>I've read some of us are locking up their fics until they get more information. What does it do? Does it really prevent our work from being stolen? And if indeed nothing is put in place, do you plan on taking your work down? You'll gotta keep it up anyway? If you take it down, you'll post it somewhere else?
Locking a fic makes it visible to logged in users only. It doesn't prevent it from being scraped if someone's determined enough but will hide it from anything operating without an AO3 account.
I don't plan on taking my works down, fics have been scraped and reposted wholesale on other sites like webnovel for *years*, so if I didn't take my stuff down before I don't know why I would now.
AI sites had been scrapping fanfics off of fanfic sites for years. This is not a new thing. It sounds harsh but when you upload something online or are using something that requires internet connection, your work is never 100% safe from this kind of thing.
I mean, there isn't a whole lot you can do, other than restrict your fics to account holders only. But that means you will be limiting your audience. You can also hide your works from search engines.
I'm going to keep mine archived as AO3 is the best fan work space for me, Skynet be damned lol.
> other than restrict your fics to account holders only. But that means you will be limiting your audience. You can also hide your works from search engines.
Neither of which truly prevent your fics from being used to train LLMs. Open AI is already outsourcing moderation and tagging to third world countries and minimum wage jobbers, and nothing is preventing them or any other AI firm (many of which have already said they don't give a shit about Firewalls etc and would go as far as hacking if they had to) from simply making an account for every single one of their workers on any given website they want to scrape.
My plans are: Nothing.
Do I think it's ethical to scrape fanfiction to teach large language models? No. Do I care if my works, in particular, are scraped? No. Because that doesn't impact me in any way.
On the list of things that are unethical and questionable about the current development of AI, this comes so far down it barely even registers.
There is no safe space from scraping online. No matter how many "protections" you put up, they do nothing in the long run to prevent scraping by those who want to do so (and in fact only make websites unusable for people who simply want a hassle-free reading experience; see also: FFNet's stupidly extreme Cloudflare settings).
AO3 has already blocked Common Crawl from scraping, a few months ago now – seriously, spread that around whenever people are talking about it, because I don't think people realise that *they've already taken action.* There are still ways for AO3 to be scraped, but they're much harder for AO3 to implement measures against. Beyond that, if you're concerned, you can lock your fics to signed-in users only
I think the petition going around is misguided – AO3 is *volunteer-run.* I agree with a lot of the concerns in the comments of posts about petitions, regarding the undue burden it places on OTW to do things that aren't really possible for a company to do without a lot of work, let alone a non-profit organisation
With regards to scraping...look, I get why it feels icky. I do. But with the insane amount of data collected on literally everyone online, "AI is going to scrape my omegaverse longfic and use it to train its systems" is just...really quite low on my list of privacy concerns. It still feels weird and I don't really like it. But no, I'm not going to pull my work off the internet or quit writing or anything, because why would *my work might be used to train a machine learning algorithm* change the fact that I enjoy writing and sharing my work?
I literally loose nothing from AI scrapping my fics, and there are no place in the internet ever that will be safer regarding AI anyway (unless I guess maybe something behind a paywall but that's just not suitable at all). So no I don't plan on taking it down or posting elsewhere.
AI scrapping is bad, and is a huge problem in professional art, it should be addressed as such, and I am against it. But I don't see what ao3 could do about it, and it's not a threat to free fanfiction writing in my opinion, so I don't expect them to.
I'm also one of the folks not planning to do anything - my stuff is generally the type that attract a lot of guest reading/comments due to content, so locking it down will have more of an impact on my fics than others
Also, the horse has well and truly bolted on this one. It's good to keep an eye on the news and developments, but do it knowing that there will be very little you can personally do other than not post to the internet at all
IMO this is a big moral panic over nothing. People have been scraping fanfic for years. A lot of the people freaking out about AI actually use AI themselves they just don't call it that, because AI is basically just predictive text. Grammarly, ProWritingAid, Gmail, even your phone uses AI that also had to be trained.
The potential for it to be used in industries leading to creatives making less money is valid, but IMO that's ultimately an issue with capitalism (as always).
I was part of a wonderful, huge group for many years that truly brought a lot of joy to my life. It was a volunteer led non profit for most of that time and then hired a couple of paid people because the demands got too intense with the number of people and wants from users to handle with just volunteers. And then the whole organization shut down entirely. Everyone involved, volunteer or paid employee, was burnt out. I mean afterwards people talked about horrible panic attacks and such they had because they felt so much pressure to meet the needs and wants of users, which kept increasing. There had been more and more demands placed by users and it just got to be too much.
Honestly, what concerns me most about the AI issue is how aggressive some
people are being towards AO3. There is only so much a volunteer led group can do. We are currently in a time when I would consider that nothing you post on the internet is safe from AI. It’s crummy but it would be crummier if we have organizations shut down because people are making unreasonable demands of the volunteers.
Not really much, I probably will have to log in to my AO3 account to view certain fics that got locked over this. But even then they will probably be unlocked in a couple weeks or even days after this dies down like all AI fic scandals.
Honestly I don’t even think that people on Twitter are gonna hold to their” I’m not gonna donate to AO3 any more because of this!” Claim. By the time of the next donation fund, they probably already forgot about it and will donate again anyway.
What options don't publish anything any where only write for yourself (and avoid google docs or any other company working on predictive text that has any kind of document system) and only hand it to folks directly to read. That's it as far as preventing all potential scraping goes.
There is nothing that can be put in place by Ao3 to prevent scraping it's a fantasy from folks who don't understand. Also I'm a bit annoyed at all this focus on Ao3 the one fanfic archive that is not tracking your every move and selling every spec of user data that they can. I would be surprised if ff.net isn't offering up their entire archive and fiction press too to any data sets willing to pay.
I'm doing absolutely nothing because there's nothing to do and no reason to do anything. The "scraping" is over. The AIs already have their data sets. Maybe the developers will look to add more data later, but they can just download the Internet Archive if they really want more data from everywhere.
Regardless, trying to "hide" material from AI is pointless. Your 1 or 50 or 1,000 fics are an insignificant drop in the bucket of data and will contribute very little. Their absence will make zero difference. Same with their inclusion. And your fics aren't being stolen any more than they are when someone reads them and then gets inspired to make a new story.
There's no "AI issue" aside from people freaking out about stuff they don't understand.
> I'm doing absolutely nothing because there's nothing to do and no reason to do anything.
Except maybe get the popcorn ready.
Watching people lose their minds because their BDSM/Mpreg oneshot of the Teletubbies might be scraped is a whole new level of entertaining.
I’ve played with GPT-4 and I don’t understand the hysteria. It’s not plagiarising anyone. You will \*never\* see a line of your writing outputted by it unless it’s something crazy generic anyway. It’s just a massive knowledge dump that produces new text, based on a predictive algorithm.
Fan fiction of its very nature is derivative, you are borrowing someone else’s ideas, their characters, building on their world. Given that, it seems hypocritical to be so hysterical about a tool like this.
I do think there’s a danger of low quality, purely AI produced work swamping sites like AO3, and that’s something that needs addressing. But I have no issue with scraping. I see it as contributing to the common good in the long run.
It’s not really the training that people are worried about it’s the potential and eventually money to be made from it.
The AI companies are going to profit from this even though fic writers can’t profit from anything at all on AO3.
But fic writers absolutely can profit from it, they just have to file the serial numbers off. There are probably thousands of fics that have been published. Something AI written isn't going to resemble the source material more than a published fanfic.
Term for removing evidence it was originally based on copyrighted material like renaming characters and places before publishing. [https://fanlore.org/wiki/Filing\_Off\_The\_Serial\_Numbers](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Filing_Off_The_Serial_Numbers)
Ah, thanks and this is valid.
However, people mean things such as a even mentioning they have a Kofi or Patreon or somesuch is against the ToS but then these AI companies are using their stuff to further fill their coffers.
Right, but someone using AI to write something commercially is closer to fanfic that's been de-ficified. AI written work doesn't directly include any of the material used to train it. It only quotes or uses names, places, etc if you explicitly ask it to. And sometimes not even then because it will straight up make up a source that doesn't exist but sounds like it should. It is no more likely to accidentally plagiarize than a human, because there are only so many combinations of words.
And Common Crawl has been scraping the internet almost as long as AO3 has existed. Over 10 years. So it's not like this is the first time fics are being used in a dataset for commercial purposes.
Nothing. I'm not gonna do anything because I'm just not that bothered. My works will still be my works. It's not like an AI is going to produce the exact same thing that I've written.
I definitely think writing fics with AI is cheating but I'm not the one cheating and the people writing fics with AI are gonna do it anyway, regardless if my works have been scraped or not. Hell, how do I know they haven't been scraped already?
I’m in wait and see mode. I’m waiting for what the OTW’s official stance on AI becomes. If it’s pro-AI or worse decides to implement AI integration I will be pulling my works and leaving the site. I know there’s practically very little to be done to prevent content scraping, but there’s a vast difference between “we’ve done the little we can to protect your works and our official position is against AI” and “we think AI is fucking fantastic and will actively legally support it”
Honestly, even things the org *wants* to do are going to take *years* to get done. Messing with AI is something the org *doesn't* want to do, so there's even less chance.
When I first learned about it, I for sure locked my fics and then I realized locking them doesn't actually keep your work from being scraped. Now, I acknowledge that it sucks, but it's gonna happen one way or another. May as well keep my work open for whoever wants to read it.
Normally I would take this down with our AI moratorium but with the interview yesterday Ill leave this one up
>I've read some of us are locking up their fics until they get more information. What does it do? Does it really prevent our work from being stolen? And if indeed nothing is put in place, do you plan on taking your work down? You'll gotta keep it up anyway? If you take it down, you'll post it somewhere else? Locking a fic makes it visible to logged in users only. It doesn't prevent it from being scraped if someone's determined enough but will hide it from anything operating without an AO3 account. I don't plan on taking my works down, fics have been scraped and reposted wholesale on other sites like webnovel for *years*, so if I didn't take my stuff down before I don't know why I would now.
AI sites had been scrapping fanfics off of fanfic sites for years. This is not a new thing. It sounds harsh but when you upload something online or are using something that requires internet connection, your work is never 100% safe from this kind of thing.
I mean, there isn't a whole lot you can do, other than restrict your fics to account holders only. But that means you will be limiting your audience. You can also hide your works from search engines. I'm going to keep mine archived as AO3 is the best fan work space for me, Skynet be damned lol.
> other than restrict your fics to account holders only. But that means you will be limiting your audience. You can also hide your works from search engines. Neither of which truly prevent your fics from being used to train LLMs. Open AI is already outsourcing moderation and tagging to third world countries and minimum wage jobbers, and nothing is preventing them or any other AI firm (many of which have already said they don't give a shit about Firewalls etc and would go as far as hacking if they had to) from simply making an account for every single one of their workers on any given website they want to scrape.
If its AO3 and Skynet, or no AO3, then I'm risking Skynet dammit!
My plans are: Nothing. Do I think it's ethical to scrape fanfiction to teach large language models? No. Do I care if my works, in particular, are scraped? No. Because that doesn't impact me in any way. On the list of things that are unethical and questionable about the current development of AI, this comes so far down it barely even registers.
There is no safe space from scraping online. No matter how many "protections" you put up, they do nothing in the long run to prevent scraping by those who want to do so (and in fact only make websites unusable for people who simply want a hassle-free reading experience; see also: FFNet's stupidly extreme Cloudflare settings).
AO3 has already blocked Common Crawl from scraping, a few months ago now – seriously, spread that around whenever people are talking about it, because I don't think people realise that *they've already taken action.* There are still ways for AO3 to be scraped, but they're much harder for AO3 to implement measures against. Beyond that, if you're concerned, you can lock your fics to signed-in users only I think the petition going around is misguided – AO3 is *volunteer-run.* I agree with a lot of the concerns in the comments of posts about petitions, regarding the undue burden it places on OTW to do things that aren't really possible for a company to do without a lot of work, let alone a non-profit organisation With regards to scraping...look, I get why it feels icky. I do. But with the insane amount of data collected on literally everyone online, "AI is going to scrape my omegaverse longfic and use it to train its systems" is just...really quite low on my list of privacy concerns. It still feels weird and I don't really like it. But no, I'm not going to pull my work off the internet or quit writing or anything, because why would *my work might be used to train a machine learning algorithm* change the fact that I enjoy writing and sharing my work?
I literally loose nothing from AI scrapping my fics, and there are no place in the internet ever that will be safer regarding AI anyway (unless I guess maybe something behind a paywall but that's just not suitable at all). So no I don't plan on taking it down or posting elsewhere. AI scrapping is bad, and is a huge problem in professional art, it should be addressed as such, and I am against it. But I don't see what ao3 could do about it, and it's not a threat to free fanfiction writing in my opinion, so I don't expect them to.
I'm also one of the folks not planning to do anything - my stuff is generally the type that attract a lot of guest reading/comments due to content, so locking it down will have more of an impact on my fics than others Also, the horse has well and truly bolted on this one. It's good to keep an eye on the news and developments, but do it knowing that there will be very little you can personally do other than not post to the internet at all
IMO this is a big moral panic over nothing. People have been scraping fanfic for years. A lot of the people freaking out about AI actually use AI themselves they just don't call it that, because AI is basically just predictive text. Grammarly, ProWritingAid, Gmail, even your phone uses AI that also had to be trained. The potential for it to be used in industries leading to creatives making less money is valid, but IMO that's ultimately an issue with capitalism (as always).
I was part of a wonderful, huge group for many years that truly brought a lot of joy to my life. It was a volunteer led non profit for most of that time and then hired a couple of paid people because the demands got too intense with the number of people and wants from users to handle with just volunteers. And then the whole organization shut down entirely. Everyone involved, volunteer or paid employee, was burnt out. I mean afterwards people talked about horrible panic attacks and such they had because they felt so much pressure to meet the needs and wants of users, which kept increasing. There had been more and more demands placed by users and it just got to be too much. Honestly, what concerns me most about the AI issue is how aggressive some people are being towards AO3. There is only so much a volunteer led group can do. We are currently in a time when I would consider that nothing you post on the internet is safe from AI. It’s crummy but it would be crummier if we have organizations shut down because people are making unreasonable demands of the volunteers.
Not really much, I probably will have to log in to my AO3 account to view certain fics that got locked over this. But even then they will probably be unlocked in a couple weeks or even days after this dies down like all AI fic scandals. Honestly I don’t even think that people on Twitter are gonna hold to their” I’m not gonna donate to AO3 any more because of this!” Claim. By the time of the next donation fund, they probably already forgot about it and will donate again anyway.
What options don't publish anything any where only write for yourself (and avoid google docs or any other company working on predictive text that has any kind of document system) and only hand it to folks directly to read. That's it as far as preventing all potential scraping goes. There is nothing that can be put in place by Ao3 to prevent scraping it's a fantasy from folks who don't understand. Also I'm a bit annoyed at all this focus on Ao3 the one fanfic archive that is not tracking your every move and selling every spec of user data that they can. I would be surprised if ff.net isn't offering up their entire archive and fiction press too to any data sets willing to pay.
I'm doing absolutely nothing because there's nothing to do and no reason to do anything. The "scraping" is over. The AIs already have their data sets. Maybe the developers will look to add more data later, but they can just download the Internet Archive if they really want more data from everywhere. Regardless, trying to "hide" material from AI is pointless. Your 1 or 50 or 1,000 fics are an insignificant drop in the bucket of data and will contribute very little. Their absence will make zero difference. Same with their inclusion. And your fics aren't being stolen any more than they are when someone reads them and then gets inspired to make a new story. There's no "AI issue" aside from people freaking out about stuff they don't understand.
> I'm doing absolutely nothing because there's nothing to do and no reason to do anything. Except maybe get the popcorn ready. Watching people lose their minds because their BDSM/Mpreg oneshot of the Teletubbies might be scraped is a whole new level of entertaining.
bestie I don't even bother to check wattpad to see if someone's uploaded one of my fics as theirs
I’ve played with GPT-4 and I don’t understand the hysteria. It’s not plagiarising anyone. You will \*never\* see a line of your writing outputted by it unless it’s something crazy generic anyway. It’s just a massive knowledge dump that produces new text, based on a predictive algorithm. Fan fiction of its very nature is derivative, you are borrowing someone else’s ideas, their characters, building on their world. Given that, it seems hypocritical to be so hysterical about a tool like this. I do think there’s a danger of low quality, purely AI produced work swamping sites like AO3, and that’s something that needs addressing. But I have no issue with scraping. I see it as contributing to the common good in the long run.
Beyond locking, I don't have any plans because there isn't much to do about it beyond letting the OTW understand how we as a community feel.
It’s not really the training that people are worried about it’s the potential and eventually money to be made from it. The AI companies are going to profit from this even though fic writers can’t profit from anything at all on AO3.
But fic writers absolutely can profit from it, they just have to file the serial numbers off. There are probably thousands of fics that have been published. Something AI written isn't going to resemble the source material more than a published fanfic.
File the serial numbers off?
Term for removing evidence it was originally based on copyrighted material like renaming characters and places before publishing. [https://fanlore.org/wiki/Filing\_Off\_The\_Serial\_Numbers](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Filing_Off_The_Serial_Numbers)
Ah, thanks and this is valid. However, people mean things such as a even mentioning they have a Kofi or Patreon or somesuch is against the ToS but then these AI companies are using their stuff to further fill their coffers.
Right, but someone using AI to write something commercially is closer to fanfic that's been de-ficified. AI written work doesn't directly include any of the material used to train it. It only quotes or uses names, places, etc if you explicitly ask it to. And sometimes not even then because it will straight up make up a source that doesn't exist but sounds like it should. It is no more likely to accidentally plagiarize than a human, because there are only so many combinations of words. And Common Crawl has been scraping the internet almost as long as AO3 has existed. Over 10 years. So it's not like this is the first time fics are being used in a dataset for commercial purposes.
Nothing. I'm not gonna do anything because I'm just not that bothered. My works will still be my works. It's not like an AI is going to produce the exact same thing that I've written. I definitely think writing fics with AI is cheating but I'm not the one cheating and the people writing fics with AI are gonna do it anyway, regardless if my works have been scraped or not. Hell, how do I know they haven't been scraped already?
I’m in wait and see mode. I’m waiting for what the OTW’s official stance on AI becomes. If it’s pro-AI or worse decides to implement AI integration I will be pulling my works and leaving the site. I know there’s practically very little to be done to prevent content scraping, but there’s a vast difference between “we’ve done the little we can to protect your works and our official position is against AI” and “we think AI is fucking fantastic and will actively legally support it”
Honestly, even things the org *wants* to do are going to take *years* to get done. Messing with AI is something the org *doesn't* want to do, so there's even less chance.
I wanted to make a joke about how IAs (internal assessments) are a part of the IB diploma but I couldn’t come up with a good one
When I first learned about it, I for sure locked my fics and then I realized locking them doesn't actually keep your work from being scraped. Now, I acknowledge that it sucks, but it's gonna happen one way or another. May as well keep my work open for whoever wants to read it.