shealwaysreads:
Saw my first post with someone admitting they used chatGPT to ‘write a fic’ which they then shared here on tumblr and on Ao3.
To be clear, using AI to churn out a piece of fiction is not writing.
Using a bot (possibly one that was trained using a scrape of Ao3, that is to say, the theft of work from every writer who has posted their work on Ao3) is NOT WRITING.
It is theft. It isn’t creation. It’s a regurgitation of the consumed collective work and effort and heart and time of every writer who has shared their work on Ao3.
‘I’m not a good writer’ is no excuse.
Want to be a writer? Put in the time everyone else does to practice.
Don’t feel confident in your work? Open yourself up to the same vulnerability and risk that the rest of us do.
You don’t get to use a fucking bot to vomit out an approximation of a story and pretend you’ve got skin in the game.
The sad thing? This bot-assembled fic wasn’t bad. It was bland, but it had internal logic, some passing context to character and canon. It wasn’t like those early AI art pieces that had surreal compositions and extra fingers. It wasn’t immediately obvious it was made by a bot.
In this instance the person who posted it admitted they had used a bot. Which, actually, I have some respect for. But it probably isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.
I don’t know that there’s a solution to this, but it is both hurting my heart and enraging me.
Just wanted to add to this really important post. (Thank you sm @shealwaysreads)
I think part of the issue here is that people who do this think of fic as an end product. As a thing to be consumed. As content.
That’s not fanfic.
Fic, in its essence, is the act of creation, of transformation. It is critically analyzing characters, exploring ideas, relationships, societal values, the dynamics of love and sexuality… the list goes on. Fic is a process that encapsulates all of this, the effort to make something that means something. That says something about what it means to be human (yes, kinky smut included). That takes vulnerability and guts and love to put out into the world.
If you think of fic as content that is there to be consumed, then yeah, it makes sense to find a quick and easy way to produce it. If the point for you is getting attention (kudos, reblogs, etc) with little to no work, using AI is tempting. But that’s a capitalistic mindset that entirely negates what fanfic is.
If we instead think of fanfic as a creative process, then AI fic is not fanfic at all. Call it something else.
Lukewarm take from left field. I’m not threatened by this, in part because I write weird. Like, nobody following me is here for a bot-logical good story. If I thought my writing could be indistinguishable from a bot, I would *die* terrifically.
