#ai is anti creativity

[8pxl]

PSA: Tumblr/Wordpress is preparing to start selling our user data to Midjourney and OpenAI.

you have to MANUALLY opt out of it as well.

to opt out on desktop, click your blog ➡�� blog settings ➡️ scroll til you see visibility options and it’ll be the last option to toggle.

to opt out on mobile, click your blog ➡️ scroll then click visibility ➡️ toggle opt out option.

if you’ve already opted out of showing up in google searches, it’s preselected for you. if you don’t have the option available, update your app or close your browser/refresh a few times. important to note you also have to opt out for each blog you own separately, so if you’d like to prevent AI scraping your blog i’d really recommend taking the time to opt out. (source)

[includedisco]

I'm popping up this random Tuesday to share a few reminders with my fellow fanfic writers

Even your favorite authors had to work hard to get good. We are all awful writers until we decide to improve and take steps.

Every day is an opportunity to be a better writer than you were yesterday if you put in a little work

The love for your works must start with you. Be your own biggest fan

You're allowed to write at your pace.

its okay to embrace some "imperfections" in your writing. Imperfection is part of art because it makes you unique.

It's okay to let go of the writer you were yesterday. Change is normal and it's okay. You're still awesome and your new work will still have an audience. It's okay to look fondly upon a past you perceive as your "glory days" but don't let that make you insecure. Your heart of a writer and your creative talent remain true. Embrace the writer you've become and confidently run with it

Any story you come up with, and your writing style are both special and precious because it's your art

its okay to crave validation and compliments for your fanfic-writing. You poured your blood, sweat and tears into it like any other artist.

No matter how you feel about your writing, it is special because no one can do it like you.

It's okay to be satisfied with just being a fanfic writer. Having amazing writing talent doesn't mean you must force yourself to write original works or to be published.

Fuck AI

[i-lavabean]

AI should never be used to steal the work of performers and creators to make sickly copies that devalue the very art form they are supposed to support

[mad-girlslove-song]

the shittiest human art will always be leagues better than the best ai "art". a child's finger paintings and macaroni crafts will always be better than a computer's subpar attempt at recreating the starry night. your stick figures and smiley faces will always surpass an algorithm's bastardized boticelli painting. the most mediocre hallmark movie will always be better than whatever bullshit sora churns out. the most cringeworthy "i'm 14 and this is deep" notes app poetry will always be better than whatever chatgpt can come up with. always

[space-blue]

Must read. Here' s a snippet to motivate you :

For the still-not-convinced: If you need an AI to come up with ideas for you, you don’t even belong in the fucking room, because ‘coming up with ideas’ is literally the most basic level skill to have. A basketball player who can’t dribble doesn’t belong in the NBA, so why the fuck do you think you deserve a spot on my writing team if you need a computer to do what any goddamn fucking eight year old can do? Take the fucking hint, you fucking fraud: if you need AI to do the most basic tasks required of you as a writer, then you aren’t employable as a writer. Period. Fuck you. You’re a waste of everyone’s time.

[batcavescolony]

I hate AI. You wanna see your favorite character say something? Here

Dick Grayson: Hi, Don't use AI to make me say things. I'm literally a fictional character, just think.

Look at that Nightwing himself told you not to! Want another?

Dean Winchester: AI is fuckin' stupid, nothing can fake being a human on my watch.

Wow, amazing!

Support the actual humans in your fandom.

[radley-rambles]

Cannot believe that 'access to quality art and writing made by other people is a luxury not a right, and artists and writers deserve to be compensated for their labour, because as much as I believe in the ethos of UBI, we live in a post-capitalist hellscape, and creators need to eat' is a controversial opinion in Leftist spaces.

[imagine-darksiders]

I hate to give it any kind of attention, but I had to know if this was real, so I looked it up (didn’t ask it anything obviously) and you just know, you just KNOW, this shit was trained by scraping work from actual fans.

[a-candle-maker]

not tagging the person bcs i don't want to call anyone out but like,,,, saw this one girl and her post formatting made it even look like a chatgpt generated thing... checked her other stuff to see and they all had that one formatting... thought i'd tell her and like. babe. you turning off asks just about confirms it for me, i mean imma just guess that you noticed lots of asks telling you the same and decided we're sooooooooo mean!! and ignored it

[chatdomestique]

Does anybody know how to poison original writing against ai-scrapers? I tried to look it up, but all I found were people talking about how to pass the ai-detection tests or which writing software to use before publishing.

I want something I can do to my writing (in the same way I overlay textures on my art) that's going to poison ai-scrapers so I can feel comfortable posting my writing online.

I thought about posting my writing in a photo, but then that comes with the issue of being inaccessible, and adding alt-text would defeat the purpose of the photo. I don't want to throw in random gibberish either because that would ruin the story for readers.

I probably won't post any writing until after I've created a website for my works, but even then a lot of ai-scapers (esp chatgpt) have a tendency to completely ignore robot.txt files.

[includedisco]

Fanfic writers, as we walk into 2025, let's remember and embrace these facts;

1.Our writing matters. The evidence is in how we all suffer meltdowns when ao3 is down.

2.Fanfic-writing is a hobby that should be done for fun.

3.The decision to go the extra mile to write awesome works should be a personal choice, not inspired by an ungrateful audience(hateful comments on your writing).

4.We are not paid to write, so we reserve the right to be comfortable in our writing(choice of writing style, writing pace, type of stories we write, what fandom to write in etc).

5.It's okay to write exactly the way you write. There is an audience for every sort of story.

6.It's okay to want more kudos, comments and hits. Why the fuck not? You worked hard on your story

7.We don't owe anyone an explanation for writing/reading any kind of fanfiction.

8.Writing has a lot of pain attached to it as we all know, but don't forget that there is just as much joy in it. Don't let the negatives take your happiness from you.

9.Let 2025 be the year in which you finally write that story idea you think is too silly; post that story you think no one will like; try to join that fandom you've admired for a while, leave a comment for an author you love; try something new with your writing.

It'll go well, I promise. If it doesn't, it's still a win because the challenge will help you get out of your comfort zone and grow. We can't win every day but we will win some days. Next time will go better

10.Be your own biggest fan.

11.AI and Satan are the same thing.

[myrsinemezzo]

Open Source Image Resources

Aka Down with AI for Fanworks

After someone in a server I was formerly in brought up a point about how many of those against AI for fanworks often use it for fic covers (which I doubt to some extent…) I thought I’d put together this resource for anyone who wants images to play with through Open Source or Creative Commons non-AI means. Feel free and please do add to this list. These are the ones that came to me off the top of my head and with the help of a few friends.

Archive.org

You can use an Advanced Search function to find Out of Copyright and Creative Commons licensed images using the date fields like so:

National Gallery of Art

Getty Museum

Cleveland Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Smithsonian

Creative Commons Images:

Pexels.com

Pexels used to be a go-to source for stock photos licensed via Creative Commons but it is absolutely overrun with AI images at this point. If you find something with some digging, however, you can check the posting date and correlate whether it might be a more recent AI image or not.

Please do add to this list if you like because I know I’m missing things. One good tactic if you want to find Open Source images is to just do a search engine query for “open source” along with the name of the institution you’re interested in.

[lauravanarendonkbaugh]

Thoughts on A Message from NaNoWriMo

I got an email today from the National Novel Writing Month head office, as I suspect many did. I have feelings. And questions.

First, I genuinely believe someone in the office is panicking and backtracking and did not endorse all that was said and done in the last month. From what I understand, the initial AI comments were not fully endorsed by all NaNo staff and board members, or even known in advance. It's got to be rough to find out your organization kinda called people with disabilities incapable of writing a story on their own, and overtly called people with ethics racists and ablists, by reading the reactions on social media--and then your organization's even worse counter-reactions on social media.

I still think NaNoWriMo has a good mission and many people in it with good goals.

But I think NaNoWriMo is SERIOUSLY missing a point in its performative progressivism. (For the record, I'm actually in favor of many progressive policies, and I support many of the same concepts NaNoWriMo claims to support, and I applaud providing materials to underfunded schools and support to marginalized groups historically not producing as many writers, etc. The issue here is not "whether or not woke is okay" -- it's whether or not the virtue signaling is still in line with the core mission.)

Also, honesty. (That's below.)

NaNoWriMo has ALWAYS been on the honor system AND fully adaptable to needs. Some years I had a schedule which absolutely did not allow for 50k new words -- I adjusted my personal goals. (I did not claim a 50k win if I did not achieve one, but I celebrated a personal win for achieving personal goals.) Some years I wrote 50k in one project, and some 50k across multiple projects. NaNoWriMo has acknowledged this for years with the "NaNo Rebel" label.

So saying out of the blue that because some people cannot achieve 50k in a month, we should devalue the challenge (y'know that word has a definition, right?) and allow anyone to claim a win whether they actually wrote 50,000 words or not... Well, that's not only rude to writers who actually write, but it was unnecessary, because project goals have always been adjustable to personal constraints.

It's also hugely unhelpful to participating writers. Yeah, writing 50k words in a month is tough. That's why it's a challenge. Allowing people to "generate" (quotes intentional) words from a machine does not improve their skills. No one benefits from using AI to generate work -- not the "writer" who did not write those words and so did not practice and improve a skill, not any reader given lowest-common-denominator words no one could be bothered to write, and not the actual writer whose words were stolen without compensation to blend into the AI-generated copy-pasta.

Hijacking language about disability to justify shortcuts and skipping self-improvement is just cheap, and it's not fair to people with disabilities.

I would much rather see NaNoWriMo say, "Hey, we don't all start in the same place, and we may need different goals. Here's overt permission to set personal goals" (or maybe even, "here are several goals to choose from"), "and if you are a NaNo Rebel, rock on! This creativity challenge does require you to do your own work, in order for you to see your own skills improve."

And, honesty. Part of why I don't feel great about NaNoWriMo's backtracking and clarifications is that they're still not being open.

The same email links to an FAQ about data harvesting, which opens with this sentence:

Users of our main website, NaNoWriMo.org, do not type their work directly into our interface, nor do they save or upload their work to our website in any way.

This is technically correct in the present tense, but for years it wasn't. Every NaNo winner for years pasted their work into the word counter for verification. That was, by every web development definition, uploading.

[Updated: the word count validator was discontinued in recent years, and I was wrong to originally write as if it was still happening. I do think addressing the question of the validator would be appropriate when refuting accusations of data harvesting, for clarity and assurance regarding any past harvesting, especially giving today's AI scraping concerns. Again, as stated below, I don't think the validator was stealing work! But I wasn't the only person to immediately think of the validator when reading the FAQ. I was, however, wrong to state it as present-tense here.]

To be clear, I do not believe that NaNoWriMo is harvesting my work, or I wouldn't have verified wins with their word counter. But that's not because of this completely bogus assurance that their website never had the upload that they've required for win verification.

"Well, sure, we had the word counter, but it didn't store your work, and you should have known that's what we meant" is not a valid expectation when you are refuting data concerns. Just as "You should have known what we meant" is not a valid position when clarifying statements about the use of generative AI.

My point is, there are a number of different people making statements for NaNoWriMo, and at least some of them are not competent to make clear, coherent, and correct statements. Either they are not aware that the word counter exists, or they're not aware that pasting data into a website that uses that data to process a task is in fact uploading, or they are not aware that implying they've never collected data they did previously collect in a FAQ is dishonest. Or they are not aware that commenting or DMing users to castigate them for expressing legitimate concerns is not a good practice. Or they are missing the whole point of a writing challenge and emphasizing instead the warm fuzzies of inclusion without actually honoring that marginalized people also want to feel a sense of accomplishment rather than being token "winners."

I judged another writing challenge, once, which included an automatically-processed digital badge for minimum word count. One of the entries was just gibberish repeated to meet the minimum word count. Okay, "participant" who did not actually create anything -- you got your automated digital badge, so I guess you feel cool and clever. But did you meet the challenge? Did you level up? Did you come out stronger and more prepared for the next one?

That's what generative AI use does. Cheap meaningless win, no actual personal progress. That's why we didn't want it endorsed in NaNoWriMo. That's what NaNo is missing in their replies.

And I remain suspicious of replies, anyway, while absolute falsehoods are in their FAQ.

It's sad, because I've truly enjoyed NaNoWriMo in the past. And I actually do think they could recover from past scandal and current AI missteps. But it does not look at this time like they're on that path.

@nanowrimo

[titanus-horizio]

Ok I'm gonna say this because, even though a lot of the characters in Atab don't have concrete designs down, it needs to be said

Please, don't under any circumstances, in any way,shape,or form, use my characters as ai in art, chatbots etc, in fact, don't even bring ai near my characters

For one, the characters aren't drawn by me, as of now they're drawn by @gay-trashcan-cat and @mjtheartist04 and I can guarantee they wouldn't appreciate their talent being used in that way

Second, I don't want something I've been passionate about for so long being used in this slop.

Does ai have a place? Yes

Medicine,chores, accessibility,coding etc

Not.in.art

No matter how good your ai "art" is, nothing will compare to the time,effort, passion and personality of actual art.

I had to say this after someone deliberately went against @startheskelaton's (go follow them, their urban kiju au is amazing) wishes of having their au characters be used in ai chatbots, ai will never belong in art

[lecoindecachou]

"Creativity challenged"