AI is Theft, plain and simple.
I'm seeing a group of posts circulating with fanfiction authors forbidding folks to feed their WIPs to an AI to get a quick ending. I am both horrified that there's actual readers who would do that and also resigned that some readers will do it anyway.
A lot of us have already been robbed.
1,000,000 words of my writing were consumed by ChatGPT when its trainers took massive amounts of AO3 works and added them to its training dataset. Nearly every word I've written in my adult life was taken without my consent to build that machine.
I'm locking all my existing and future fics to registered AO3 users only for this reason. It's the best precaution to prevent future scraping of works on the website by AI. I don't want to do that. Half my Kudos and some of my comments come from guests. I want to be able to share my stories with those of you who can't get an AO3 account. But I don't want my work stolen by an AI again.
To folks who would rather use AI to generate the ending of someone else's WIP, or to write a whole story for them, know that youre condoning the theft of billions of words.
Some may say that all writing is created thanks to inspiration from other writing, maybe you think it's not a big deal that others work was used to train an AI. But there are differences to how a human mind writes and how a machine generates text. A human being can be inspired by another writer or dozens of writers. But the work they create is their own, crafted from their unique human experiences. Humans select words based on their definition, connotation, linguistic history, and dozens of other unique factors to convey whatever idea they are striving to put onto a page.
ChatGPT selects words based primarily on their function, one of the reasons it has been demonstrated to be unable to tell the difference between falsehood and fact. It selects words based on how often it knows they have been paired with other words. ChatGPT does not have its own emotions. It does not think. It does not create. It only reuses the turns of phrase created by real people. None of its words are its own. It has no original ideas of its own. It's producing a facimile of creativity - a facimile made possible by my and millions of other writers stolen, unconsented contributions. Its creators are profiting off of our work.
WGA are striking to ensure their professional writers' hard work is never used for AI models. Those of us who are fanfiction authors deserve the same choice. I never agreed to have my work used for anyone else’s profit, certainly not for an AI which, by design, steals other people’s ideas each time it generates a word.
If you're too impatient to wait for one of my WIPs to be finished, and for some reason dont just want to message me and beg me to spoil the ending, then go ahead, give my work to the AI to finish if youre that impatient. It already ate every word thats ever mattered to me. But know that whatever ending it spits out, it will be no more real than a trick of the light and not half as entertaining. The equivalent of eating a pack of red dye number 2 when you wanted a red apple. And it will be theft. Is that really worth your instant gratification?
