#betsy rosenblatt

[mel-the-pirate-prompt-reblog]

Not to bring up "old" stuff, such as the OTW May Signal bit that was removed after some backlash, I wanted to see it. I threw the OTW into the Wayback Machine, went back to May 9th, and was able to see just what they pulled from the Signal after the community backlash to see what they regret adding to this month's Signal.

So I copy-pasted it, since I bet others who didn't read it wanted/want to, too. You can also read it directly from the OTW May Signal on the Wayback Machine here.

Quotes and etc are under the cut. All blue text is a link.

This is what they cut out of May 2023's Signal:

For Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, the OTW’s Legal Chair, Betsy Rosenblatt, was interviewed about AI legal issues*. Betsy pointed out that having AIs learn from works such as fanfiction meant that they weren’t only using old works from the public domain to learn about the world. “That means that machines will learn how to describe and express a much more contemporary, broad, inclusive, and diverse set of ideas.” What’s more…

"I’m also intrigued by some of the expressive possibilities that AI may create. Will DALL·E or ChatGPT become characters in fan fiction? Surely they will. I want to read the fan-created stories where DALL·E and ChatGPT fall in love with each other (or don’t), get into arguments (or don’t), buy a house together (or don’t), team up to solve (or perpetrate!) crimes….

Will fans will take up this challenge?"

Thought it might be worth noting that the OTW did add this about AI and Data Scraping on the Archive on May 13th.

*The interview is still up, but just in case, I'll be pulling the link from the Wayback Machine instead of the actual link.

I will be highlighting a few important points (imo) in case people don't want to read the entire interview. For longer highlights, I will be adding bold/italics/underline to help people keep from jumping around the text and read out of order (I know I do, and that tends to help me).

Because I'm having Thoughts about AI scraping, I might make a Tumblr-esque essay and put my English major to use looking into some of this interview (If I ever do, I might add a link to this post). Highlighting things and reading through this interview makes me want to pull my stuff from AO3, and I've only just started posting there a year ago.

Highlighting phrases and sentences does not mean I agree with them. It means I think they are important to see and consider.

Here's the interview that Signal links to:

...Betsy Rosenblatt is the legal chair for the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit dedicated to preserving fan works.... The interview with Betsy follows.

Katherine: When you think about AI technology, fan works, and copyright, what excites you? And, what keeps you up at night?

Betsy: One of the things that excites me—which is probably a bit off to the side of what most people are talking about with AI and copyright—is that AIs are reading fan fiction now. For a long time, machine learning relied almost exclusively on data sources that were known to be in the copyright public domain, such as works published prior to 1927 and public records. The result of that was that machines were often learning archaic ideas—learning to associate certain professions with certain races and genders, for example. Now, machine learning is turning to broader sources from across the internet, including fan works. That means that machines will learn how to describe and express a much more contemporary, broad, inclusive, and diverse set of ideas.

I’m also intrigued by some of the expressive possibilities that AI may create. Will DALL·E or ChatGPT become characters in fan fiction? Surely they will. I want to read the fan-created stories where DALL·E and ChatGPT fall in love with each other (or don’t), get into arguments (or don’t), buy a house together (or don’t), team up to solve (or perpetrate!) crimes….

As for what keeps me up at night, I remain mostly optimistic. I think it would be a very sad turn of events if some of the newly begun litigation about data crawling and scraping ended up preventing machines from building contemporary, inclusive, broad-based data pools to draw on. I think it would be very sad if people turned to AI-created works instead of finding, exploring, and making fan works of their own. But I don’t think either of those things is very likely to happen. Fans make fan works because they love doing it. They feel compelled to tell the stories they imagine, and they want to share those with communities of other fans. They use fan work creation to build skills and find their own voices. I don’t think that the emergence of new technologies will stop them from doing that.

Katherine: Artists have filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that AI companies violate copyright law when they create databases of copyrighted images to “train” their AI image products. At least one of the companies in the suit, Stability AI, says that this is a fair use: “Anyone that believes that this isn’t fair use does not understand the technology and misunderstands the law.” What questions would you like to see a court ask when analyzing whether ingesting copyrighted works to create AI-training databases is a fair use?

Betsy: I tend to agree with Stability AI’s statement. I would like to see courts consider the “training” process separately from the process of generating works. It is, of course, possible that a machine could generate an infringing work. But the process of training that machine involves something very different—turning expressive works into data and creating relationships based on that data collection. We call it machine “learning” for a reason. A well-trained machine won’t generate an infringing work, but it needs as large a pool of data to work from as possible to do that. The mere fact that an AI can create something infringing doesn’t determine whether the gathering of information is infringement. Consider the classic Sony v. Betamax case: The VCR can be used to infringe, but it has noninfringing (fair) uses, and therefore the VCR does not inherently infringe. I recognize that the analogy isn’t perfect, but I find it persuasive. In general, courts have found that “interim” copying isn’t infringement—that is, copying isn’t infringement when it occurs inside a machine and does not, itself, make copyrighted works perceptible to people—and I think courts should continue to follow that logic.

Katherine: Will the Supreme Court’s 2021 Google v. Oracle decision have any bearing on this case?

Betsy: I hope so. That case highlighted that we shouldn’t be locked into one definition of “transformative” work, and that copying for the purpose of engaging in a different technological use can be transformative copying.

Katherine: What would you say to online creators who might be discouraged by AI technology?

Betsy: You will always make your work better than an AI can. What matters about your work is that it comes from you. That makes your work irreplaceable, and it will always remain so.

[silverstark]

AI threat to Ao3 and Fanworks

Betsy Rosenblatt, the legal chair for Ao3′s umbrella Organization for Transformative Works, is advocating for allowing AI developers to use fanfic. :

This is a betrayal of Ao3′s mission, a betrayal of the worldwide community of fanfic-writers/readers, and a betrayal of Betsy Rosenblatt’s job to legally protect fanfiction. Please keep an eye on this situation and speak up where you are able to- there is at least one petition out already.

[volixia669]

OTW’s Legal Chair is Pro-AI and What That Means

traHoooooooo boy. Okay, so for those who don’t know, OTW shared in their little newsletter on May 6th an interview their legal chair did on AI.

Most people didn’t notice...Until a couple hours ago when I guess more high profile accounts caught wind and now every time I refresh the tweet that links the newsletter that’s another 10+ quote tweets.

The interview itself is short, was done in February, and...Has some gross stuff.

Essentially Betsy Rosenblatt agrees with Stability AI that its fair use, and believes that AI is “reading fanfic”.

To be EXTREMELY clear: Generative AI like ChatGPT is not sentient. No AI is sentient, and Generative AI are actually incredibly simple as far as AI goes. Generative AI cannot “read”, it cannot “comprehend” and it cannot “learn”.

In fact, all Generative AI can do is spit out an output created out of a dataset. Its output is reliant on there being variables for it to spit back out. Therefore, it cannot be separated from its dataset or its “training”.

Additionally, the techbros who make these things are profiting off them, are not actually transforming anything, and oh yeah, are stealing people’s private data in order to make these datasets.

All this to say: Betsy Rosenblatt does not actually understand AI, has presumably fallen for the marketing behind Generative AI, and is not fit to legally fight for fic writers.

So what does this mean? Well, don’t delete your accounts just yet. This is just one person, belonging to a nonprofit that supposedly listens to its users. There’s a huge backlash on social media right now because yeah, people are pissed. Which is good.

We should absolutely use social media to be clear about our stances. To tell @transformativeworks that we are not okay with tech bros profiting off our fanworks, and their legal team should be fighting back against those who have already scraped our fanworks rather than lauding a program for doing things its incapable of doing.

I have fanfic up on Ao3. I have fanfic I’m working on that I’d love to put there too. But I cannot if it turns out the one safe haven for ficwriters is A-Okay with random people stealing our work and profiting off of it.

[vergess]

Have you been hit with absurd fear mongering about how AO3 is going to totally allow AI to eat all your art, because you read one headline of one tumblr post?

Well, here's the actual interview, not clipped to be as inflammatory as possible, where it is made VERY clear that this is a matter of one legal advisor of OTW having a reasonable, nuanced stance on the fact that AI CAN be used ethically it just IS NOT being used ethically RIGHT NOW.

And once you've calmed down and read the interview for real, take another minute and ask yourself why you were, once again, so ready to assume AO3 and the OTW are going to come steal your children in the night.

[dawnfelagund]

This Week in Fandom, from a Small Site Owner's Perspective

This past week has offered an interesting example of synchronicity in fandom history. On 5 May, a comment on the Silmarillion Writers' Guild Discord about "AI fanart" prompted the mods to collectively make a uncomfortable noise like, "ummmm ..." and swiftly open discussion on whether AI-generated "fanworks" were actually fanworks. (We decided no.) The next day, 6 May, the OTW Signal highlighted the interview with legal chair Betsy Rosenblatt, where she expressed excitement for inclusion of fanworks in AI training and pissed off a bunch of fans. By this point, I'd mostly written the SWG's AI policy but was giving my comods the weekend for further research and discussion on the issue before turning the document over to them for comments and edits.

As a small archive owner, it is interesting to undergo this process, first with my comods and now with SWG members, at the same time as the OTW/AO3 is wrestling through theirs. Yesterday, my afternoon was spent researching and implementing, with the help of my co-admin Russandol, strategies to block as much AI scraping of the SWG as we can. In the aftermath of that work, I wrote this post about a small archive owner's perspective on the issue and how it has unfolded on the SWG vs. AO3.

Then, in a second instance of synchronicity, while I was writing this post, AO3 was clarifying their stance on AI. First, as a PSA to anyone reading this, AO3 does block AI scrapers and has since December 2022 (though I'll be petty and note that it doesn't seem that they've gone as far as the SWG in the tools they're using, at least based on this post). But AI-generated "fanworks" are allowed: "If fans are using AI to generate fanworks, then our current position is that this is also a type of work that is within our mandate to preserve." This is what I predicted in my [synchronous] post, and I was right.

Two big points emerge from my consideration so far of this issue and how it has been handled on a small site (mine) and AO3:

People want/need AO3 to be something it's not because there aren't any other options for the vast majority of fans. (Tolkien fans, you do have options. Not a lot, but trust that there are people in other fandoms wishing they had even the few small independent archives that we do.) OTW/AO3 need to take a principled stand that all fanworks deserve to be preserved. And fans often want spaces where all of the fanworks that ideal encompasses (like AI-generated ...) aren't included. Both are legitimate! But when AO3 is the only option for most fans, they turn their energy to trying to change a foundational value of the one option they do have, and that's fruitless and frustrating and contribute to the comments along the lines of "no one will listen or care."

Big organizations are big, and changing or responding to anything is like trying to port-round the Titanic: It's going to be slow and cumbersome and possibly involve catastrophic collisions with icebergs despite best intentions. In eight days, the SWG went from never having discussed AI formally to having a draft policy in front of members for comment and implementation of AI bot blocking. In the same span of time, OTW managed to rouse themselves to an apology that has been widely perceived as half-assed, and AO3 managed to inform people, after a week of worry, that they've been blocking most AI scrapers for months. This isn't a criticism of those organizations (really!) but an acknowledgement of the difference between big organizations and small ones and an argument for diverse options for archiving fanworks because both options have advantages to offer.

As I said above, I wrote much more about this here.

Of course, what should be done? The options are what they are, right? Right now, yes, mostly. That's the sad place where we've ended up, but we can reverse course. There was a time when many fandoms had dozens or even hundreds of options for archiving fanworks. Those small sites, archives, and communities died due to a variety of factors: closure of the platforms on which they were built (e.g., Geocities and Yahoo! Groups), low to no traffic (due to everyone reading and posting exclusively on AO3), and deteriorating software (e.g., eFiction ... and again at least partly due to low demand, again because everyone thought AO3 would be everything they ever needed).

However, there is hope that more options will become available (or already have).

Neocities is a resurrection of Geocities for personal homepages.

Bobaboard "lets you create moderated, privacy-oriented communities for all your fandom interests."

Dreamwidth is still around, fandom-positive, and underused.

eFiction is being rebuilt, ideally with the ability to host a site through their servers, much as you can build a Wordpress site without downloading Wordpress onto your own webspace.

Fandom Coders is a resource for educating fans who want to learn the skills to build and run website.

I'm working on a tutorial for how to build a fanworks archive in Drupal, the software we use on the SWG. I have the whole thing outlined and will be recording it this summer. Watch this space.

So what can you do?

If fanworks are hosted somewhere other than AO3: post there, read there, comment there, interact there, link there. I cannot overstate how vital this is for small sites.

Make sure your fanworks are archived someplace other than AO3 (like Dreamwidth), even if you're not getting clicks, comments, and interaction there ... yet.

Nearly all of the options for independent sites that I linked above accept donations toward their projects. eFiction is one where I know progress has stagnated due to a lack of funding.

So this turned into another tirade/plea for small sites, but it really is unfair to OTW/AO3 to ask them to be something they were never intended to be, and it's also unfair to fans that they don't have a place to put there work that they feel reflects their needs, wishes, and values.

[reachartwork]

legal chair for the OTW (i.e for archive of our own) weighs in on AI with a Sober and Well-Thought Take (/sincerity mode)

[youhideastar]

The U.S. legal profession and the OTW: a few thoughts

I don't feel that I have a ton of value to add to the conversation currently taking place about structural/organizational problems with the OTW and the way that those affect the well-being of fans in general and OTW volunteers in particular. But given that it appears some of those problems are (correctly, in my view) attributed to the Legal Committee and given that I am a real, live practicing U.S. lawyer, I thought a few comments about the legal profession and how that might be affecting the Legal Committee could perhaps offer a little value. To be clear, I am not now and never have been an OTW volunteer of any kind, let alone for the Legal Committee (a thing I really regret now!), and I do not know the current or former composition of the Committee beyond what is general fandom knowledge. I'm also super uncomfortable purporting to speak for the entire legal profession, but to keep this post to a manageable length, I'm going to leave out all the caveats and "on the other hand"s that I would normally include. Please forgive my presumption and feel free to add on or take issue!

The OTW website says the Committee is "[m]ostly comprised of legal professionals." My understanding is that it is almost entirely comprised of U.S. attorneys. This has demographic implications. To become an attorney here, you must be at least ~26 years old, for starters (you need an undergraduate degree, a 3-year graduate law degree, and then you need to pass the bar exam), and most new lawyers feel very wet-behind-the-ears and would be hesitant to volunteer alongside more experienced lawyers (much less to challenge them) for years thereafter. This means that Committee members are likely to be the fandom old guard - they remember Strikethrough and were probably around for the founding of the OTW itself. Additionally, the legal profession is disproportionately white, male, and wealthy.

The legal profession is incredibly hierarchical and credential/status-obsessed. To a degree that outsiders would probably find hard to believe. You can practice law for 30 years and people will still want to know where you went to law school and where you clerked afterward (and will still take you less seriously if your answers aren't "a top-14 school" and "a federal court"). In this pecking order, law professors are very, very high. Second only to judges. And no professor ranks higher than a professor at Harvard freaking Law, such as, e.g., Rebecca Tushnet. Even a professor at a low-ranked law school, like Betsy Rosenblatt, gets a lot of deference.

Lawyers do not take non-lawyers seriously. We go through this grueling law school admissions process, followed by 3+ years of hazing (that leaves a demographically unremarkable group of law school admittees with shocking rates of mental illness and substance use problems) teaching us that only we have the keys to understand this hugely important system of rules that governs every aspect of human interaction, stuffing our minds with a whole new language of "attractive nuisance" and "expressio unius," and then we're unleashed on a world in which people are constantly doing stupid shit that's going to get them sued, and it breeds both unhealthy insularity and a hell of a God complex. It makes us think we can do anything (like write public statements without input from a professional communications team...).

Lawyers are pathologically risk-averse. First, we self-select for that - most law students are kids who were damn good writers but scared of trying to make a living writing fiction/screenplays/whatever. And second, law school trains us for precisely that: the exams test, not primarily for knowledge of legal rules, but for a skill called "issue-spotting," which is basically "looking at a set of facts and figuring out all the million ways the people in that scenario could get sued." For many practicing lawyers, figuring out how to spot shit that their clients are doing that could get them sued and then telling them to stop it is their whole job. And it can be exhausting, because people/organizations love doing shit that could get them sued. It's like parenting a toddler - constant vigilance to keep the client from sticking their fingers in a metaphorical wall socket or running out into the metaphorical street. (See how I fell there into #3, framing non-lawyers as children who need the lawyer-parent to keep them out of trouble? It comes so naturally.) The Committee has managed to keep the OTW from being sued for 16 years (to my knowledge) and counting, despite the fact that the org's projects, especially AO3, engage in incredibly legally risky activities. To give the Committee their due, that is a hell of a track record. You can see how that might feed the God complex.

There are also, to be clear, many good things about the legal profession and a legal education. But the goal here is to give fans who are outside of this very specific and insular subculture a few pieces of information that might help them understand why this body of people is acting the way it's acting - not to excuse it, but rather to help folks understand what might need to change both within and around the OTW's Legal Committee to create the better OTW that many in fandom, including me, really, really want to see.

Please feel free to ask questions and to correct anything I got wrong! And apologies again for generalizing at such a high level.

[olderthannetfic]

Soooo thoughts on the shitstorm breaking right now re: OTW Signal, May 2023 and Betsy Rosenblatt's quote of “That means that machines will learn how to describe and express a much more contemporary, broad, inclusive, and diverse set of ideas.” ? I feel like it might be counterproductive to just get outraged right away, so I thought maybe with your own insight into this, you can say if we should get angry or if some context is missing?

--

Ah, an actual quote.

Well... I think there are massive dangers of AI being used by cheapass corporations to further screw actual humans. As usual, automation can be used to create a utopia where nobody has to work but is actually used to keep the masses down.

If we're positing inevitable AI scraping, then sure, including AO3 could make the AI more capable of writing things I personally would care about.

I'm not sure I'd call AO3 broad, inclusive, or diverse though. There are very marked artistic trends. They may be somewhat different from elsewhere, but they're internally samey. (Though, of course, with 11 million works, there are always some outliers.)

I'd expect an AI trained on AO3 to end up writing nothing but Stucky or BTS omegaverse.

[shadowmaat]

OTW concerns

I know the OTW is vital for preserving fannish things. Pretty much my life's work is hosted on AO3 and I have spent many years happily convinced that AO3 would look out for the best interests of fans and donating money to that cause when I could.

Unfortunately, doubts have begun to creep in. Last year's election debacle was it's own whole thing, but the most recent issue has to do with AI and the OTW's stance on it.

I've sent them a couple of letters now expressing my concerns and been told that it's a "complex issue" and that the Board is indeed giving it a lot of thought. They were frustrating but fair responses since I understand that it IS a complex issue and coming to a consensus can be difficult.

Time is still passing, however, with no official word on what the Organization is planning to do. No official word... except from their Legal Chair, Betsy Rosenblatt.

In the latest OTW Signal of May 2023, they shared an excerpt (and link to) an interview Betsy gave regarding the use of AI in relation to fanfic. This was done, apparently, for Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, and Ms. Rosenblatt's opinions seem to focus more on future potential than current reality, which is troubling.

Ms. Rosenblatt believes that content scraping is good for teaching "AI" programs about modern language usage and views. The use of "AI" to generate fics seems to fall under the scope of "fair use" as far as she's concerned. Which would seem to indicate that, from Legal's standpoint, there's nothing wrong with continuing to allow bots to scrape content from AO3 and regurgitate it into new content.

It could also mean that people posting AI-generated content onto AO3 under the guise of them being legitimate works will also be allowed to continue.

I think that true artificial intelligence is a fascinating concept. I also understand that these programs need to learn somehow, but stealing stories (and art) without permission or credit is fucking reprehensible and should not be tolerated at any level. The fact that the Legal Chair for one of the most vital fan archives on the internet seems to be in favor of this is... alarming. Especially since, as far as I know, no other Board members have spoken up in opposition.

I also really dislike that Ms. Rosenblatt seems entirely concerned about what's "good" for machine learning and not at all about what's good for the human fans who are the entire reason the OTW exists.

AO3 is the backbone of fandom on the internet, but this is a bad direction for it to go, if that is indeed the way it's planning to go.

[theliterarywolf]

...Okay what happened with AO3??

Anonymous asked: Whats the reason to criticize AO3?

In the midst of AI being a plague on the creative world, both in terms of leisure and commercial sectors, the legal chair of the OTW Betsy Rosenblatt was recently interviewed as pulling the same nonsense that lazy school admins and Corporate Talking Heads have been:

'AI like ChatGPT shouldn't be banned but, instead, should be seen as a tool that writers/artists should be trained on'.

Which, on top of being braindead, is interesting that Betsy conveniently waited until after this year's big AO3 charity drive before showing her asshole like this.

[vanyamired]

I have lots of thoughts on how ao3′s most recent stance on AI (the one posted today, not yesterday) is bullshit, even though a lot of people will be satisfied. I genuinely feel it’s bad news if nothing changes. Not as in ao3 will be deluged in AI generated content, but the fact that they would then carry this stance forward during legal proceedings.

Here’s something Betsy Rosenblatt said during a US Copyright listening session- “On the other hand, we've heard of enthusiasm about the potential for what AI can do and bring to fan communities.” During a time when workers are trying so hard to campaign against AI, this is not something that should have ever been said. She did go on to say that people would want to ‘opt out’ (not sufficient in the least btw), and about attribution when the work is too similar to the original, but again, this isn’t a strong enough rebuttal that I was expecting, perhaps foolishly, from the OTW, when the entire AO3 content as been fed into a commercial regurgitation machine.

And I fear that this is all we will have if the OTW do not change their policy on considering AI fanwork ‘transformative’, because then they would, by their own policy, have to campaign for AI content as being transformative & fair use alongside the very works they said they’d protect from such exploitation.

Someone please correct me if I’m wrong here.

[iprefertheterminsane]

Apparently tumblr hasnt heard yet, but the OTW had just released an interview with their legal chair representative Betsy Rosenblatt about allowing/using Fanfiction to train AI writing and I have to say....its fucking grim

There are simply no words to describe how awful and tone fucking DEAF this interview was, considering the WGA strike happening in the USA rn.

Machines will learn how to express and describe better contemporary works? A diverse set of ideas? It's not a goddamned PERSON. Just hire a writer. Why should creative non-profit artists be complicit in the continued abuse of professional writers who are fighting for their wage and work rights by training machines to do continuously better and better at coming up to par? Transformative copying???? PLAGIARISM. PEOPLE WILL BE TRAINING MACHINES ON FREE WORK FOR PROFIT ON PLAGIARISED WORKS. And phrasing it in a cutesie uwu shipping challenge way? Does Betsy HONESTLY every fic writer out there is a coming of age tween writing between her classes?

Shes not the voice of AO3. Just a legal representative. That being said, she either needs to step the fuck down, or we are decimating her ass next coming elections.

FANDOM came up with AO3 from scratch. This site is OURS. I have never been so inflamed and angry by OTW and AO3 than I am today, reading THIS. If it gets too rotten, I am not above pulling all my fics away, tearing the whole thing down and starting it back up again.

[yadivagirl]

I linked this as a gift so hopefully people can read it. Below is the part about AO3.

At Archive of Our Own, a fan fiction database with more than 11 million stories, writers have increasingly pressured the site to ban data-scraping and A.I.-generated stories.

In May, when some Twitter accounts shared examples of ChatGPT mimicking the style of popular fan fiction posted on Archive of Our Own, dozens of writers rose up in arms. They blocked their stories and wrote subversive content to mislead the A.I. scrapers. They also pushed Archive of Our Own’s leaders to stop allowing A.I.-generated content.

Betsy Rosenblatt, who provides legal advice to Archive of Our Own and is a professor at University of Tulsa College of Law, said the site had a policy of “maximum inclusivity” and did not want to be in the position of discerning which stories were written with A.I.

[miyamiwu]

For Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, the OTW’s Legal Chair, Betsy Rosenblatt, was interviewed about AI legal issues. Betsy pointed out that having AIs learn from works such as fanfiction meant that they weren’t only using old works from the public domain to learn about the world. “That means that machines will learn how to describe and express a much more contemporary, broad, inclusive, and diverse set of ideas.” What’s more… I’m also intrigued by some of the expressive possibilities that AI may create. Will DALL·E or ChatGPT become characters in fan fiction? Surely they will. I want to read the fan-created stories where DALL·E and ChatGPT fall in love with each other (or don’t), get into arguments (or don’t), buy a house together (or don’t), team up to solve (or perpetrate!) crimes…. Will fans take up this challenge?

(source)

OTW, WHAT THE HECK???

WHY IS NOBODY TALKING ABOUT THIS???

WHAT FAIR USE BULLSHIT??? I DID NOT CONSENT TO AI SCRAPING MY FANFICS

Who the heck is this Betsy Rosenblatt??? They’re so out of touch with their user base. Did they really think fanfic writers would be happy hearing about this? Hah, I guess this is why they only said this after asking for donations...

I just can’t believe this is coming from the Organization of Transformative Works. I trusted AO3 to not be pro-AI, and yet here we are.

Time to remove my fanfics from that platform.

[ivyodessa]

Of course I just reblogged that long ass post defending AO3 and then the article about the OTW lawyer low key defending AI surfaces. Of fucking course

https://www.arl.org/blog/applying-intellectual-property-law-to-ai-an-interview-with-betsy-rosenblatt/

Just a reminder that the OTW elections are August 11-14th. Please make sure to check the candidates and their position on AI. Please vote to protect writer's work and make sure AI stays out of AO3.

Mark your calendars:

[wasteland-frenzy]

the pro AI person is Betsy Rosenblatt. I do not know Heathers stance on AI.

thanks for the info (: