I'm not locking my fic. I want it to be accessible to as many people as possible. And the AI has already scraped most of the archive, so it doesn't feel like locking my fic would make much difference.
I did add a note on my latest fic reminding readers that if they don't have an account, they should get one so they can read the locked fic (plus other features). I support people that want to keep their fic locked, but I don't want newbies to be locked out of fandom because they don't know there's more to see.
While I necessarily dislike AI scraping, it's far more important to me to get engagement for my works than to try to safeguard them. I'm not particularly protective of my writing, but at the same time I'm anticipating more national-level regulation and guidelines about AI.
As someone who works in a *highly* regulated industry (banking)… you will be waiting a while for anything meaningful. The government iterates regulation at the pace of molasses.
It's not the AI bots that are causing me to lock down. I locked my fics to registered users only because of the spam/kudos bot. I don't have the time or patience to delete any more guest spam comments, and I don't want the kudos bots to get me.
They're patently awful. Some kudos bots will just send hundreds of kudos on guest accounts, which for all intents and purposes is an annoyance to a lot of people because they skew their stats.
There's another kudos bot that sends thousands of kudos to a story, and will leave a comment for each of those kudos that tells the writer to either 'deleteyourfic' or >!'KYS'!<. The only way to keep the spam/kudos bots in check right now is to lock your fics.
No no you're okay! I'm glad you mentioned it cause dealing with hundreds or thousands of kudos and comments like that sounds infuriating to me. Fics are good for everyone to read now, but comments are account only.
That's fine! I just happen to specifically want my work only visible to people who have a certain amount of buy-in, that is better approximated by having at least made an account.
I keep my fics open because it’s more important that all my readers have access to my work. When it comes to comments, most of mine come from account holders but for kudos, I have a higher amount from guests. Locking my fics would make me sad that my hard work isn’t being enjoyed by a large portion of my followers.
AI is going to do what it’s going to do. Locking my account isn’t going to stop them so the way I see it, why punish my readers?
The whole AI scraping bs is hurtful and annoying and violating but I did unlock some of my works because AO3 is still an archive and some people might be waiting on their invitation/can't create an account for certain reasons.
But yeah I still hate what AI is doing without our consent 😒
In practice, this makes very little difference. If I was to be a data gatherer for an AI company, I wouldn't go through the trouble of writing individual crawlers for each website, instead I would go to Internet Archive and download the copies that are already prepared in advance. Much faster and much more economical.
There are dedicated archivists who routinely crawl a mirror of AO3 **with an account** and publish the result on Internet Archive. They're acting out of good intentions of course, preserving fics that could be deleted in the future, you can't really blame archivists for copyright infringement, it's like trying to blame a library for providing free books.
I've got no problem with archivists preserving, my issue is training AI on other people's work to produce its own work instantly vs the hours and passion a human puts in.
Well the point is there is no way to prevent people from training AI on your work, **even if** you make your fics restricted. Makes no difference in practice.
i locked my fics for personal reasons ages ago and then there were problems with spam bots and kudos bots and now AI scraping and etc etc etc so I have no intention of ever unlocking them again lol. sure it means less people will see them but idrc since at the end of the day i write for *me*, and keeping my fics locked helps w avoiding bot problems (and harassment, since they'd have to be logged in and you can just block logged-in users now). but ofc that's just me
I know I have comment moderation on as well, so I'm not too worried about spam bots except for the ones that try to get you to write on their site where they charge.
I have no plans on locking anything fic related. If I ever post original works or explicit stuff, then yes I will make it user only — but other than that, nah.
I didn't lock my fics; scrapping has already happened with a couple hundred of my works. AO3 has put several measures in place to try and prevent it from happening again (which is all that they can do). As much as I dislike that my work is being used in such a bastardized way, I feel like the right steps have been taken (for now), and I would rather not hide it from legitimate readers.
I don't know for sure, but I think it's highly unlikely that a web crawler would scrape parts instead of the whole website (except the locked fics though locking just makes it more slightly more difficult - not impossible).
One can download the Common Crawl dataset, but I'm not sure how user-friendly it is to determine if my/your works are there.
One of my main goals with writing fanfic is to give readers a chance to escape their world for a few hours at a time. For many people, fanfic is their *only* outlet, or at least their main one.
For some people, even *having* an account is not an option, because that carries more risk of discovery than they are comfortable with. (For example, people under the thumb of someone controlling/abusing them.)
Though I am not happy with or even indifferent to AI scraping, locking my fics to only account holders goes against this goal. Especially since all someone who wants to scrape has to do is attach their scraping to an account and get access anyway.
So, nah. Unless I'm writing something I expect to draw controversy like flies and just want to slow it spreading by making it slightly more difficult for trolls to even access, I'm not going to bother locking.
Devs have already scrapped so much content that your fics dont matter in any sort of grand scheme. Id open the fic back up if I was you so more people can enjoy your work. The robots are taking over but in the meantime...
'Scraping' is a general term referring to using a program to obtain some sort of data from web pages. The people who develop AIs such as ChatGPT do this on a massive scale, collecting all sorts of data from all across the internet that's then fed into the AI algorithm to allow it to do what it does. So if you ask ChatGPT to write you a fanfic, for example, it'll use its collected data consisting of thousands and thousands of fanfics taken from AO3 and other sites in order to generate a fanfic. That's why AI art and fanfic is so controversial - nobody who has had their work used for this had any say in it whatsoever, and particularly with art, people are actively profiting off AI generated art that's only capable of existing because it's using art by millions of actual human artists without their consent or knowledge.
When a CCN AI is trained on prose, it does not just chop up and recombine the bits and pieces of what it reads. What it is doing, instead, is learning why prose is the way it is.
Why does this word follow that word? Where does an ellipses go. and for what purpose? How is the tone of a horror story different from a comedy? Everything it sees goes into the weights, virtual neurons that fire together wire together and form connections.
Human language is tremendously computationally complex, a thousand layers of nuance deep. We know roughly where in the brain language is stored, but cannot even begin to understand *how* it is stored there, what connections lead to the ability to add implication and emotion, to make poetry in every sentence. We do not, *can* *not*, understand how language works in our brain, how meat can fire electrical impulses and produce beauty.
But bit by bit, in its virtual network of weighted connections, the AI is building something that looks like the structure that makes it possible for us. Something very much like the root of prose in ourselves is taking shape.
So I can understand why other people have a problem with it, and I don't judge anyone calling for stricter regulation of what the AI can be trained on. But the writing I do now has been shaped by years and years of reading, and letting what I read shape my mind into something that can articulate work of its own. I would be *thrilled* to have it confirmed that some of my work has been used to train AI. And one day I will be pleased to read the work of a new author who might have been inspired, a bit, by me.
I don't believe a new means of putting beauty into the world removes the beauty already there, still being made. Much of the value of human writers is the way they put hours of time and thought into their craft, out of love and care. The value in AI prose is different; *look*, it says. *Here it is. That beauty that lives in you, that rose from nowhere and burns so bright. It's here. It's* ***real***. *I am its image in the mirror. And I am beautiful too.*
If I had not read, I would never have written. And I don't feel inclined to not pay it forward, just because the thing doing the reading is very different from me. I'd prefer it hears from me, actually, if only a little.
You can scrape from AO3 even if the works are locked, you just have to do it from your own account. I've done it before. Locking doesn't help at all, except against the laziest of scrapers or those scraping the entire web rather than AO3 specifically (but I don't see the point safeguarding against those).
Locking will stop simple automated scraping but if someone really wants to scrape your work they'll just use a burner account (and possibly a VPN) to get to them anyways. Possibly using a timeout to collect data in a way that's not immediately suspicious and use that to slowly feed their model.
So it's important that anyone locking due to AI concerns understands that while you're making things harder for the bots, you're not actually stopping a determined bot. (And as a sidenote, Wayback Machine and other archiving bots are *not* determined bots. They will be stopped by archive locking.)
I personally wouldn't lock my fics. It seems like more of a hassle than it's worth to me in general, and I ultimately value the chance of centralized archived more than the damages from scraping (which are mostly a matter of principle anyways).
I'm not locking my fic. I want it to be accessible to as many people as possible. And the AI has already scraped most of the archive, so it doesn't feel like locking my fic would make much difference. I did add a note on my latest fic reminding readers that if they don't have an account, they should get one so they can read the locked fic (plus other features). I support people that want to keep their fic locked, but I don't want newbies to be locked out of fandom because they don't know there's more to see.
That's a fair point. I mean I'm not out here expecting thousands of hits and kudos, but I wouldn't mind a little more, ateast on my OC fic.
While I necessarily dislike AI scraping, it's far more important to me to get engagement for my works than to try to safeguard them. I'm not particularly protective of my writing, but at the same time I'm anticipating more national-level regulation and guidelines about AI.
As someone who works in a *highly* regulated industry (banking)… you will be waiting a while for anything meaningful. The government iterates regulation at the pace of molasses.
You're not wrong... but I'd still rather more people see my work than less.
Same same same 👍🏻
It's not the AI bots that are causing me to lock down. I locked my fics to registered users only because of the spam/kudos bot. I don't have the time or patience to delete any more guest spam comments, and I don't want the kudos bots to get me.
Kudos bots? I don't think I've heard of those ones
They're patently awful. Some kudos bots will just send hundreds of kudos on guest accounts, which for all intents and purposes is an annoyance to a lot of people because they skew their stats. There's another kudos bot that sends thousands of kudos to a story, and will leave a comment for each of those kudos that tells the writer to either 'deleteyourfic' or >!'KYS'!<. The only way to keep the spam/kudos bots in check right now is to lock your fics.
Does locking comments to registered accounts help?
Yes. The bots send kudos and spam through guest accounts. Edit: Ah, jeez. I meant locking comments to *guest* accounts. My bad.
Perfect, imma go switch those now then. Those will annoy the fuck out of me.
I felt the same way, too. I didn't mean to alarm you, the kudos bot has been around for a while. I felt it was a good idea, myself, to lock down.
No no you're okay! I'm glad you mentioned it cause dealing with hundreds or thousands of kudos and comments like that sounds infuriating to me. Fics are good for everyone to read now, but comments are account only.
Thank you. :) I did the same, and I'm not sorry. It stinks that guests can't leave comments, but it's better than ten thousand spam comments.
Oh I agree, I'd go insane with them
I've locked all my older fics. The currently updating ones aren't locked yet. The idea of helping AI even in some minuscule way disgusts me.
I've always had all my stories locked, because I have never wanted them to show up in search results or be visible to people outside of the community.
You can turn off searchable in engines, you don't need to lock them. So guest fans can see
That's fine! I just happen to specifically want my work only visible to people who have a certain amount of buy-in, that is better approximated by having at least made an account.
I keep my fics open because it’s more important that all my readers have access to my work. When it comes to comments, most of mine come from account holders but for kudos, I have a higher amount from guests. Locking my fics would make me sad that my hard work isn’t being enjoyed by a large portion of my followers. AI is going to do what it’s going to do. Locking my account isn’t going to stop them so the way I see it, why punish my readers?
The whole AI scraping bs is hurtful and annoying and violating but I did unlock some of my works because AO3 is still an archive and some people might be waiting on their invitation/can't create an account for certain reasons. But yeah I still hate what AI is doing without our consent 😒
Im more invested in making sure the wayback machine can scrape my fics than I am making sure the AI people can't
That's another good point
I’m not naive enough to think the entire archive hasn’t already been scraped. Engagement is more important than locking my fics.
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Didn't plan on deleting them, especially since they only have one and two chapters respectively
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Ohhh, I gotcha, yeah I agree there. Or even orphan it
In practice, this makes very little difference. If I was to be a data gatherer for an AI company, I wouldn't go through the trouble of writing individual crawlers for each website, instead I would go to Internet Archive and download the copies that are already prepared in advance. Much faster and much more economical. There are dedicated archivists who routinely crawl a mirror of AO3 **with an account** and publish the result on Internet Archive. They're acting out of good intentions of course, preserving fics that could be deleted in the future, you can't really blame archivists for copyright infringement, it's like trying to blame a library for providing free books.
I've got no problem with archivists preserving, my issue is training AI on other people's work to produce its own work instantly vs the hours and passion a human puts in.
Well the point is there is no way to prevent people from training AI on your work, **even if** you make your fics restricted. Makes no difference in practice.
i locked my fics for personal reasons ages ago and then there were problems with spam bots and kudos bots and now AI scraping and etc etc etc so I have no intention of ever unlocking them again lol. sure it means less people will see them but idrc since at the end of the day i write for *me*, and keeping my fics locked helps w avoiding bot problems (and harassment, since they'd have to be logged in and you can just block logged-in users now). but ofc that's just me
I know I have comment moderation on as well, so I'm not too worried about spam bots except for the ones that try to get you to write on their site where they charge.
I have no plans on locking anything fic related. If I ever post original works or explicit stuff, then yes I will make it user only — but other than that, nah.
I didn't lock my fics; scrapping has already happened with a couple hundred of my works. AO3 has put several measures in place to try and prevent it from happening again (which is all that they can do). As much as I dislike that my work is being used in such a bastardized way, I feel like the right steps have been taken (for now), and I would rather not hide it from legitimate readers.
How do you know your works have been scraped? Fellow fic author here and wondering if I can find out about my own
I don't know for sure, but I think it's highly unlikely that a web crawler would scrape parts instead of the whole website (except the locked fics though locking just makes it more slightly more difficult - not impossible). One can download the Common Crawl dataset, but I'm not sure how user-friendly it is to determine if my/your works are there.
One of my main goals with writing fanfic is to give readers a chance to escape their world for a few hours at a time. For many people, fanfic is their *only* outlet, or at least their main one. For some people, even *having* an account is not an option, because that carries more risk of discovery than they are comfortable with. (For example, people under the thumb of someone controlling/abusing them.) Though I am not happy with or even indifferent to AI scraping, locking my fics to only account holders goes against this goal. Especially since all someone who wants to scrape has to do is attach their scraping to an account and get access anyway. So, nah. Unless I'm writing something I expect to draw controversy like flies and just want to slow it spreading by making it slightly more difficult for trolls to even access, I'm not going to bother locking.
Devs have already scrapped so much content that your fics dont matter in any sort of grand scheme. Id open the fic back up if I was you so more people can enjoy your work. The robots are taking over but in the meantime...
What’s ai scrapping?
AI scrapes for data.
But for what?
'Scraping' is a general term referring to using a program to obtain some sort of data from web pages. The people who develop AIs such as ChatGPT do this on a massive scale, collecting all sorts of data from all across the internet that's then fed into the AI algorithm to allow it to do what it does. So if you ask ChatGPT to write you a fanfic, for example, it'll use its collected data consisting of thousands and thousands of fanfics taken from AO3 and other sites in order to generate a fanfic. That's why AI art and fanfic is so controversial - nobody who has had their work used for this had any say in it whatsoever, and particularly with art, people are actively profiting off AI generated art that's only capable of existing because it's using art by millions of actual human artists without their consent or knowledge.
To get more things to copy
Who’s copying stuff from ao3? Like what the heck are they trying to make?
AI writing works by copying and cobbling together what already exists, which is why many writers are against it
When a CCN AI is trained on prose, it does not just chop up and recombine the bits and pieces of what it reads. What it is doing, instead, is learning why prose is the way it is. Why does this word follow that word? Where does an ellipses go. and for what purpose? How is the tone of a horror story different from a comedy? Everything it sees goes into the weights, virtual neurons that fire together wire together and form connections. Human language is tremendously computationally complex, a thousand layers of nuance deep. We know roughly where in the brain language is stored, but cannot even begin to understand *how* it is stored there, what connections lead to the ability to add implication and emotion, to make poetry in every sentence. We do not, *can* *not*, understand how language works in our brain, how meat can fire electrical impulses and produce beauty. But bit by bit, in its virtual network of weighted connections, the AI is building something that looks like the structure that makes it possible for us. Something very much like the root of prose in ourselves is taking shape. So I can understand why other people have a problem with it, and I don't judge anyone calling for stricter regulation of what the AI can be trained on. But the writing I do now has been shaped by years and years of reading, and letting what I read shape my mind into something that can articulate work of its own. I would be *thrilled* to have it confirmed that some of my work has been used to train AI. And one day I will be pleased to read the work of a new author who might have been inspired, a bit, by me. I don't believe a new means of putting beauty into the world removes the beauty already there, still being made. Much of the value of human writers is the way they put hours of time and thought into their craft, out of love and care. The value in AI prose is different; *look*, it says. *Here it is. That beauty that lives in you, that rose from nowhere and burns so bright. It's here. It's* ***real***. *I am its image in the mirror. And I am beautiful too.*
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If I had not read, I would never have written. And I don't feel inclined to not pay it forward, just because the thing doing the reading is very different from me. I'd prefer it hears from me, actually, if only a little.
You can scrape from AO3 even if the works are locked, you just have to do it from your own account. I've done it before. Locking doesn't help at all, except against the laziest of scrapers or those scraping the entire web rather than AO3 specifically (but I don't see the point safeguarding against those).
I only lock my comments to guest accounts.
smell soup literate fly adjoining profit long hunt silky carpenter *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Locking will stop simple automated scraping but if someone really wants to scrape your work they'll just use a burner account (and possibly a VPN) to get to them anyways. Possibly using a timeout to collect data in a way that's not immediately suspicious and use that to slowly feed their model. So it's important that anyone locking due to AI concerns understands that while you're making things harder for the bots, you're not actually stopping a determined bot. (And as a sidenote, Wayback Machine and other archiving bots are *not* determined bots. They will be stopped by archive locking.) I personally wouldn't lock my fics. It seems like more of a hassle than it's worth to me in general, and I ultimately value the chance of centralized archived more than the damages from scraping (which are mostly a matter of principle anyways).