestly the statement that still is the most horrible to me about this whole thing.
This is the point where Whumptober started to block a bunch of us and delete asks/replies. They made a post that falsely made it seem like we were harassing and bullying them for saying that they "couldn't check every single entry for AI-generated content". We pointed out multiple times that we absolutely did not expect them to, since we're very aware that with the size of the Whumptober event, it would be impossible. We'd just like them to say 'AI-generated content is not allowed and it's art theft' but apparently they didn't want to.
After this one of the mods DMed me and asked me to send them some resources on why AI-generated content and scraping AI is bad, so they could educate themselves. We spent several minutes collecting sources (some linked in our pinned). They said the Whumptober mods would read them, and then come to a standpoint. But then within less than a minute of us sending the links, they deleted the remaining posts involved in the debate, and just told us they were sticking to their standpoint that "We will not police how people create things, we'll just discourage people by not reblogging it". They also added to their pinned that they won't ever respond to any asks about AI-generated content again. So that was that.
Somewhere during the argument, the Whumptober mods told us that if we disliked their stance so much, we should just make our own event. So we did.
(Edit to add: regardless on if whumptober does change their policy, we never received any sort of acknowledgement or apology for the above - especially the rampant ableism from a non-disabled mod (their words) to us, and we will keep running this event for whoever wants to.)
(Edit to add 2: as a cherry on the shitcake, we'd like the point out that Whumptober is now very much trying to hunker down and convince people that they never changed their stance and this has been their policy all along, after they quietly changed their FAQ to say that they won't reblog AI-generated content. While it's true that "we won't reblog AI-generated content" has always been part of the policy, 1) that doesn't change the fact that they did say it was allowed back then. It's also allowed in their AO3 collection. And 2) that doesn't change that the reason they don't reblog AI-generated content is because they 'feel it's cheating' and 'don't want to cause drama', and not because they're anti-ai. Them reblogging or not reblogging AI-generated content was never the issue. We do not appreciate that the events described are being made out to be a harrasment campaign from our side after they said they "Wouldn't allow/reblog AI" and we got pissy. That's not what happened.)
