The sheer fucking selfish soulless laziness of this drives me daft. Yeah, great, you can get a bot to churn you out some crappy generic ending, rather than one written with love and thought and heart by an actual human being. And you can do it in a couple of seconds, rather than having to put any thought into it yourself.
Why do they think so many stories go unfinished in the first place? Could it be perhaps because writing is hard work, and that writers are people with real lives to balance with their writing?? Question, anonymous commenter: did you bother to comment on the fic while the author was still updating, letting them know how much you were enjoying it, offering them motivation to continue? Did you get in touch with them to ask about the story and where it was headed? Did you give the author the slightest indication that they were writing a story that someone else out there enjoyed? Did you think of the author as a fellow human being and member of fandom community at all before you decided to feed their story into some fucking machine to get your shitty by-the-numbers McFanfic conclusion?
Speaking as a writer: honestly, if someone came to me and told me they’d written an ending to an unfinished story of mine - I mean actually written, with their own imagination, under their own steam - I might have mixed feelings, depending on the circumstances, but at least I would know that they had loved the story enough to actually put the thought and the effort into creating an ending for it. Honestly, I’d very probably be flattered. It certainly wouldn’t be the same slap in the face that just feeding it to fucking chatgpt would be. Maybe you could try that next time your favourite fic is languishing unfinished. Only that would take - gasp - actual effort and engagement on your part.
From the bottom of my heart: fuck AI. And fuck this lazy, entitled culture of instant gratification that enables this sort of behaviour.
I make fun of myself regularly for the amount of smutty oneshots I post, but I also write long form content. And BOTH of those forms of writing mean a lot to me, even if I make fun of myself a lot. I work hard on what I write, and I pour myself into all of it, even the "porn without plot," stuff. If someone feeds my stuff to an AI, and I find out about it, it will crush me in a way I can't describe. Writers are not machines, and that's WHY the work is better than anything the AI will produce. People seem to think it's "just words." It's not. Words matter. Watch a movie with poorly written dialogue and tell me it doesn't make a difference. Reach out and tell the fic writers you love that you enjoy and appreciate their work. If it's unfinished, yeah that SUCKS, and as someone who also reads fanfic I get it. It sucks when something hasn't been updated for months or even years. But it doesn't give you the right to feed unfinished fic to an AI. If you feel the impulse to do that, don't.
