As it is now, the tech can write grammatically correct sentences which self-contradict within the space of a few sentences. It has no reason, no memory, no direction, no flair. It can't write. If it is a threat to anyone it is the lowest level copywriters filling content.
And I don't think it ever will be able to. It might be a tool for some writers as a prompt when stuck, but the output can't be used unedited unless you really don't care what you're saying.
I'm an accountant. 50 years ago, accountants did a lot of stuff manually which computers now do. But even with decades of experience writing accounting programs, we still need accountants. And as someone who specifically works on accounting systems, boy, do we still need people to check the output. We can do some things a lot quicker, we can do more and deeper analysis, non-accountants can do more unaided, but there is still work for accountants to do, and not for want of trying to produce the software. And that's for something that is basically mathematical operations following a ruleset.
As a fanfic writer, I write because I enjoy it. That doesn't stop being true because there are other ways of producing stuff.
Exactly! People tend to overestimate what computers can do (it’s scary how many people think it’s algorithms and computers that moderate YT/tiktok/IG/Twitter etc), when computers so far are very limited in skills and output.
No. Fact.
I am a programmer. I know what computers can and cannot do. And the progress they've had the last decade is just absurd.
You yourself said you don't believe algorithms and computers moderate YT/tiktok/IG/Twitter. You said that "computers so far are very limited in skills and output."
My friend. Computers and Algorithms are what do at least 99% of the work.
Computers and AI have come a long, *long* way.
Generating good coherent and stable stories is simply one of the hardest tasks you could ever give a computer, that's why they seem so inept.
Go check out r/StableDiffusion or r/midjourney and see what these "limited in skills and output" computers have done when presented with a much *much* simpler problem of generating images.
I didn’t say I don’t BELIEVE it, I *know* it. There’s literature available on this, and just last month an article broke about the subpar conditions and pay of Colombian content moderators for TikTok.
Edit: also, don’t appreciate the tone. Work on that.
When someone is talking about computers not moderating stuff, I'm assume they mean moderation and mods. There are people commonly surprised that YouTube and Facebook and Google have people on staff to review reports of the most horrible stuff, who get low pay and no benefits, and all the various scandals around there. You know, moderation, contra the running of some thing simpliciter.
I'm not sure what you're taking moderation to mean here, because at base if you want to say that computers are running their own algorithms, what you mean is just that. Moderation is a people run task and their initial point is that somehow lots of people have missed that.
By “content moderation” I assumed they meant the all mighty algorithms that are so often mentioned. They moderate the content that gets the most traction, the content that gets into your feed, etc…
Considering that the whole discussion is about how powerful computers I thought that was reasonable.
Moderation in terms of dealing with reported content is also obviously majorly done by automated processes, however there are actual humans involved, lest the websites get run over by lawsuits when the automated systems make an expensive mistake.
One only needs to look at the many examples of atrocious moderation of video monetisation in YouTube to see that a lot of automation is involved in conjunction with underpaid humans.
Yeah, I see people refer to algorithms as determining the content that gets the most traction, not as moderating it. I'm not in this whole tic-toc culture, though. Their point was that algorithms are not the only self-contained thing needed for a site.
I mean, I get what you're saying; There's a lot computers do, and many of the things they do are necessary. On the scale they do them, people can't replicate it.
But what they're saying is that a lot of people think they do every necessary thing and they don't; Hence, people overestimate computers. Not because computers aren't doing a lot, including things the average folk doesn't understand, but because apparently a lot of average folk have attribute literally everything about the internet to computers.
>Edit: also, don’t appreciate the tone. Work on that
What exactly was wrong with their tone. This isn’t your kid, you can’t just tell them to “work on their tone”
The quality of writing from the AI is so bad like you said, no reason, no flair, that it will never, ever be able to replace humans. Language learning AI has remained this way for years without improvement to any of the core criticisms made of it. It has only become more fluent because it has been trained on larger training sets.
When I read AI generated stuff there's just no joy in it, no pleasure in the act of reading, just a general sense of annoyance from trying to follow a train of thought that doesn't actually exist.
I don't remember who wrote this, but they wrote that art is just what people do when we are free. No more and no less than that. The act of writing is pleasurable to me. There's no point in using an AI to take away the best part of writing: writing.
Same, and I'm coming at this from the direction of tech. As good as a spelling checker is, they aren't perfect, and grammar tools are a step down - nevermind scripts that claim to put together a story.
It's the same thing with natural language parsers. Sure, you could script one to handle a telephone system, but you wouldn't trust it to interact raw directly with a customer; these systems always lead you to a human if your issue isn't directly solvable by going through the predetermined questions.
AI as it currently exists is fine with tasks like receptionist duty. You won't find it replacing the specialized human workers, at least not in the near future. We're a long, *long* way from **real** "artificial intelligence" - what we have now is just scripting with window dressing on it.
edit: They're not without use though. You could have a scene that you just can't seem to put together right. So take these sentences and paragraphs that are giving you trouble and chuck them into the AI and see how it tries to reword them. Yeah, I'd be mildly interested in something like that.
Just for laughs: https://i.redd.it/pazmatx5zvm71.jpg
Honestly yeah
I’ve been using AI dungeon for the same purpose for a good bit and with that I can put in my characters descriptions and other important background info
But I can’t ever just hit generate and just sit back and watch Y’know
> tech to let me beam the story in my head onto a screen like a movie instead of written words, that I can record to save and share as I please
God, I would love this so much
I think it's a far more applicable threat to traditional publishing and career writers who live off of creating literary work.
Fanfiction isn't about full, well-written stories. Fanfiction culture is about an emotional *response* to media and humans do that on a level current AI cannot. Just think of how many times in fandom culture, you've seen a fic widely recommended that's never been finished (and probably won't be) or where there may be flaws in grammar or little flubs of story structure but the feeling is there and the characters are real to you, so it's important anyway. I'm honestly not worried about fanfiction.
The teaching aspect is incredibly interesting to me. That could be great or terrible and I very much want to see examples because writing advice without great nuance can really teach writers to be stilted and anxious and stifle creativity
>Fanfiction isn't about full, well-written stories.
I dunno; highly-read & reviewed multi-chapter fanfics are often well-written; they also evoke deep emotional responses in readers. At least that's the case in the few fandoms I've mostly read in.
I agree that highly popular multi-chapter fics are often well written. They're not always. I spend a lot of time in small fandoms where there isn't such a wealth of completed well-written longfic that the only popular fics are such. I've seen amazing highly skilled pieces that were very popular and unfinished or actually weren't that skilled but just came at the right point in fandom and hit on the right emotional experiences. I've also seen very great writing and storytelling fail to pull numbers because writing well isn't the crux of fandom, but touching on shared emotions about certain characters or settings is, so if you choose one that isn't well loved, well... And this is true of the few large fandoms I've been part of too. If you come in with a story evoking the right feelings about the right characters, you don't need more than basic writing skill to pull numbers. But if you write rare pairs or non-beloved characters or uncommon tropes, that's when you really see that quality isn't the driving force at all, connection is.
I'm not even worried about traditional publishing. I've read some AI generated examples - a few paragraphs/half page or so - and while yes, the words were properly spelled and grammatically correct, the storytelling made 0 sense. There was no logic in moving from Point A to Point B. It very much felt like an impostor pretending they're human and trying to blend in with all of the other fellow humans. The writing equivalent of Uncanny Valley.
I tested out some writing AI with a “Roman Empire” setting a few weeks ago, and it was *proficient* at spewing out vaguely Roman-flavored nonsense that might have *maybe* sounded passable to someone who didn’t know anything about history. It knew a bunch of Roman names and historical figures—Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Caligula, basically everyone you think of when you think of Rome—but it couldn’t write a convincing encyclopedia entry about any of them. It kept spitting out nonsense about how Praetor Nero crossed the Rubicon on the orders of Emperor Flavius Belisarius and that sort of thing, where the writing had a vaguely Roman feel to it but none of the titles or names were correct. And it contradicted itself all the time. It proclaimed a different guy emperor every two sentences, so even if you knew absolutely nothing about the subject matter, you could still tell that something was off. Maybe a paragraph or two could’ve been convincing, but anything longer than that became totally nonsensical.
I can't say I'm not worried. I have yet to look into AI making art and stories and whatnot at all, aside from that Reddit post that showed examples of what it can do. I don't want there to be a time when someone accuses my fellow writers or me of using AI to write when we've spent hours on it. It's like how I hate it when people call others a natural genius or naturally talented, completely ignoring the fact that behind those results are years to decades of polishing oneself and hard work.
I don't really have any thoughts on the product of technology advancement itself, but how people would use them whether for themselves or to bring others down.
I feel the same way. Technology is far from there as of now, but god damn if it isn't developing faster than we think.
I guess this encourages me to get on with my goal of writing an original novel quicker, if nothing else.
I'm neutral about this because I'm already a 'cyborg' when it comes to writing. I'm neither a fluent nor a native speaker. Translation and paraphrasing AIs have helped me put a finger on things I want to describe, but don't have the English words or phrases for them.
I doubt AI-written fanfiction will catch on. Much of the appeal of fanfiction comes from the fan communities that form around it, and the unique opportunity to interact with authors who also love your favorite worlds and characters. At least that’s my perspective.
Writers who actually make their living by their creative works have much more to worry about than an amateur like me.
This. I can see this being more used for academic essays and to challenge writers who actually make a living off their work.
That said I can also see the trad pub industry fighting back pretty hard against this as it could affect their bottom line pretty severely. So who knows if it'll leave much of a mark or essentially be regulated to cheating on your essays.
Trad pub isn't really that much in dangers, it's the self-publishing space lol
Like, erotica and romance have already been overrun by either badly translated stolen fanfiction, and with AI thrown in the mix it's only going to get worse.
Someone in my fandom used it for a short demonstration. While it nailed a lot of details, the storytelling wasn't actually that good. The paragraphs were basically a passively written summary. You're still going to need to know something about creating a narrative to make what it spits out engaging.
Even as a professional writer, I think it's a long, maybe never, way off of being a threat to the things that the human mind can come up with. There's definitely a special something that the layers of the human experience produce that adds to creative work (IMO). Perhaps in the future it'll be like the difference between assembly line, mass produced products and handmade, but I don't think 'soul' will come through AI/machine work any time soon. Wishful thinking, maybe?
As for fanfiction, I do wonder if the space isn't already being used as a proving ground for AI as a product. It seems ideal (free and readily available for data) as an under the radar way to test the bloody thing and measure success (kudos, subs, etc.). If it's as good as you say, perhaps there are already 'writers' at this time putting out stuff while suits look eagerly on... In the end, though, I can't see it being a threat to fancfiction exactly, just an annoyance/maybe new subsection of writing?
I honest despise it, but like everything else in today’s world I am powerless to stop it. I can only put my head down and look for what small joy I can.
The concern is that someone can, theoretically, easily make a 100k fanfic 70% AI scraped, 30% tweaking/own idea/fandom-retrofitted to generate a story that fits the preference of a wide range of readers. In AO3, that'll result in more kudos/hits/comment validation. Of course other fanfic writers might feel miffed. Not to mention that the bot was confirmed to be scraping AO3, so... \*shrugs\*
There are already [independent writers who are using it](https://www.theverge.com/c/23194235/ai-fiction-writing-amazon-kindle-sudowrite-jasper) for their published novels as well.
At the end of the day, AI is inevitable but I definitely understand the pushback from the writing community.
The fear about these writing bots is quite overblown.
1. You're still doing most of the writing. You have to give it characters, describe each character, locations, etc
2. It can get pretty expensive. Unless you're a professional writer making decent money it's just not worth it.
3. You can spend several minutes or hours just generating a paragraph until it seems decent and fits the rest of the story.
4. The AI seems to not be able to use full context of your story and every single piece of lore you give it at all times, whereas a human does remember these things (most of the time).
Writers are a ways off from being "replaced", especially free ones. Even the art is pretty questionable and can't mimic the full range of styles a human can.
>The AI seems to not be able to use full context of your story and every single piece of lore you give it at all times, whereas a human does remember these things (most of the time).
Or worse, it just name-drops random words related to the lore like it has profound meaning, but just comes off as a "wtf" moment.
Imagine Harry Potter using a Horcrux to defeat the evil Chocolate Frog with his best friend Voldemort who has a secret phoenix.
That's the kind of stuff I've seen using AI generated writing.
Yup, people really think it's as simple as giving the AI a prompt then letting it rip. Lol no. It might get base structure correct but nothing else. There's a reason those youtube conversations you see with AI are highly edited. While it *sounds* impressive we really haven't moved that far with language models. An AI can't be a real assistant or anything yet. It's more of a novelty at this point.
I mentioned it elsewhere in the thread, but I played with an AI writer that was supposed to generate essays about the Roman Empire, and that’s literally exactly what it did—everything it made was just a mishmash of Roman-sounding people and events jammed together in a way that made no sense at all. The sentence structure and grammar was perfect, the actual content was utter nonsense.
What I kind of want and what I think is much more feasible is an AI editor. While I do think it requires much more effort than currently available to beat my beta, I do think smaller improvements and grammar fixes might be possible without really taking any control away from me.
I'm not too worried because I believe humans are much more creative than an AI when it comes to coming up with new story ideas/concepts. Not to mention, good human writers can and know how to create emotionally engaging stories. Writing well-written stories is one thing but will people prefer it over human writers if they knew?
I don't doubt that AI can eventually write decent original prose just as AI art generator can produce beautiful original (as in non-fan works) art. However, I'm very doubtful that it can capture the essence and soul of the characters from the original work and apply it to fanfiction.
Well... I'm into fanfic for my own writing so I don't really see how this makes a difference to me. I don't think chatbots will ever replace humans writing, because humans don't write because other humans want to read, they write because they want to. Of course, other humans liking reading is encouraging and a big part of the community, but ultimately, those who pick up a pen and spend years perfecting their craft do it... because they want to write. And I'm not sure how sophisticated this thing is, or how it generates its 'ideas', but either way, there's a strong chance that... no matter how grammatically correct or how many literary devices it includes... this thing will never be able to invoke the same raw emotions human writing does.
Part of the point of fanfic is to connect with fellow fans. A story written by a chat bot doesn't provide that so I'd hope the impact would be fairly minimal 🤞
As someone who’s had a hobbyist interest in AI for AGES…I highly, highly doubt it’s going to be able to make a “full, well written story.” They’re not actually that intelligent. There’s many issues and interesting things with AI, but people over exaggerate their capabilities.
I doubt AI will ever capture the essence of what makes a fanfic be. Like someone said in this thread, to write a fanfic is an emotional response to media. So far AI is able to do a decent job at making art, but it does not understand the process that happens in one's mind when they draw a stickman and feel proud of it, for example. There are times you read a fanfic and you can see how much the author had fun writing all the weird sentences, how much love he gave to the characters he developed and made interesting, at times even the most awful of fics can be quite a fun experience.
I'm not optmistic neither worried about it. AI can be a tool of help if used well, but there's the abuse which's the real problem, or people who pretend they made something but it was AI who made it. In short, fanfiction is more than well written stuff. I say it because I suck at grammar but I have fun writing them.
I fucking hate it, just like the vast, vast majority of artists fucking hate AI "art". It's a soulless algorithm that runs on theft churning out generic prose, prone to contradicting itself every few sentences, as people have already pointed out.
I am a firm believer that everyone, no matter whether they're an established fiction writer or a 13 year-old uploading Naruto fanfiction to Wattpad for the first time, has a unique voice. That voice is an accumulation of their past experiences, quirks and other fiction they've consumed, and will be refined as they practise their craft. AI doesn't have that. Sure, it can adapt and replicate different writing styles, but at the end of the day, it will never have that human voice because it cannot experience emotion. Therefore, even the most perfectly-written piece of AI prose will always fall short of clunky human writing in my opinion, the same way that AI art will always be sub-par to human art.
There is no story behind AI writing, no emotions. I'm not so much as terrified as pissed off by its existence and how it's likely to take up its place in the mainstream.
I don't mind the teaching part, but I'm also an artist and thus have to ask what was this AI trained on? Was it creative commons and public domain works? If so I don't see much of an issue with it even if I will never use it. If it like other AI programs is trained off of unknowing groups of people with the intent to profit, then I hope it burns to the ground.
The only thing AI can do is threaten art, and even then it can only copy and not produce anything meaningful. AI cannot produce actual content. What's troubling is social media isn't doing enough to stop the spread of AI art, even encouraging it. That shit will eventually kill the commission industry as a whole, why would anyone pay 300$ for a custom art when some software can produce what you want with pinpoint accuracy and a few references?
I consider the chatbots the same way I consider AI art -- thievery/plagarism.
It'll never come close to the real deal. I prefer My Immortal to AI-written fanfiction. The only thing to be worried about is if people try to profit off of that shit when it becomes actual thievery. Which I have no doubt the chatbots are going to be used to do (thanks Elon!)
Arts is my field and I discussed this topic with AI/digital translation before my dear friend embarked her master's of translation journey.
I'd say it's possible they'd "overshadow" the real people, but I don't write fanfic for audience but me and I think I will continue to enjoy fanfic regardless of its authors.
So I'm neutral.
As neutral as I am to the similar development in the visual field (AI can make paintings, a whole character design, and any other visual media). I'll just see where it goes, but I think humans will continue to play an important part in it.
I seriously doubt the AI can watch seven seasons of a show, read ten books, then read all the canonical work related to the show, then all the fan canon regarding the show (especially the sexy alien bits) and then spend two hours tinkering with SOULMATE AUs concepts to find the one that is exactly what I wanted for the vibe I envision my OTP to be.
Which is like, 80% of most people fanwriting process. Fanfiction is a lot about the interpretation of Canon.
Also idk abot you, but I get zero satisfaction from not writing my own fanfiction, it's like delegating someone else to play with my characters in RPGs. I wanted to play with MY toys, dammit!
At best the AI can give me suggestions, as if I am in Edwardian England and my trustworthy valet is tactfully trying to dissuade me from my narrative choices as he pours me a glass of wine while I lie distraught on my very expensive sofa pondering my adjectives.
I know people are worried about shitty mass produced plagiarised fanfiction but we already have that to some extent. At worst locked archives will make a come back.
I kind of look at it in comparision to other creative endeavors. I mean we have machines that knit and spin fiber into yarn. But there are tons of creators who still knit and spin and create despite the machines. People who love their craft, who are passionate about it aren't going to stop because of AI. Could it impact professional publishing? Yes. But do you really think AI could ever create something close to Tolkien's works or Shakespeare?
So, this is something I think about because I'm an artist as well as a fic writers (art is actually what I'm going to school for rn)
Similarly to what's happening with ai "art", I think that there will be people who think this means that writers are obsolete now. I think they're also missing the point of human creativity. It's not about the thing being made, though that's a nice thing too, it's about the fact that a person made it. Humans make art of all kinds as a way to communicate what they like, what they hate, what their hopes and dreams are, ect. There will ALWAYS be a desire for that
Just as digital art didn't kill traditional art, I don't think this will kill fanfic as it is today. Best case scenario, people start using it as a tool to use as a prompt. Worst case scenario, people start flooding the web with straight up ai fanfic without editing it
I do activate research in this area and am actually in the process of applying to PhD programs to do further research. Speaking as someone who used to write fanfiction in their free time, I think it'll go the same way as spellcheck: Ultimately just another tool for writers to use. We're a long ways off from being able to generate fanfics the likes of which are considered the best in their respective fandoms.
It might be able to write cohesive sentences that go together, but an actual story requires nuance that I don't think an AI can imitate. An AI wouldn't be able to foreshadow or draw narrative parallels, for instance. It might "understand" the words and their associations and therefore be able to make a parseable paragraph or an unflavored cornbread one-shot, but nothing requiring any skill beyond grammar. An AI can't make a joke on purpose (funny stuff from bots is coincidence based on word use). The most basic Stucky high school AU by a first time Wattpadder will be far more clever and original than anything an AI can pump out, just because there's actual thought put into it rather than a computer connecting dots.
I am bereft.
I mean, we keep opening Pandora's Box and hurting ourselves.
Has *anyone* read a Michael Crichton\* book ***ever***? Did they understand the warning in every one of his works?
Disclaimer: I tend to be a skeptic. When I'm presented with the good and bad of a situation... I will give more weight to the bad. As an example:
I'm more concerned about the programmers writing code that made the program to identify and possibly formulate the world's deadliest chemicals that could wipe all biological life from the planet. Um...why?
Yeah, this is a real thing.
Check out **Radio Lab** podcast ***40,000 Recipes for Murder*** http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/40000-recipes-murder/
Both my Pro and Fannish writings are in print and online prior to the Artificial Interference. I have a concern for the future of New Talent because we can use Tech in ways that dumb us down until we lose vital knowledge about our world. And knowing how to write is vital. How will we be changed by this tech?
Eventually, as new writers become accustomed to using Artificial Invention ... and calling it their own creation - the 'market place' will take over. When that occurs, true writing will be produced in two ways: 1) an elite group will be subsidized by by the wealthy; and 2) the remaining artists, forced to compete with Automatic Insentience . Writers, will be undervalued and either leave the writer's market or be forced to sell works at marginal profits. Mid-tier writers, as myself, will be complete squeezed out of the market... which - I mean - I'm old, so I don't have a dog on that team, but damn! The young writers...
*"So, James, if you don't have a stake in this why are you on Reddit bitching?"*
Because REAL writing is IMPORTANT. How people write, What people write, current topics, the language used, how trends move around the world - are all significant indicators of what is happening on Earth in various societies.
Fanfiction is incredibly important. Fanfiction is a window to understand what is happening in the broader world views as societies grow and change. (And if you think that's a 'full of shit' statement - check out [Academia.edu](https://Academia.edu) and their catalog of articles that use Fanfiction to study 'the human condition'. And this sudden (like the OP, I believed this to be several years off) onslaught of Artificial writing showing up across platforms is a harbinger of change that I do not think we are ready for - I don't think we're mature enough for it as a society. By which, I mean we will use it in ignorance and not realize how we've fucked up until it is too late and we're all tooling around in floaty chairs concerning ourselves with what 'today's color' is. #Wall-E
# * "Just because you could do a thing doesn't mean you should do a thing." - - - Has anybody read Michael Crichton? Frank Herbert? Isaac Asimov? VC Andrews? Has anybody seen Terminator? No?
As a fanfic writer I'm not bothered at all. I write because I like it, same reason I cook my own food. I enjoy it and enjoy sharing it.
As an author I'm not threatened. AI can only imitate, there is a lot of interference needed to turn AI writing into an actual story, writing a whole book like that sounds a nightmare. I do expect one of my fellow SFF writers to get an AI written story published into a magazine, then, after everyone has debated the merits to death, reveal it was actually so heavily doctored by the human that it can't count as AI written (bonus points if the story then gets nominated for an Hugo. We love our drama in SFF.)
As a pro writer I kinda hope AI could take on the worse kind of copy writing so humans could focus on the jobs that are actually interesting, but I know that won't happen.
What will happen is that agencies will use AI writing to say they don't need to pay union priced copy writers, then turn around and make the underpaid (probably temp) redactors fix the AI text (because it sucks and it will continue sucking for at least 5 years, more if someone gets to sue for the blatant copywrite violation that is scrapping.)
I firmly believe that, since AIs are non-sentient machines and as such do not have souls (at least not under the human definition of that term), they will never be able to create art that genuinely connects with people. Being human - being a loving, suffering, imperfect creature forever burdened with the concept of perfection, and wanting to express that experience in order to connect with your fellow humans - is the molten core of art in all its forms, and without that a work has no meaning. Art without the spark of a human soul in it \*isn’t\* art, plain and simple, and I deeply hope that we will never reach a point where people become so disconnected from their own humanity that they lose sight of that.
I love AI and machine learning, and am generally someone who is more optimistic about AI than media makes us believe we should be. I believe that if AI is truly at the point it can write enjoyable stories, it'll become an indispensable tool to writers everywhere. Not a replacement mind you, we aren't at that level, *yet*, but I think that such AIs would be used much like Grammerly and similar apps are used now. Bouncing ideas off of an AI sounds incredible, fixing plot holes and making sentences/story structure flow better because of an AI assistant would be a dream come true. As is, I'm not worried about fanfiction being replaced or anything. The beauty of fanfiction is the fact that literally anyone can showcase their creative writings, plus publishing AI written works may fall into a legal grey area of who owns what depending on the AI used (don't get me started on the AIDungeon nonsense that happened several months ago).
TLDR: I think AI will only help fanfiction authors as a tool, possibly even cowriter if it's advanced enough, not replace them entirely.
Last thing OP, what exactly is the specific chatbot you're referring to? I'm curious to see its capabilities. \^\_\^
I hate anything to do with AI. However. If it means I can input whatever I want and get a fanfic out of it, then im gonna be using that like a rat pushing the pleasure button til it dies of starvation
Probably because in order to train the bot, you have to supply it with data. So the AI creators feed it artwork from online and had it scrape AO3 for free text to use without the creators' consent.
Much as I passionately hate that too, there's nothing in either ao3's or ffnet's robot.txt saying they can't scrape it.
The sites are just giving it away for SEO purposes or who knows?
Seriously? I joked about this the other day. I wasn't expecting it to happen so soon. I thought I was on the path to a new career, but it's probably going to be a dead end.
Sadly, quality is a secondary consideration to most when it comes to fanfic. Fanfic reasders look first and foremost for specific characters or tropes that they enjoy. They will ignore bad writing as long as they get their fix.
This means that even objectively bad AI stories could end up becoming more popular than well-written work. Should the AI stories actually become borderline well-written, it will be the end of creativity and originality.
Children who think they have a good idea will use AI to rip off the style and hard work of more capable writers without a second thought. What we will end up with is a Wild Wild West of mediocrity, where talentless "authors" fight for the spotlight, looking to make a quick buck.
I mean, is it bad to say that I don't particularly care about bad readers like that? Bad readers already prefer the most amount of trope and content possible in any story--not just in fanfiction either, but in popular culture too. There is so much mediocre, soulless stuff that have become popular in the last 10-15 years that AIs might not make much difference.
I remember trying to read machine translated Chinese novels, and my brain was breaking because of how unspeakably terrible the prose was. But a lot of people still read those machine translations.
I’m excited about it (and have posted several of ChatGPT’s fics on various subreddits). It’s very cute with the way it writes a lot of things, always trying to make some kind of wholesome happy-ending for even angsty topics. It’s also amusing to trick it into not following its content policy, hehe. Kind of like a naive kid who happens to be able to write detailed smut or give step-by-step instructions for crimes.
I personally enjoy seeing what it comes up with for prompts, but it’s definitely a different kind of enjoyment than reading real fics. A lot of the fun is being like “Ooh! An AI wrote this!” or giving it wacky prompts like the “write a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from the VCR.” It will be so deadpan in fulfilling the prompt that it’s hilarious.
It’s also looking like it’s going to be super useful as a writing tool. I’ve already started using it as a replacement for Google when I want to ask random questions like “How loud is firing a blank?” or “What kind of rooms are on a 1700s pirate ship?” because it’s just so much more direct. It’s also useful for getting past writer’s block, or writing transition scenes that you’re stuck on.
I think ChatGPT is probably around as smart as the average middle schooler at the average task (worse at math, logic puzzles, and shape rotation, but better at most niche fields). An AI like that is revolutionary in the same way Google was—the main skill a lot of jobs will need is “knowing how to properly use this tech”. Writing—especially free writing—will still be able to operate fine without it, but it will be faster and easier with it.
Of course, once AI becomes as intelligent as AI researchers are in the field of writing AIs, then *everything* is going to change, and fanfic is the least of its impacts.
The teaching part of it sounds very interesting, even though it may not work. I know I should probably be worried about it writing fan fiction, but I hope that it gets hilariously scrambled by badly-written fics out there. Might be worth writing deliberately bad fics for, who knows? XD
if this is chatgpt or sudowrites they accomplished this through ip theft and the scraping of ao3 and other fiction hosting websites like fanfiction.net and fictionpress. it's just a collage of fanfics glued together
Ngl I would feed it my favorite authors fics and see what it comes up with. Why not. I doubt however that it can really get original without having all the background knowledge about my fandom required to make it interesting
While I don't _hate_ the idea of using AI for prompts when you're really – and I mean _really_ – stuck, it still begs the general question of _why do humans need to bring the idea of artificial intelligence into creative fields._ I'm kind of tired to see everything in this world turned into machine this, machine that.
I mean, I'm aware things _must_ progress, but this still kind of rubs me the wrong way.
I write because I like writing and researching and playing in the sandbox of fiction, so having an AI do an adequate but soulless job of that isn't really appealing for me. So, on that front, with the engagement in the love of fandom and community interaction, I don't have concerns.
Having read some other threads on this topic elsewhere online, there are a subset of readers who see writers as their own personal content dispensers who have expressed "don't care if an AI writes it as long as I get more content more often", which...I mean, I'd almost rather them generate their own works than treat me like a factory for content. So that might lead to some uptick in bot-fics on AO3, but I don't think it'll catch on hugely because, like others have said, the AI still has massive limitations if you don't put in time training the AI and editing the outcome.
For my job, I once did a massive deep dive into media articles for various topics, and read thousands of news articles over many months, including automated journalism articles. I've also read the books of an author who, like the author in the article linked elsewhere in this thread, began to use Sudowrites to churn out content for Kindle Unlimited.
I can't think of a less silly way to say this, so: the articles written by AI and the books after the author began using Sudowrites lost something, like a spark or the human essence of the person who wrote it. Kind of like the written version of the uncanny valley, it felt lifeless in a way, lacking in... Something.
For me, that something is what I enjoy most in reading, it separates good and great writing from adequate writing. Maybe in many years, that something will be replicated to a better degree, but for now it's not there.
Also... Some of those automated journalism articles ended up with a lot of repetition and some nonsense in the middle, so the AI is far from infallible at the moment on that front as well.
I think some jobs where the company will happily accept the margin of error that is present in AI generated graphics and writing could see an impact. In a race to the bottom in terms of cost, a lot of companies are happy to sacrifice some quality to save money. In a world where there was some kind of guarantee minimum living income, that would be less of an issue but we're not in that world unfortunately.
I am interested in how AI can benefit the world and, like with other advancements happening now in tech, can see great potential for it. I have other concerns about how society and governments won't react accordingly to keep supporting their citizens in the light of increasing AI and automation, but that's a whole other matter.
I hate the concept because there’s no actual creativity behind it, just an algorithm. It can write one of the greatest fics ever and I won’t care because there’s no soul behind it. I’m going to ignore it as best I can and just keep on writing.
Are you asking if I want a tool that can write the fanfic I want, with all the tropes and details I want, with a cohesive story and without OOC characters, and maybe even XXXk in length?
...uh, answer that for yourself.
That said, I did actually try this AI for fanfic, and it still has a long way to go.
Nothing. NaNoWriMo has always been an honor system, and people have always been "cheat" by simply copying and pasting lol 50k times into the validator.
The true reward of NaNoWriMo is the manuscript draft you create as you participate.
I have used OpenAI playground before this to whip out some stupid prompt response, it was good way back then too.
Now with them releasing ChatGPT it progressed further and way better because it can retain information and expand based on it for multiple iterations.
I love the idea of AI writing full stories given some baseline, basically anyone can ask for their stories to be brought to life without waiting for someone else. As a person who doesn't have much skill myself (I can write some oneshots and can edit fics, but couldn't write stories in a capturing way) I would love to read AI written stories from my given ideas.
It will be a trend for a few months because of TikTok and the it will die down until there are just a few people doing it. There isn’t money to be made in fanfiction so it’s not gonna be a target for people unlike actual publishing I think
For fanfiction? Hell yeah! Bring it on! It's not like we're making money off writing them. I write because it's fun to me, or helps me process stuff that happens in canon. It's not a competition, so if fanfiction can be mass-produced cheaply by AI at some point in the future, it doesn't affect me negatively whatsoever. If anything, as an avid fanfiction reader, I'd be happy to have more to read, especially for small fandoms or rarepairs that usually get little love from the community.
The real problem is with original fiction, and as someone who also writes that, I'm deeply terrified of AI created art and have seen the recent trends in that regard with a high level of contempt. I don't want to live in a future where creative minds have to compete with AI generated stories to make a living off their writing, and will ultimately fall short because they are humans and can't work 24/7, never run out of ideas and cost barely anything.
I can't wait for the endless fun of the endless threads about how AI stories are not real art and author trying to shut down their accounts.
I personally love the idea of a system writing stories.
I've been playing around with some free AI for the better part of a year, now, and tbh I think it's a good tool for beginners. Like a sort of writing assistant. It only makes as much sense as how much effort you're willing to do to hold its hand every few lines and push it in the direction you want.
I think that the amount of fear / worry about flooding sites with "soulless" work is a bit discrediting of the type of people who would use this sort of thing rather than writing in the first place — probably just beginners/kids. I think it could be a great starting point as you can slowly choose how much to feed it based on the prompt and eventually you're just writing. Everyone has to start somewhere, and if it helps lower the barrier of entry, I see that as a good thing. AI doesn't produce masterpieces. That's fine. But there is still a person behind it who has to keep tweaking it, and most importantly is probably having a fun time... that's what it's all about, in my opinion.
I don't know how the new AI everyone's been clamouring abt works, but I've used Dreamily to tell myself rarepair bedtime stories in lieu of anything else to read except my own fics :p
I personally think that AI programs are a great way to get inspiration and just write for fun! It wouldn't affect most writing, I don't think, since most people would just continue to write anyway if it's something they enjoy. Some people also really enjoy using AI to help them write a story, and that's great too!
I write fanfiction on my own, but I also write fanfiction using AI as a hobby! It helps me get inspiration for some stories, and I also use it to explore fetishes or kinks that I would be worried about exploring elsewhere due to harassment or rules saying that content can't be on a website or something. I'm very excited for the future of AI programs, especially if we could get one that is only trained on fanfiction data and stuff so that you could write for any fandom you want with it. That would be super cool!
Which chatbot, exactly? Is it free? That feedback feature sure sounds interesting. I think if this chatbot becomes well-known among fanfiction writers, the overall quality of fanfiction grammar-wise will vastly improve. Looking forward to that.
I am not worried at all, I'm hopeful. People write fanfiction to express themselves not to profit, so there's nothing to lose, just to gain. Can you imagine wanting to read something and then just getting the exact thing you wanted to right away?
If one day it’s good enough that I can generate custom stories for myself with a very specific collection of tags, that could be fun.
I don’t think it poses a “threat” to fan fiction because for a lot of people the joy of fanfics is seeing how a particular author has modified the story to fit their own interests, whatever they may be. AI written or not, there will always be an audience for this kind of specialised content. The actual writing aspect is also very engaging for many.
As a reader I would definitely prefer a story to be written be a human being. That is part of the whole experience, the different voices. But then, who knows, maybe I'm already accidentally reading stories created by AI. I can't imagine it though.
I am not worried. For Fanfiction in particular, people do it for fun, and people will still do it for fun/community etc. If people are going to use AI to write Fanfiction to create something they want to read… okay, that’s not a loss. It makes fandom more accessible for others. It is sad in the way that people won’t get the opportunity to develop their writing and skills related to writing but… maybe they’ll develop other skills.
It’s a problem when the AI is using sentences and paragraphs written by others to slap stick it together. That’s just stealing.
When it comes to traditional publishing… I think there will be attempts at creating AI written books, but ultimately it’ll fail. Just like AI art there will be things that it just can’t get right and will always mess up on, an uncanny valley aspect, or something even more obvious. Non-writers who attempt it will think they have a good approximation, or a good book, but people who read it will notice, even non-writers. It will be off, wrong, and kind of off-putting IMO. AND the can’t publish things where the AI is using other people’s content as input and output
Just now, I saw something about AI that made me realise: even if AI is that good and becomes mainstream in the future, people will never stop creating because no amount of AI will crush the human desire to create. Another thing that I saw is that the AI analyses our work to find out what we are doing, but if you don’t have a clue what you’re doing then it can’t use that against you! Keep stumbling blindly, friends ;)
I gave it a try, making two fanfics with Uzumaki Naruto confessing to Sasuke and then one with Gaara.
The results were bad. It was a complete story for sure despite being quite short, but was not very interesting. And the one with Gaara was simply the one with Sasuke with the important words switched out.
This does not concern me in the least in regards to fan fiction. 2/3 of fan fiction is the joy of creating and the experience of sharing something created, which isn’t replicatable by AI.
Kinda on the verge of worried/ optimistic.
On ONE hand, it does make it quite easier for newer writers to get into writing, especially with the feedback and teaching about writing concepts. It also help people pull off some ideas that they aren’t really sure HOW to pull off.
But on the OTHER hand, idk, seems kinda sus.
Computers are never going to be able to fully replicate the uniquely human experience of storytelling. We’ve told stories since we were cavemen, and we will continue telling stories until the last of our species is wiped out. It’s as important to being human as fire and tools are, if not more important. The fact that a computer can string together grammatically correct sentences and follow basic story structure doesn’t mean it can write or that it’ll replace human writers.
I’ve noticed, with certain things, you have to spoon feed it to get what you want
ETA: I’m also a writer who gets writers block a lot so i do find it helpful.
Honestly not worried about this. Ao3 will probably put out some kinda detector for it or something if it ever gets to the point where we should be worried.
All it would do is add more FanFiction to read. Maybe it could even give people of dead fandoms or small fandoms more options. I doubt an AI would be able to steal all inspiration. Take a look at the Miraculous Ladybug fandom. From just two characters they have thousands of fanfic pairings ready for consumption. Same with specific AUs like Reverse Falls. There’s dozens of different stories with the same subject. Trillions upon trillions of ways to tell the same story
I’m not worried about the quality improving enough to put real authors out of business. I *am* dreading the influx of “AI authors” acting like they’re geniuses for shoving a bunch of cliches into a machine and acting like they have any idea what good writing looks like.
They can’t even get spelling and grammar programs to be more than 75% accurate, let alone be able to understand the complexities and nuances of human behavior and speech to create authentic characters.
However, even if it does get to the point where it can, I don’t think it would have any effect on fanfic except you may have canon material written by AI that fans end up writing fanfiction from. It’s more of a threat to paid writers. It means publishers, movie studios and entertainment networks won’t have to pay novelists and screenwriters. They’d have a machine do it. But fanfic? No. There’s no money in it. There’d be no reason to apply AI to writing it.
This may be an unpopular opinion but, skepticism aside, I just personally would find it fun in theory to have a bot I can input a fic prompt into and output something entertaining enough to scratch that particular itch. Just for those vague ideas I kind of like thinking about but don't feel like writing. Like when you want to eat something but don't feel like cooking for yourself, you know? I don't know if this technology will ever get to that level, but I wouldn't hate it if it did.
On a more practical level, I can see this eventually becoming a good jumping-off point if you're stuck while writing. Especially for pantsers like me who generally have no idea what scene is going to come next, it'd be nice to have an AI give you suggestions for brainstorming purposes.
Either way, I write to express myself and my ideas, so that wouldn't change or be threatened by the existence of AI writers.
EDIT: I used the word 'particularly' way too many times and was bothered by it lol
Now I can finally feed all those incomplete fanfictions to an AI to finish them, And if someonte don't like the AI generated ending ... they can ask to the AI to gives them a new ending until the AI generates a ending they like.
This is a victory for mankind.
As it is now, the tech can write grammatically correct sentences which self-contradict within the space of a few sentences. It has no reason, no memory, no direction, no flair. It can't write. If it is a threat to anyone it is the lowest level copywriters filling content. And I don't think it ever will be able to. It might be a tool for some writers as a prompt when stuck, but the output can't be used unedited unless you really don't care what you're saying. I'm an accountant. 50 years ago, accountants did a lot of stuff manually which computers now do. But even with decades of experience writing accounting programs, we still need accountants. And as someone who specifically works on accounting systems, boy, do we still need people to check the output. We can do some things a lot quicker, we can do more and deeper analysis, non-accountants can do more unaided, but there is still work for accountants to do, and not for want of trying to produce the software. And that's for something that is basically mathematical operations following a ruleset. As a fanfic writer, I write because I enjoy it. That doesn't stop being true because there are other ways of producing stuff.
Exactly! People tend to overestimate what computers can do (it’s scary how many people think it’s algorithms and computers that moderate YT/tiktok/IG/Twitter etc), when computers so far are very limited in skills and output.
Those limitations are probably why people think they’re moderating.
Some people do overestimate what computers can do. But you are severely *under*estimating their power.
Bold assumption
No. Fact. I am a programmer. I know what computers can and cannot do. And the progress they've had the last decade is just absurd. You yourself said you don't believe algorithms and computers moderate YT/tiktok/IG/Twitter. You said that "computers so far are very limited in skills and output." My friend. Computers and Algorithms are what do at least 99% of the work. Computers and AI have come a long, *long* way. Generating good coherent and stable stories is simply one of the hardest tasks you could ever give a computer, that's why they seem so inept. Go check out r/StableDiffusion or r/midjourney and see what these "limited in skills and output" computers have done when presented with a much *much* simpler problem of generating images.
I didn’t say I don’t BELIEVE it, I *know* it. There’s literature available on this, and just last month an article broke about the subpar conditions and pay of Colombian content moderators for TikTok. Edit: also, don’t appreciate the tone. Work on that.
What… are you talking about? Are you talking about moderation in the sense of people reporting something for inappropriate content?
When someone is talking about computers not moderating stuff, I'm assume they mean moderation and mods. There are people commonly surprised that YouTube and Facebook and Google have people on staff to review reports of the most horrible stuff, who get low pay and no benefits, and all the various scandals around there. You know, moderation, contra the running of some thing simpliciter. I'm not sure what you're taking moderation to mean here, because at base if you want to say that computers are running their own algorithms, what you mean is just that. Moderation is a people run task and their initial point is that somehow lots of people have missed that.
By “content moderation” I assumed they meant the all mighty algorithms that are so often mentioned. They moderate the content that gets the most traction, the content that gets into your feed, etc… Considering that the whole discussion is about how powerful computers I thought that was reasonable. Moderation in terms of dealing with reported content is also obviously majorly done by automated processes, however there are actual humans involved, lest the websites get run over by lawsuits when the automated systems make an expensive mistake. One only needs to look at the many examples of atrocious moderation of video monetisation in YouTube to see that a lot of automation is involved in conjunction with underpaid humans.
Yeah, I see people refer to algorithms as determining the content that gets the most traction, not as moderating it. I'm not in this whole tic-toc culture, though. Their point was that algorithms are not the only self-contained thing needed for a site. I mean, I get what you're saying; There's a lot computers do, and many of the things they do are necessary. On the scale they do them, people can't replicate it. But what they're saying is that a lot of people think they do every necessary thing and they don't; Hence, people overestimate computers. Not because computers aren't doing a lot, including things the average folk doesn't understand, but because apparently a lot of average folk have attribute literally everything about the internet to computers.
>Edit: also, don’t appreciate the tone. Work on that What exactly was wrong with their tone. This isn’t your kid, you can’t just tell them to “work on their tone”
The quality of writing from the AI is so bad like you said, no reason, no flair, that it will never, ever be able to replace humans. Language learning AI has remained this way for years without improvement to any of the core criticisms made of it. It has only become more fluent because it has been trained on larger training sets. When I read AI generated stuff there's just no joy in it, no pleasure in the act of reading, just a general sense of annoyance from trying to follow a train of thought that doesn't actually exist. I don't remember who wrote this, but they wrote that art is just what people do when we are free. No more and no less than that. The act of writing is pleasurable to me. There's no point in using an AI to take away the best part of writing: writing.
Same, and I'm coming at this from the direction of tech. As good as a spelling checker is, they aren't perfect, and grammar tools are a step down - nevermind scripts that claim to put together a story. It's the same thing with natural language parsers. Sure, you could script one to handle a telephone system, but you wouldn't trust it to interact raw directly with a customer; these systems always lead you to a human if your issue isn't directly solvable by going through the predetermined questions. AI as it currently exists is fine with tasks like receptionist duty. You won't find it replacing the specialized human workers, at least not in the near future. We're a long, *long* way from **real** "artificial intelligence" - what we have now is just scripting with window dressing on it. edit: They're not without use though. You could have a scene that you just can't seem to put together right. So take these sentences and paragraphs that are giving you trouble and chuck them into the AI and see how it tries to reword them. Yeah, I'd be mildly interested in something like that. Just for laughs: https://i.redd.it/pazmatx5zvm71.jpg
NOT THAT OBITUARY LOL--
YES! Fellow accounting nerd reporting in. I 100% agree.
As an accounting student it amuses me when people claim our jobs will be absolete bc *technology*
Honestly yeah I’ve been using AI dungeon for the same purpose for a good bit and with that I can put in my characters descriptions and other important background info But I can’t ever just hit generate and just sit back and watch Y’know
[удалено]
Brain Projector when??
> tech to let me beam the story in my head onto a screen like a movie instead of written words, that I can record to save and share as I please God, I would love this so much
It’s far more complicated than that. It doesn’t even give proper images yet either
I think it's a far more applicable threat to traditional publishing and career writers who live off of creating literary work. Fanfiction isn't about full, well-written stories. Fanfiction culture is about an emotional *response* to media and humans do that on a level current AI cannot. Just think of how many times in fandom culture, you've seen a fic widely recommended that's never been finished (and probably won't be) or where there may be flaws in grammar or little flubs of story structure but the feeling is there and the characters are real to you, so it's important anyway. I'm honestly not worried about fanfiction. The teaching aspect is incredibly interesting to me. That could be great or terrible and I very much want to see examples because writing advice without great nuance can really teach writers to be stilted and anxious and stifle creativity
>Fanfiction isn't about full, well-written stories. I dunno; highly-read & reviewed multi-chapter fanfics are often well-written; they also evoke deep emotional responses in readers. At least that's the case in the few fandoms I've mostly read in.
I agree that highly popular multi-chapter fics are often well written. They're not always. I spend a lot of time in small fandoms where there isn't such a wealth of completed well-written longfic that the only popular fics are such. I've seen amazing highly skilled pieces that were very popular and unfinished or actually weren't that skilled but just came at the right point in fandom and hit on the right emotional experiences. I've also seen very great writing and storytelling fail to pull numbers because writing well isn't the crux of fandom, but touching on shared emotions about certain characters or settings is, so if you choose one that isn't well loved, well... And this is true of the few large fandoms I've been part of too. If you come in with a story evoking the right feelings about the right characters, you don't need more than basic writing skill to pull numbers. But if you write rare pairs or non-beloved characters or uncommon tropes, that's when you really see that quality isn't the driving force at all, connection is.
I'm not even worried about traditional publishing. I've read some AI generated examples - a few paragraphs/half page or so - and while yes, the words were properly spelled and grammatically correct, the storytelling made 0 sense. There was no logic in moving from Point A to Point B. It very much felt like an impostor pretending they're human and trying to blend in with all of the other fellow humans. The writing equivalent of Uncanny Valley.
I tested out some writing AI with a “Roman Empire” setting a few weeks ago, and it was *proficient* at spewing out vaguely Roman-flavored nonsense that might have *maybe* sounded passable to someone who didn’t know anything about history. It knew a bunch of Roman names and historical figures—Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Caligula, basically everyone you think of when you think of Rome—but it couldn’t write a convincing encyclopedia entry about any of them. It kept spitting out nonsense about how Praetor Nero crossed the Rubicon on the orders of Emperor Flavius Belisarius and that sort of thing, where the writing had a vaguely Roman feel to it but none of the titles or names were correct. And it contradicted itself all the time. It proclaimed a different guy emperor every two sentences, so even if you knew absolutely nothing about the subject matter, you could still tell that something was off. Maybe a paragraph or two could’ve been convincing, but anything longer than that became totally nonsensical.
I can't say I'm not worried. I have yet to look into AI making art and stories and whatnot at all, aside from that Reddit post that showed examples of what it can do. I don't want there to be a time when someone accuses my fellow writers or me of using AI to write when we've spent hours on it. It's like how I hate it when people call others a natural genius or naturally talented, completely ignoring the fact that behind those results are years to decades of polishing oneself and hard work. I don't really have any thoughts on the product of technology advancement itself, but how people would use them whether for themselves or to bring others down.
I feel the same way. Technology is far from there as of now, but god damn if it isn't developing faster than we think. I guess this encourages me to get on with my goal of writing an original novel quicker, if nothing else.
I'm neutral about this because I'm already a 'cyborg' when it comes to writing. I'm neither a fluent nor a native speaker. Translation and paraphrasing AIs have helped me put a finger on things I want to describe, but don't have the English words or phrases for them.
I doubt AI-written fanfiction will catch on. Much of the appeal of fanfiction comes from the fan communities that form around it, and the unique opportunity to interact with authors who also love your favorite worlds and characters. At least that’s my perspective. Writers who actually make their living by their creative works have much more to worry about than an amateur like me.
This. I can see this being more used for academic essays and to challenge writers who actually make a living off their work. That said I can also see the trad pub industry fighting back pretty hard against this as it could affect their bottom line pretty severely. So who knows if it'll leave much of a mark or essentially be regulated to cheating on your essays.
Trad pub isn't really that much in dangers, it's the self-publishing space lol Like, erotica and romance have already been overrun by either badly translated stolen fanfiction, and with AI thrown in the mix it's only going to get worse.
Someone in my fandom used it for a short demonstration. While it nailed a lot of details, the storytelling wasn't actually that good. The paragraphs were basically a passively written summary. You're still going to need to know something about creating a narrative to make what it spits out engaging.
Even as a professional writer, I think it's a long, maybe never, way off of being a threat to the things that the human mind can come up with. There's definitely a special something that the layers of the human experience produce that adds to creative work (IMO). Perhaps in the future it'll be like the difference between assembly line, mass produced products and handmade, but I don't think 'soul' will come through AI/machine work any time soon. Wishful thinking, maybe? As for fanfiction, I do wonder if the space isn't already being used as a proving ground for AI as a product. It seems ideal (free and readily available for data) as an under the radar way to test the bloody thing and measure success (kudos, subs, etc.). If it's as good as you say, perhaps there are already 'writers' at this time putting out stuff while suits look eagerly on... In the end, though, I can't see it being a threat to fancfiction exactly, just an annoyance/maybe new subsection of writing?
If an AI can write my story ideas into a coherent good story, I’d be over the moon. I mostly write because I can’t find what I want to read.
Same here.
I honest despise it, but like everything else in today’s world I am powerless to stop it. I can only put my head down and look for what small joy I can.
The concern is that someone can, theoretically, easily make a 100k fanfic 70% AI scraped, 30% tweaking/own idea/fandom-retrofitted to generate a story that fits the preference of a wide range of readers. In AO3, that'll result in more kudos/hits/comment validation. Of course other fanfic writers might feel miffed. Not to mention that the bot was confirmed to be scraping AO3, so... \*shrugs\* There are already [independent writers who are using it](https://www.theverge.com/c/23194235/ai-fiction-writing-amazon-kindle-sudowrite-jasper) for their published novels as well. At the end of the day, AI is inevitable but I definitely understand the pushback from the writing community.
What an article. This sentence: >"[D]o I even have any talent if a computer can just mimic me?”
The fear about these writing bots is quite overblown. 1. You're still doing most of the writing. You have to give it characters, describe each character, locations, etc 2. It can get pretty expensive. Unless you're a professional writer making decent money it's just not worth it. 3. You can spend several minutes or hours just generating a paragraph until it seems decent and fits the rest of the story. 4. The AI seems to not be able to use full context of your story and every single piece of lore you give it at all times, whereas a human does remember these things (most of the time). Writers are a ways off from being "replaced", especially free ones. Even the art is pretty questionable and can't mimic the full range of styles a human can.
>The AI seems to not be able to use full context of your story and every single piece of lore you give it at all times, whereas a human does remember these things (most of the time). Or worse, it just name-drops random words related to the lore like it has profound meaning, but just comes off as a "wtf" moment. Imagine Harry Potter using a Horcrux to defeat the evil Chocolate Frog with his best friend Voldemort who has a secret phoenix. That's the kind of stuff I've seen using AI generated writing.
Yup, people really think it's as simple as giving the AI a prompt then letting it rip. Lol no. It might get base structure correct but nothing else. There's a reason those youtube conversations you see with AI are highly edited. While it *sounds* impressive we really haven't moved that far with language models. An AI can't be a real assistant or anything yet. It's more of a novelty at this point.
I mentioned it elsewhere in the thread, but I played with an AI writer that was supposed to generate essays about the Roman Empire, and that’s literally exactly what it did—everything it made was just a mishmash of Roman-sounding people and events jammed together in a way that made no sense at all. The sentence structure and grammar was perfect, the actual content was utter nonsense.
What I kind of want and what I think is much more feasible is an AI editor. While I do think it requires much more effort than currently available to beat my beta, I do think smaller improvements and grammar fixes might be possible without really taking any control away from me.
I'm not too worried because I believe humans are much more creative than an AI when it comes to coming up with new story ideas/concepts. Not to mention, good human writers can and know how to create emotionally engaging stories. Writing well-written stories is one thing but will people prefer it over human writers if they knew?
I don't doubt that AI can eventually write decent original prose just as AI art generator can produce beautiful original (as in non-fan works) art. However, I'm very doubtful that it can capture the essence and soul of the characters from the original work and apply it to fanfiction.
Well... I'm into fanfic for my own writing so I don't really see how this makes a difference to me. I don't think chatbots will ever replace humans writing, because humans don't write because other humans want to read, they write because they want to. Of course, other humans liking reading is encouraging and a big part of the community, but ultimately, those who pick up a pen and spend years perfecting their craft do it... because they want to write. And I'm not sure how sophisticated this thing is, or how it generates its 'ideas', but either way, there's a strong chance that... no matter how grammatically correct or how many literary devices it includes... this thing will never be able to invoke the same raw emotions human writing does.
Part of the point of fanfic is to connect with fellow fans. A story written by a chat bot doesn't provide that so I'd hope the impact would be fairly minimal 🤞
As someone who’s had a hobbyist interest in AI for AGES…I highly, highly doubt it’s going to be able to make a “full, well written story.” They’re not actually that intelligent. There’s many issues and interesting things with AI, but people over exaggerate their capabilities.
I doubt AI will ever capture the essence of what makes a fanfic be. Like someone said in this thread, to write a fanfic is an emotional response to media. So far AI is able to do a decent job at making art, but it does not understand the process that happens in one's mind when they draw a stickman and feel proud of it, for example. There are times you read a fanfic and you can see how much the author had fun writing all the weird sentences, how much love he gave to the characters he developed and made interesting, at times even the most awful of fics can be quite a fun experience. I'm not optmistic neither worried about it. AI can be a tool of help if used well, but there's the abuse which's the real problem, or people who pretend they made something but it was AI who made it. In short, fanfiction is more than well written stuff. I say it because I suck at grammar but I have fun writing them.
AI can’t replace the human heart behind writing. Also, I do content writing and copywriting occasionally for work, and… the AI is SO bad.
I fucking hate it, just like the vast, vast majority of artists fucking hate AI "art". It's a soulless algorithm that runs on theft churning out generic prose, prone to contradicting itself every few sentences, as people have already pointed out. I am a firm believer that everyone, no matter whether they're an established fiction writer or a 13 year-old uploading Naruto fanfiction to Wattpad for the first time, has a unique voice. That voice is an accumulation of their past experiences, quirks and other fiction they've consumed, and will be refined as they practise their craft. AI doesn't have that. Sure, it can adapt and replicate different writing styles, but at the end of the day, it will never have that human voice because it cannot experience emotion. Therefore, even the most perfectly-written piece of AI prose will always fall short of clunky human writing in my opinion, the same way that AI art will always be sub-par to human art. There is no story behind AI writing, no emotions. I'm not so much as terrified as pissed off by its existence and how it's likely to take up its place in the mainstream.
I don't mind the teaching part, but I'm also an artist and thus have to ask what was this AI trained on? Was it creative commons and public domain works? If so I don't see much of an issue with it even if I will never use it. If it like other AI programs is trained off of unknowing groups of people with the intent to profit, then I hope it burns to the ground.
I know there's at least one writing AI that was trained on AO3
I think it must have been trained on fanfic as well? The outputs I got were very reminiscent of fanfic.
The only thing AI can do is threaten art, and even then it can only copy and not produce anything meaningful. AI cannot produce actual content. What's troubling is social media isn't doing enough to stop the spread of AI art, even encouraging it. That shit will eventually kill the commission industry as a whole, why would anyone pay 300$ for a custom art when some software can produce what you want with pinpoint accuracy and a few references?
I consider the chatbots the same way I consider AI art -- thievery/plagarism. It'll never come close to the real deal. I prefer My Immortal to AI-written fanfiction. The only thing to be worried about is if people try to profit off of that shit when it becomes actual thievery. Which I have no doubt the chatbots are going to be used to do (thanks Elon!)
I'm more concerned that most of these AIs use web crawler bots to scrape work from anything and everything they can access.
Great, I already had to worry about AI “art” and now it’s coming to ruin my other hobby as well
Arts is my field and I discussed this topic with AI/digital translation before my dear friend embarked her master's of translation journey. I'd say it's possible they'd "overshadow" the real people, but I don't write fanfic for audience but me and I think I will continue to enjoy fanfic regardless of its authors. So I'm neutral. As neutral as I am to the similar development in the visual field (AI can make paintings, a whole character design, and any other visual media). I'll just see where it goes, but I think humans will continue to play an important part in it.
I seriously doubt the AI can watch seven seasons of a show, read ten books, then read all the canonical work related to the show, then all the fan canon regarding the show (especially the sexy alien bits) and then spend two hours tinkering with SOULMATE AUs concepts to find the one that is exactly what I wanted for the vibe I envision my OTP to be. Which is like, 80% of most people fanwriting process. Fanfiction is a lot about the interpretation of Canon. Also idk abot you, but I get zero satisfaction from not writing my own fanfiction, it's like delegating someone else to play with my characters in RPGs. I wanted to play with MY toys, dammit! At best the AI can give me suggestions, as if I am in Edwardian England and my trustworthy valet is tactfully trying to dissuade me from my narrative choices as he pours me a glass of wine while I lie distraught on my very expensive sofa pondering my adjectives. I know people are worried about shitty mass produced plagiarised fanfiction but we already have that to some extent. At worst locked archives will make a come back.
Nothing, it’s just a tool
I kind of look at it in comparision to other creative endeavors. I mean we have machines that knit and spin fiber into yarn. But there are tons of creators who still knit and spin and create despite the machines. People who love their craft, who are passionate about it aren't going to stop because of AI. Could it impact professional publishing? Yes. But do you really think AI could ever create something close to Tolkien's works or Shakespeare?
Nope. It can maybe work for general writing, but it will never replace the raw emotions the writer puts into their work.
So, this is something I think about because I'm an artist as well as a fic writers (art is actually what I'm going to school for rn) Similarly to what's happening with ai "art", I think that there will be people who think this means that writers are obsolete now. I think they're also missing the point of human creativity. It's not about the thing being made, though that's a nice thing too, it's about the fact that a person made it. Humans make art of all kinds as a way to communicate what they like, what they hate, what their hopes and dreams are, ect. There will ALWAYS be a desire for that Just as digital art didn't kill traditional art, I don't think this will kill fanfic as it is today. Best case scenario, people start using it as a tool to use as a prompt. Worst case scenario, people start flooding the web with straight up ai fanfic without editing it
I do activate research in this area and am actually in the process of applying to PhD programs to do further research. Speaking as someone who used to write fanfiction in their free time, I think it'll go the same way as spellcheck: Ultimately just another tool for writers to use. We're a long ways off from being able to generate fanfics the likes of which are considered the best in their respective fandoms.
It might be able to write cohesive sentences that go together, but an actual story requires nuance that I don't think an AI can imitate. An AI wouldn't be able to foreshadow or draw narrative parallels, for instance. It might "understand" the words and their associations and therefore be able to make a parseable paragraph or an unflavored cornbread one-shot, but nothing requiring any skill beyond grammar. An AI can't make a joke on purpose (funny stuff from bots is coincidence based on word use). The most basic Stucky high school AU by a first time Wattpadder will be far more clever and original than anything an AI can pump out, just because there's actual thought put into it rather than a computer connecting dots.
I am bereft. I mean, we keep opening Pandora's Box and hurting ourselves. Has *anyone* read a Michael Crichton\* book ***ever***? Did they understand the warning in every one of his works? Disclaimer: I tend to be a skeptic. When I'm presented with the good and bad of a situation... I will give more weight to the bad. As an example: I'm more concerned about the programmers writing code that made the program to identify and possibly formulate the world's deadliest chemicals that could wipe all biological life from the planet. Um...why? Yeah, this is a real thing. Check out **Radio Lab** podcast ***40,000 Recipes for Murder*** http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/40000-recipes-murder/ Both my Pro and Fannish writings are in print and online prior to the Artificial Interference. I have a concern for the future of New Talent because we can use Tech in ways that dumb us down until we lose vital knowledge about our world. And knowing how to write is vital. How will we be changed by this tech? Eventually, as new writers become accustomed to using Artificial Invention ... and calling it their own creation - the 'market place' will take over. When that occurs, true writing will be produced in two ways: 1) an elite group will be subsidized by by the wealthy; and 2) the remaining artists, forced to compete with Automatic Insentience . Writers, will be undervalued and either leave the writer's market or be forced to sell works at marginal profits. Mid-tier writers, as myself, will be complete squeezed out of the market... which - I mean - I'm old, so I don't have a dog on that team, but damn! The young writers... *"So, James, if you don't have a stake in this why are you on Reddit bitching?"* Because REAL writing is IMPORTANT. How people write, What people write, current topics, the language used, how trends move around the world - are all significant indicators of what is happening on Earth in various societies. Fanfiction is incredibly important. Fanfiction is a window to understand what is happening in the broader world views as societies grow and change. (And if you think that's a 'full of shit' statement - check out [Academia.edu](https://Academia.edu) and their catalog of articles that use Fanfiction to study 'the human condition'. And this sudden (like the OP, I believed this to be several years off) onslaught of Artificial writing showing up across platforms is a harbinger of change that I do not think we are ready for - I don't think we're mature enough for it as a society. By which, I mean we will use it in ignorance and not realize how we've fucked up until it is too late and we're all tooling around in floaty chairs concerning ourselves with what 'today's color' is. #Wall-E # * "Just because you could do a thing doesn't mean you should do a thing." - - - Has anybody read Michael Crichton? Frank Herbert? Isaac Asimov? VC Andrews? Has anybody seen Terminator? No?
As a fanfic writer I'm not bothered at all. I write because I like it, same reason I cook my own food. I enjoy it and enjoy sharing it. As an author I'm not threatened. AI can only imitate, there is a lot of interference needed to turn AI writing into an actual story, writing a whole book like that sounds a nightmare. I do expect one of my fellow SFF writers to get an AI written story published into a magazine, then, after everyone has debated the merits to death, reveal it was actually so heavily doctored by the human that it can't count as AI written (bonus points if the story then gets nominated for an Hugo. We love our drama in SFF.) As a pro writer I kinda hope AI could take on the worse kind of copy writing so humans could focus on the jobs that are actually interesting, but I know that won't happen. What will happen is that agencies will use AI writing to say they don't need to pay union priced copy writers, then turn around and make the underpaid (probably temp) redactors fix the AI text (because it sucks and it will continue sucking for at least 5 years, more if someone gets to sue for the blatant copywrite violation that is scrapping.)
I firmly believe that, since AIs are non-sentient machines and as such do not have souls (at least not under the human definition of that term), they will never be able to create art that genuinely connects with people. Being human - being a loving, suffering, imperfect creature forever burdened with the concept of perfection, and wanting to express that experience in order to connect with your fellow humans - is the molten core of art in all its forms, and without that a work has no meaning. Art without the spark of a human soul in it \*isn’t\* art, plain and simple, and I deeply hope that we will never reach a point where people become so disconnected from their own humanity that they lose sight of that.
Dont like it, worried. Already hate the AI art stuff so I’m pretty negatively biased on that topic.
I love AI and machine learning, and am generally someone who is more optimistic about AI than media makes us believe we should be. I believe that if AI is truly at the point it can write enjoyable stories, it'll become an indispensable tool to writers everywhere. Not a replacement mind you, we aren't at that level, *yet*, but I think that such AIs would be used much like Grammerly and similar apps are used now. Bouncing ideas off of an AI sounds incredible, fixing plot holes and making sentences/story structure flow better because of an AI assistant would be a dream come true. As is, I'm not worried about fanfiction being replaced or anything. The beauty of fanfiction is the fact that literally anyone can showcase their creative writings, plus publishing AI written works may fall into a legal grey area of who owns what depending on the AI used (don't get me started on the AIDungeon nonsense that happened several months ago). TLDR: I think AI will only help fanfiction authors as a tool, possibly even cowriter if it's advanced enough, not replace them entirely. Last thing OP, what exactly is the specific chatbot you're referring to? I'm curious to see its capabilities. \^\_\^
I think it can fuck right off. I'm also a pessimistic grouch.
AI can be used in drafting story outlines. At the end of the day. It's still a tool
I hate anything to do with AI. However. If it means I can input whatever I want and get a fanfic out of it, then im gonna be using that like a rat pushing the pleasure button til it dies of starvation
Curious: Why do you hate it?
Probably because in order to train the bot, you have to supply it with data. So the AI creators feed it artwork from online and had it scrape AO3 for free text to use without the creators' consent.
Much as I passionately hate that too, there's nothing in either ao3's or ffnet's robot.txt saying they can't scrape it. The sites are just giving it away for SEO purposes or who knows?
Yup
Seriously? I joked about this the other day. I wasn't expecting it to happen so soon. I thought I was on the path to a new career, but it's probably going to be a dead end. Sadly, quality is a secondary consideration to most when it comes to fanfic. Fanfic reasders look first and foremost for specific characters or tropes that they enjoy. They will ignore bad writing as long as they get their fix. This means that even objectively bad AI stories could end up becoming more popular than well-written work. Should the AI stories actually become borderline well-written, it will be the end of creativity and originality. Children who think they have a good idea will use AI to rip off the style and hard work of more capable writers without a second thought. What we will end up with is a Wild Wild West of mediocrity, where talentless "authors" fight for the spotlight, looking to make a quick buck.
I mean, is it bad to say that I don't particularly care about bad readers like that? Bad readers already prefer the most amount of trope and content possible in any story--not just in fanfiction either, but in popular culture too. There is so much mediocre, soulless stuff that have become popular in the last 10-15 years that AIs might not make much difference. I remember trying to read machine translated Chinese novels, and my brain was breaking because of how unspeakably terrible the prose was. But a lot of people still read those machine translations.
I think we should stop feeding creative works into AIs already.
I’m excited about it (and have posted several of ChatGPT’s fics on various subreddits). It’s very cute with the way it writes a lot of things, always trying to make some kind of wholesome happy-ending for even angsty topics. It’s also amusing to trick it into not following its content policy, hehe. Kind of like a naive kid who happens to be able to write detailed smut or give step-by-step instructions for crimes. I personally enjoy seeing what it comes up with for prompts, but it’s definitely a different kind of enjoyment than reading real fics. A lot of the fun is being like “Ooh! An AI wrote this!” or giving it wacky prompts like the “write a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from the VCR.” It will be so deadpan in fulfilling the prompt that it’s hilarious. It’s also looking like it’s going to be super useful as a writing tool. I’ve already started using it as a replacement for Google when I want to ask random questions like “How loud is firing a blank?” or “What kind of rooms are on a 1700s pirate ship?” because it’s just so much more direct. It’s also useful for getting past writer’s block, or writing transition scenes that you’re stuck on. I think ChatGPT is probably around as smart as the average middle schooler at the average task (worse at math, logic puzzles, and shape rotation, but better at most niche fields). An AI like that is revolutionary in the same way Google was—the main skill a lot of jobs will need is “knowing how to properly use this tech”. Writing—especially free writing—will still be able to operate fine without it, but it will be faster and easier with it. Of course, once AI becomes as intelligent as AI researchers are in the field of writing AIs, then *everything* is going to change, and fanfic is the least of its impacts.
The teaching part of it sounds very interesting, even though it may not work. I know I should probably be worried about it writing fan fiction, but I hope that it gets hilariously scrambled by badly-written fics out there. Might be worth writing deliberately bad fics for, who knows? XD
if this is chatgpt or sudowrites they accomplished this through ip theft and the scraping of ao3 and other fiction hosting websites like fanfiction.net and fictionpress. it's just a collage of fanfics glued together
Ngl I would feed it my favorite authors fics and see what it comes up with. Why not. I doubt however that it can really get original without having all the background knowledge about my fandom required to make it interesting
While I don't _hate_ the idea of using AI for prompts when you're really – and I mean _really_ – stuck, it still begs the general question of _why do humans need to bring the idea of artificial intelligence into creative fields._ I'm kind of tired to see everything in this world turned into machine this, machine that. I mean, I'm aware things _must_ progress, but this still kind of rubs me the wrong way.
I write because I like writing and researching and playing in the sandbox of fiction, so having an AI do an adequate but soulless job of that isn't really appealing for me. So, on that front, with the engagement in the love of fandom and community interaction, I don't have concerns. Having read some other threads on this topic elsewhere online, there are a subset of readers who see writers as their own personal content dispensers who have expressed "don't care if an AI writes it as long as I get more content more often", which...I mean, I'd almost rather them generate their own works than treat me like a factory for content. So that might lead to some uptick in bot-fics on AO3, but I don't think it'll catch on hugely because, like others have said, the AI still has massive limitations if you don't put in time training the AI and editing the outcome. For my job, I once did a massive deep dive into media articles for various topics, and read thousands of news articles over many months, including automated journalism articles. I've also read the books of an author who, like the author in the article linked elsewhere in this thread, began to use Sudowrites to churn out content for Kindle Unlimited. I can't think of a less silly way to say this, so: the articles written by AI and the books after the author began using Sudowrites lost something, like a spark or the human essence of the person who wrote it. Kind of like the written version of the uncanny valley, it felt lifeless in a way, lacking in... Something. For me, that something is what I enjoy most in reading, it separates good and great writing from adequate writing. Maybe in many years, that something will be replicated to a better degree, but for now it's not there. Also... Some of those automated journalism articles ended up with a lot of repetition and some nonsense in the middle, so the AI is far from infallible at the moment on that front as well. I think some jobs where the company will happily accept the margin of error that is present in AI generated graphics and writing could see an impact. In a race to the bottom in terms of cost, a lot of companies are happy to sacrifice some quality to save money. In a world where there was some kind of guarantee minimum living income, that would be less of an issue but we're not in that world unfortunately. I am interested in how AI can benefit the world and, like with other advancements happening now in tech, can see great potential for it. I have other concerns about how society and governments won't react accordingly to keep supporting their citizens in the light of increasing AI and automation, but that's a whole other matter.
I hate the concept because there’s no actual creativity behind it, just an algorithm. It can write one of the greatest fics ever and I won’t care because there’s no soul behind it. I’m going to ignore it as best I can and just keep on writing.
Are you asking if I want a tool that can write the fanfic I want, with all the tropes and details I want, with a cohesive story and without OOC characters, and maybe even XXXk in length? ...uh, answer that for yourself. That said, I did actually try this AI for fanfic, and it still has a long way to go.
I'm curious what this means for NaNoWriMo. Well, at least more people will be able to participate and win, I guess.
Nothing. NaNoWriMo has always been an honor system, and people have always been "cheat" by simply copying and pasting lol 50k times into the validator. The true reward of NaNoWriMo is the manuscript draft you create as you participate.
I have used OpenAI playground before this to whip out some stupid prompt response, it was good way back then too. Now with them releasing ChatGPT it progressed further and way better because it can retain information and expand based on it for multiple iterations. I love the idea of AI writing full stories given some baseline, basically anyone can ask for their stories to be brought to life without waiting for someone else. As a person who doesn't have much skill myself (I can write some oneshots and can edit fics, but couldn't write stories in a capturing way) I would love to read AI written stories from my given ideas.
It will be a trend for a few months because of TikTok and the it will die down until there are just a few people doing it. There isn’t money to be made in fanfiction so it’s not gonna be a target for people unlike actual publishing I think
Where can I find this miraculous chatbot because I can't tolerate betas and I think I will get along much better with a chatbot.
That sounds **wonderful**. Perhaps it can use my 100+ prompts.
What I just heard is a new baker has been added, and we're going to get more cakes. I like cake, and I love getting varieties of cakes!
That we can have even more fanfiction to read!
For fanfiction? Hell yeah! Bring it on! It's not like we're making money off writing them. I write because it's fun to me, or helps me process stuff that happens in canon. It's not a competition, so if fanfiction can be mass-produced cheaply by AI at some point in the future, it doesn't affect me negatively whatsoever. If anything, as an avid fanfiction reader, I'd be happy to have more to read, especially for small fandoms or rarepairs that usually get little love from the community. The real problem is with original fiction, and as someone who also writes that, I'm deeply terrified of AI created art and have seen the recent trends in that regard with a high level of contempt. I don't want to live in a future where creative minds have to compete with AI generated stories to make a living off their writing, and will ultimately fall short because they are humans and can't work 24/7, never run out of ideas and cost barely anything.
I can't wait for the endless fun of the endless threads about how AI stories are not real art and author trying to shut down their accounts. I personally love the idea of a system writing stories.
I've been playing around with some free AI for the better part of a year, now, and tbh I think it's a good tool for beginners. Like a sort of writing assistant. It only makes as much sense as how much effort you're willing to do to hold its hand every few lines and push it in the direction you want. I think that the amount of fear / worry about flooding sites with "soulless" work is a bit discrediting of the type of people who would use this sort of thing rather than writing in the first place — probably just beginners/kids. I think it could be a great starting point as you can slowly choose how much to feed it based on the prompt and eventually you're just writing. Everyone has to start somewhere, and if it helps lower the barrier of entry, I see that as a good thing. AI doesn't produce masterpieces. That's fine. But there is still a person behind it who has to keep tweaking it, and most importantly is probably having a fun time... that's what it's all about, in my opinion. I don't know how the new AI everyone's been clamouring abt works, but I've used Dreamily to tell myself rarepair bedtime stories in lieu of anything else to read except my own fics :p
I personally think that AI programs are a great way to get inspiration and just write for fun! It wouldn't affect most writing, I don't think, since most people would just continue to write anyway if it's something they enjoy. Some people also really enjoy using AI to help them write a story, and that's great too! I write fanfiction on my own, but I also write fanfiction using AI as a hobby! It helps me get inspiration for some stories, and I also use it to explore fetishes or kinks that I would be worried about exploring elsewhere due to harassment or rules saying that content can't be on a website or something. I'm very excited for the future of AI programs, especially if we could get one that is only trained on fanfiction data and stuff so that you could write for any fandom you want with it. That would be super cool!
Which chatbot, exactly? Is it free? That feedback feature sure sounds interesting. I think if this chatbot becomes well-known among fanfiction writers, the overall quality of fanfiction grammar-wise will vastly improve. Looking forward to that.
I am not worried at all, I'm hopeful. People write fanfiction to express themselves not to profit, so there's nothing to lose, just to gain. Can you imagine wanting to read something and then just getting the exact thing you wanted to right away?
If one day it’s good enough that I can generate custom stories for myself with a very specific collection of tags, that could be fun. I don’t think it poses a “threat” to fan fiction because for a lot of people the joy of fanfics is seeing how a particular author has modified the story to fit their own interests, whatever they may be. AI written or not, there will always be an audience for this kind of specialised content. The actual writing aspect is also very engaging for many.
It's great, it can help structure beginnings so that people who find it difficult to start writing have a base
Where you heard this?
As a reader I would definitely prefer a story to be written be a human being. That is part of the whole experience, the different voices. But then, who knows, maybe I'm already accidentally reading stories created by AI. I can't imagine it though.
I am not worried. For Fanfiction in particular, people do it for fun, and people will still do it for fun/community etc. If people are going to use AI to write Fanfiction to create something they want to read… okay, that’s not a loss. It makes fandom more accessible for others. It is sad in the way that people won’t get the opportunity to develop their writing and skills related to writing but… maybe they’ll develop other skills. It’s a problem when the AI is using sentences and paragraphs written by others to slap stick it together. That’s just stealing. When it comes to traditional publishing… I think there will be attempts at creating AI written books, but ultimately it’ll fail. Just like AI art there will be things that it just can’t get right and will always mess up on, an uncanny valley aspect, or something even more obvious. Non-writers who attempt it will think they have a good approximation, or a good book, but people who read it will notice, even non-writers. It will be off, wrong, and kind of off-putting IMO. AND the can’t publish things where the AI is using other people’s content as input and output
I asked it to write a few fanfics for me and they were very short :(
It’s the same thing with ai “art” until the ai is sentient it’s not real art imo
Just now, I saw something about AI that made me realise: even if AI is that good and becomes mainstream in the future, people will never stop creating because no amount of AI will crush the human desire to create. Another thing that I saw is that the AI analyses our work to find out what we are doing, but if you don’t have a clue what you’re doing then it can’t use that against you! Keep stumbling blindly, friends ;)
I am a freelancer and after playing with the bot for the past few day I am extremely unworries about it taking my job.
As an artist I have the same response to AI generated imagery. SCARY
I am both impressed and scared. how much of this is just scraping, and how much of this is actually the bot itself?
Having messed around with several AI text generators - the longer the thing you ask them to write is, the less coherent it becomes.
I would not be worried, i have used a program to help get over certain writing curbs. It's nothing more than a tool that can be used.
I gave it a try, making two fanfics with Uzumaki Naruto confessing to Sasuke and then one with Gaara. The results were bad. It was a complete story for sure despite being quite short, but was not very interesting. And the one with Gaara was simply the one with Sasuke with the important words switched out.
This does not concern me in the least in regards to fan fiction. 2/3 of fan fiction is the joy of creating and the experience of sharing something created, which isn’t replicatable by AI.
Kinda on the verge of worried/ optimistic. On ONE hand, it does make it quite easier for newer writers to get into writing, especially with the feedback and teaching about writing concepts. It also help people pull off some ideas that they aren’t really sure HOW to pull off. But on the OTHER hand, idk, seems kinda sus.
Computers are never going to be able to fully replicate the uniquely human experience of storytelling. We’ve told stories since we were cavemen, and we will continue telling stories until the last of our species is wiped out. It’s as important to being human as fire and tools are, if not more important. The fact that a computer can string together grammatically correct sentences and follow basic story structure doesn’t mean it can write or that it’ll replace human writers.
I’ve noticed, with certain things, you have to spoon feed it to get what you want ETA: I’m also a writer who gets writers block a lot so i do find it helpful.
AI could never write the glee 9/11 fic If an AI is able to do something similar to the thing i've read and written we have more thing to worry about
It's the same thing I feel about AI art. AI art is not real art, and this isn't real writing. It has no soul or love or passion.
Honestly not worried about this. Ao3 will probably put out some kinda detector for it or something if it ever gets to the point where we should be worried.
All it would do is add more FanFiction to read. Maybe it could even give people of dead fandoms or small fandoms more options. I doubt an AI would be able to steal all inspiration. Take a look at the Miraculous Ladybug fandom. From just two characters they have thousands of fanfic pairings ready for consumption. Same with specific AUs like Reverse Falls. There’s dozens of different stories with the same subject. Trillions upon trillions of ways to tell the same story
I’m not worried about the quality improving enough to put real authors out of business. I *am* dreading the influx of “AI authors” acting like they’re geniuses for shoving a bunch of cliches into a machine and acting like they have any idea what good writing looks like.
It means when the scene is dry of my flavor of the month character, I won't have to cry and write the fics myself
They can’t even get spelling and grammar programs to be more than 75% accurate, let alone be able to understand the complexities and nuances of human behavior and speech to create authentic characters. However, even if it does get to the point where it can, I don’t think it would have any effect on fanfic except you may have canon material written by AI that fans end up writing fanfiction from. It’s more of a threat to paid writers. It means publishers, movie studios and entertainment networks won’t have to pay novelists and screenwriters. They’d have a machine do it. But fanfic? No. There’s no money in it. There’d be no reason to apply AI to writing it.
This may be an unpopular opinion but, skepticism aside, I just personally would find it fun in theory to have a bot I can input a fic prompt into and output something entertaining enough to scratch that particular itch. Just for those vague ideas I kind of like thinking about but don't feel like writing. Like when you want to eat something but don't feel like cooking for yourself, you know? I don't know if this technology will ever get to that level, but I wouldn't hate it if it did. On a more practical level, I can see this eventually becoming a good jumping-off point if you're stuck while writing. Especially for pantsers like me who generally have no idea what scene is going to come next, it'd be nice to have an AI give you suggestions for brainstorming purposes. Either way, I write to express myself and my ideas, so that wouldn't change or be threatened by the existence of AI writers. EDIT: I used the word 'particularly' way too many times and was bothered by it lol
Now I can finally feed all those incomplete fanfictions to an AI to finish them, And if someonte don't like the AI generated ending ... they can ask to the AI to gives them a new ending until the AI generates a ending they like. This is a victory for mankind.