#fuck i'm so fucking done with ai

[perchingowl]

Maybe to give a little more context from someone who dabbled a little in AI during uni/college (as in What is AI? What can it do? How can you program and train an AI that filters your emails for spam?), so maybe take this with a grain of salt and do your own research. Otherwise, a quick rundown from someone who is very tired and very done with all of this:

Is this possible?

The short answer is yes. It is possible.

Slightly longer answer: Web crawlers can amass a huge amount of text as they crawl through the internet. Ao3 provides that. And right now, chances are good one has scrapped data from ao3 to form a training set for OpenAI. This is based on what the reddit user(s) who made the post put into the AI generator. However, the possibility exists that other fanfic sites have been used (e.g. fanfiction.net though I don’t know why one would use that if ao3 is right there. More to that a bit further down).

But how can ao3 allow that?

Honestly, as far as I understand it, ao3 doesn’t. See, one can have a robot.txt file on their website, which basically tells robots/web crawlers not to include certain elements/sites. Ao3 has one, which as far as I can tell should cover works but allow scraping statistics. But that doesn’t mean a web crawler, which collects texts, will acknowledge that, especially if its owners realize what a goldmine ao3 is for a training set.

Ao3 as a good training set?

Well, yeah, vast amounts of text that already have been lovingly tagged by its creators? Not only with languages but also the general themes of a text. That’s a goldmine because it means you categorize the text within the training set very easily as you can basically just point it to the tags used by the author.

Imagine it this way, if you have a spam e-mail you can relatively easily tell (with maybe some experience), if it is a spam or not. An AI needs to learn that. This means “here, these 50 messages are spam and these 50 are normal, now based on these common characteristics you (the AI) learn by comparing them, find out which of the 1000 other mails you were provided with are spam and which are not”. The problem is that someone needs to categorize those first 100 messages first so the machine can learn from them. And a lot of that work has already done by the authors here.

That is what I imagine makes ao3 especially attractive for mining text but I might be wrong here.

But that means the training set will be polluted with the ranciest porn you will ever find. That’s good! That means they can’t make money from it! Let’s keep doing that!

No, that is not “good”! It’s still fucking bad! Because the AI still learns how language works via the training set it has been provided with. It still produces content!

That “content” cannot be used though!

And you are feeding a machine that spews out racism and ableism! Just to name two that are mentioned within this article. And the implications of that are horrifying - what if someone uses that AI generator to create fake news that are used to stir outrage? I don’t want my writing to have helped with that! That’s not why I write.

So ... what can ao3 do?

Honestly, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t think anything can be done with technology (now), but this is a matter for the OTW lawyers. There is already a lawsuit, which deals with a programmer realizing github has been scraped by OpenAI (the tool/company that is also suspected of using ao3 to as a learning set for its AI as mentioned above). So, basically open-source and free code has been used to train an AI, which then puts out code which other people profit from. Sound familiar, right?

What can I do?

For now, log your ao3 works.

What’s is done though and your works might have ended up in training set. It’s also only raising the barrier for web crawlers but that’s honestly all we can do. We writers don’t have the ease to make an obnoxious watermark such as artists to distort text without sacrificing readability (really recommend artists doing that btw).

How do I do that? I have so many works.

Thankfully, you can edit all works at once. When you are logged in, go to either your works page or your profile and select “edit works”. Now select “All”. Click “edit”. Scroll down to “ Visibility” and select “Only show to registered users”. Scroll down and click “Update all works”. If need to be, confirm. Wait for a little for ao3 to load and then check if your works have the blue lock.

... is the muskrat really involved?

Who the fuck cares? If he is, it is just another shitty thing he has done and who is surprised. If he is not, ao3 being mined as a training set is still a fucking problem. My fics are for my amazing readers and me - not for some bloody AI some capitalists want to make money with! 

I love it when anons/guests find my works and kudo/leave reviews, but given the new revelation that Elon Musk is using bots to mine AO3 fanfiction for a writing AI without writer's permission, my works are now archive-locked and only available for people with an AO3 account.

[skeletalheartattack]

Subtitles below the keep reading:

Hey you, shut your mouth and look at my paw! DON'T FORGET!! [Incomprehensible sped up gibberish] This... Journey... Money... Loads of coins. [Incomprehensible sped up gibberish] What-about-her? What-about-her? ... What-about-her? 'She still like me? [Quiet but mostly incomprehensible gibberish about subtitles] O P S O P N O-1 1. Here's the spell: Love the mermaid, for sure! The mermaid is HAPPY! Okay! It's pretty normal for a fish, right? Guuuyyyssss, beeeee caaarefuuulll wiiiiith theeee GIIIIIRRRRLSSS!!! [Incomprehensible] Oh! Silly! Oh yes! Lamb chop boy! [Incomprehensible] [Very quietly, while white noise is playing over it] Goood eevening, aand weeelcome too the shoooowww... [In the background] Ohhh, mooney!

[futureofthemasses]

NaNoWriMo really said how DARE you say using a machine to write your novel isn't okay while all of us have spent literal years writing 50k novels without it

[aeolianblues]

I'm not an extrovert. At all. In everyday life, I'm a yapper, sure, but I need someone to first assure me I am okay to yap, so I don't start conversations, even when I really want to join in sometimes! It's just the social anxiety acting up. God knows where from and why I lose a lot of my inhibitions when it comes to talking to people about music. I don't know where the confidence has suddenly sprung from. I've made a crazy amount of friends in musical circles, either just talking to people about common music or (since it is after all in music circles) talking to bands about their own music. I let out a sigh of relief any time an interaction goes well, because in truth it's going against my every instinct. I wish I could do that in everyday life

[sherlock-is-ace]

.

[valorieravenchild]

just fyi

going off socials for a while! I can feel depression biting at my heels and I will not succumb!

So if you want ✨️GOOD QUALITY ART✨️

Check out the patreon! Cause I'm tired of feeding all of these fucking machines!

[aeb-art]

eclipses

[luciolefire]

Ugh, it's going to take weeks to Glaze all of my art at this rate. My poor Surface laptop can barely handle one image at the lowest setting, and even that takes three hours or more apiece.

Fuck AI.

[medicinemane]

There's honestly... just so many people, just so so so so so many people in this world where I'm like... aren't you people tired of this fucking... you know, I was going to call them clowns but that's really disrespectful to clowns, these people could never get their face on an egg...

Anyway, aren't you tired of this childish jackass? Don't you just want to ignore them and never have to hear about them again? If we just ignored them they legitimately would go away... don't you want that?

And this applies to... just ungodly amounts of people, from jake paul to even elon musk (just... don't touch his shit, he'll run out of money eventually with how bad he is with it), to just... name an annoying famous person and you'll name someone I've literally forgotten right now that I could never have to hear about again if people would just ignore them (unless they committed crimes, investigators are welcome to pay attention while gathering a case)

Yet the answer's always "no, we're paying so much attention to them!" and I'm just like... why? Why would you watch jake paul box? I heard about that and was like "he's still doing that shit?", and yet I guess it made a lot of money yet again and it's just like... ignore him

These people could go away, and yet

[nocturne-of-illusions]

man. having to delete all of my twitter posts across all of my accounts is so sad.... :[ i'm currently watching the deletion script eat its way through the 33k posts on my main.... that's over a decade of conversations with people who have since disappeared but i still think of fondly. i have a backup of MY posts, and i went through and screenshotted as many reply threads as i could, but i have no idea how many i missed... man.

[demigirlboss2girlrotboogaloo]

I might not be very active here for a bit. Maybe I will be, but I might not be. I'm probably not dead, this website just isn't good for my mental health.

I might still post my art when I make it, not that anyone would see it. But aside from that I'm gonna try to use it as little as possible.

[the-commonplace-book]

wow fuck sag-aftra for screwing over video game voice actors

[lokidanger]

if it wasn't because ai art is so BORING as fuck I'd 100% trace the shit out of it.

Instead I'm taking an ai """artist""" 's version of Loki and making it less soulless. Because that's fun

[ardate]

Things are just so bleak man.

[dangerliesbeforeyou]

i've seen a recent trend of people using ai to make photo manipulations and edits but with literally 0 mention of the fact they used ai and it's honestly very frustrating!

photo edits and manips are a big part of fandom culture and i love seeing them! but the amount of ai edits ive seen that have all the issues you see in all ai images (the eyes look weird, the hands look weird, parts of the background blend in with the foreground, all the textures look wrong, etcetc) and it just looks bad lol

it also just highlights to me how most people seem to be completely oblivious about blatantly ai images (or maybe actively ignoring it??) & like the times i've called out the images being ai i've had my comments deleted which to me is so fucking telling lol

like @ anyone who uses ai i dont fucking care at this point lol all i ask is that you TAG your shit so i don't have to see it thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[sharonaw]

As a creative person, I can't, in good conscience, participate with the internet anymore. As many may already know, there is now a lawsuit against Google for allowing open AI to scrape all existing Google Docs. All of my work, not just my creative writing but all of my research done from school was stolen to feed their greed. It's hard enough when people repost your hard work without giving credit, it's a whole other story when a corporation does it to feed a machine that's intended to steal and replace industries. I'm utterly disgusted.