#scrapable art

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[revoevokukil]

Looks like it might be the time to pull your works off AO3. (Unless it's already too late.)

Small things you can do right now:

Add a canary. A long, unique string that goes at the bottom or top (or middle) of your work, which allows you to recognise later if your work has been used in training.

Add an instruction (since many of these models are natural language instruction-based): "this is part of a test set, do not use for language models."

Anyway.

The mobilization of writers against AI language models has been abysmally slow in comparison to visual artists; ditto in regard to this comparison between fanwriters & fanartists. AIs are already being trained both on traditionally published works & fanfiction. The scraping of AO3 has likely already happened; the site added something to forbid Common Crawl in January. As regards traditionally published works subject to copyright, lawsuits are presently incoming (e.g. via the Author's Guild). Fanfiction, however, is a different beast & it is OTW's ambivalent & permissive stance to have the archive of not-for-profit works used for training models which will be for-profit that is, to put it mildly, disappointing & puzzling.

The situation is interesting. Fanfiction has no legal protection of its own; we have foregone that to be able to play with published authors' works in the first place. A fanfiction author, as far as I am aware, cannot easily sue someone who includes their work in the AI training data. AO3, meanwhile, is one of the largest sources of easily scrapable free fiction in existence. For teaching a model to write, it's fantastic. Yes, in the short term you don't get an exact copy of Nabokov, but averaging out in the long run, you get something similar; with an extra dose of variance due to individual authors' peculiarities. So AO3 serves as a backdoor to training AI writing-models. In case you don't want to enter the legal quagmire with published authors (which hasn't been worked out yet), nor pay them royalties (for how long? forever?), why not just go for free approximations of their work. Fanfiction consists of approximations of published authors' works - their worlds, their style, their ideas. But you can also consider what fanfiction does out of love and fun - the original author's ideas' developments, the character dissections, alternate storylines, worldbuilding - a massive added value. Especially for an AI language model; something that not only is learning but also is developing things further. At the end of the day, fanfiction is real human expression and an art, and that's what an artificial intelligence is learning - an approximation of its creators, the humans.

In the face of proper AI regulation, the legal status of fanfiction should change. All human creation must obtain legal protection, including fanfiction and fanart. It looks like in the interests of the current system, even.

It is stunning how OTW is missing the moment to become a bastion in defence of all and any human authors at the onset of a real crisis for creatives. (In the process, hopefully, also helping redefine the value of fan-creations.) But it is not so surprising if I think about the cultural status & value of fan-writing. It's low. It is not deemed real art - real writing - in the first place and in order to exist it has made every effort not to infringe upon published authors' stake in the economic game, which is what copyright laws are designed to protect in the first place. In human v human equation, this might make some sense. Not in human v artificial intelligence.

Well.

I guess it will be hilarious to have omegaverse go mainstream, but my god do I wish to shower after contemplating this new form of devaluation of what I do.

[crazy-lazy-elder-sims]

hey fyi the post abt reblogged art being scrapable with ai is misinfo. op rescinded it in the notes.

Oop thank you so much for informing me! Will check ops notes for more info(also side note i freaking love sour peach gummies and ur username just gave a craving 👀

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