okay I have like zero reach on this site and this is almost certainly not going anywhere, BUT.
Friends, Romans, countrymen...tell me about YOUR weirdly specific beef with a piece of media because of their flagrant disregard of your personal area of expertise/niche interest.
I'm not talking about "I'm a biologist and I don't understand why Project Hail Mary is so great" type of things. Not the kind of thing where the entire work is premised on [thing you know very well] and you can tell the writer doesn't. I want the really niche stuff.
For example: One of my best friends attempted to read Fifty Shades of Grey to understand why everyone hated it so much. He called me and ranted at me for like fifteen minutes solid about how he couldn't finish it because it was so wildly inaccurate...because of a throwaway line in one of the first couple chapters where Anastasia incorrectly used a couple of neuroscience terms. He never even got to the sex part.
Another example: My brother once complained to a friend that a book he was reading was "totally unrealistic" because a character who had been missing for ten years and declared dead returned to the real world and was informed he'd been awarded the Nobel Prize for Mathematics, and even if there was a Nobel Prize for Mathematics (there isn't), posthumous nominations are not permitted and you have to be presumed to be alive as of the October announcements to be eligible. His friend looked at him, looked at the book, looked back at him, and said, "[Brother], it's about fucking elves."
I'm curious. Please reblog for reach because I wanna know if there are other things like this. Mostly for sick curiosity.
So far I am aware of three long running series that had an ending where people coped so hard that the theory that it was all in the protagonist's head or otherwise a dream became a fairly popular lens to look at the events of the game / series through:
Mass Effect 3's Indoctrination Theory (which I don't actually know if it ever became less popular / completely thrown out but when the game launched I remember it being pretty dang popular at the time).
Kingdom Hearts 3's Sleeping Realm Theory (which, again, I don't know if that ever fell off but I vaguely recall there being a minor fandom war over at the time. I remember reading it and not buying it fully, but that was definitely before Melody of Memory and probably before or around the time of Re:Mind so idk if my qualms got ironed out since it seems it's been continually updated since).
Whatever the hell was going on with Stranger Things (I don't go here, but I remember reading and seeing people do something similar and believed they would get another batch of episodes with the 'real ending').
I am sincerely curious to learn about other things that were like this in other fandoms. Full on theories people threw entire presentations and essays for to say 'this is what is actually going on!!!' that a decent number of folks believed, not something more akin to an AU or the Ash's Coma Theory from back in the day.
Ok am I the only one who doesn’t get the waterboy thing? I personally found him a little annoying (I guess over the top pathetic?) so I skipped him for Phenomaman. Waterboy just kinda made me cringe whenever he was a main part of a scene.
Did I miss something? Like is there something I’m not seeing here?
Like I read a lot of fanfic and I keep seeing Waterboy Slash. A lot of porn which I expected bc AO3, that’s prime kink right there, even if it’s not my thing but also a lot of really earnest relationship ones. And I just don’t get it? Is it mostly the kink? Did I miss a scene where he becomes really interesting?
(Like I read the tie-in comics too, it did not make me like him any more. I can’t get over the idea that he’d be just a bad touch, like an overly sweaty palm and it makes my skin crawl. Is this a sensory issue thing?)
THIS IS NOT HATE
Kink or no kink, either way, you do you, I’m just curious why everyone seems to like him so much?
Let’s talk about the oft-repeated accusation that AI is “stealing” or “plagiarising” content. It’s a loaded claim, designed to provoke — and like most loaded claims, it deserves careful unpacking.
🧠 When a Human Learns from Art…
Let’s say you read a novel. You love it. It influences how you think about pacing, dialogue, maybe even inspires a character or two in your own writing. That’s how humans learn: by absorbing, remixing, iterating. If you quote the novel directly without attribution, that’s plagiarism. But if you write something inspired by it — that’s transformative. That’s how all creative culture works.
We do not accuse someone of “stealing” when they say they were influenced by Dickens or Morrison or Kurosawa.
🤖 But When AI Learns the Same Way…
It doesn’t act like a pirate library or a photocopier, and it doesn’t normally regurgitate books word-for-word. What it does is learn patterns — structure, syntax, rhythm, pacing. In some edge cases models can reproduce memorised snippets, but that’s a technical and governance problem, not their primary behaviour.
Yet somehow, when an AI synthesises a new sentence influenced by its training data, we call it theft. Why?
⚖️ Where’s the Actual Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is about presenting someone else’s language or ideas as your own without proper credit — substantial uncredited copying of specific content. It’s an ethical and academic violation, not a technical process.
AI doesn’t intend anything. It has no authorship or ego; it just outputs patterns. Any ethical responsibility sits with the humans using it.
When a model reproduces verbatim text from training data, that’s a technical and governance problem — a risk to privacy and copyright that needs to be mitigated — not proof that every single output is theft.
🧂 A Dash of Hypocrisy?
You’ll often hear:
“AI is just scraping artists’ work and remixing it!”
But then we ask:
“Have you ever written fanfic? Used a prompt list? Played with visual references? Quoted a line in your fic title? Watched a tutorial? Written like your fave author for fun?”
Because if the answer is yes… congrats. You’re already engaging in transformative work, the same fundamental mechanism AI relies on. The only real difference? You're squishier.
🧾 “But AI Was Trained on Copyrighted Material Without Permission!”
This is the big one, isn’t it?
It’s true that many AI models were trained on large datasets scraped from the public web — which include copyrighted works that were publicly accessible. That’s not the same thing as deliberately raiding pirate libraries, but it’s also not ethically trivial, and some lawsuits argue that certain systems scraped paywalled material without consent.
Legally, this is still an active fight. In places like the U.S., regulators and courts haven’t given a single, final answer. Some legal scholars and early court decisions say that using copyrighted works as training data can count as fair use when it’s about learning patterns rather than reproducing the originals, especially if the outputs don’t compete with or substitute the source material. Others disagree, or are still deciding.
But “it touched copyrighted material” is not, by itself, proof of theft. If reading a copyrighted book teaches you how to write your own — did you “steal” it?
If “learning from content” equals “theft,” then your memory is a crime scene.
Does that mean there are no concerns? Of course not. Transparency, consent, opt-outs — all of those matter. But shouting “it was trained on IP without permission!!” isn’t a moral mic drop. It’s a simplification that falls apart under scrutiny.
💬 So, is AI really stealing?
Only if you are.
🔗 Further Reading / Sources:
U.S. Copyright Office – Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 3: Generative AI Training (2025)
Overview of how U.S. law currently thinks about training on copyrighted works; concludes legality depends on context and fair-use analysis.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-3-Generative-AI-Training-Report-Pre-Publication-Version.pdf
Carlini et al. – Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models (USENIX Security, 2021)
Shows that verbatim memorisation can happen in edge cases — a real risk, but not the default behaviour of these models.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec21-carlini-extracting.pdf
Micaela Mantegna – ARTificial: Why Copyright Is Not the Right Policy Tool to Deal with Generative AI (Yale Law Journal Forum, 2024)
Argues that stretching copyright to “solve” AI problems is a bad fit and risks harming creativity and the public.
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/artificial-why-copyright-is-not-the-right-policy-tool-to-deal-with-generative-ai
Electronic Frontier Foundation – AI and Copyright: Expanding Copyright Hurts Everyone—Here’s What to Do Instead (2025)
Explains how using AI panic to expand copyright would undercut fair use, research, and small creators.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/ai-and-copyright-expanding-copyright-hurts-everyone-heres-what-do-instead
Cory Doctorow – Copyright Won’t Solve Creators’ Generative AI Problem (Pluralistic, 2023)
A creator-centred critique of copyright maximalism as a fake solution to AI and labour issues.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/
