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AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#1
Wired has put up a disturbing article about a for-sale AI-based writing tool that has incorporated AO3's contents in its language model, how it was discovered, and the growing outrage in the fan communities about it:

The Fanfic Sex Trope That Caught a Plundering AI Red-Handed
-- Bob

I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Clark Kent, Mary Sue, DJ Croft, Skysaber.  I have been 
called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the sun grows dim and cold....
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#2
Fucking parasites.
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#3
Cool! All the misspellings, poor grammar, and terrible characterizations, and bad plotting are now preserved for posterity.

EDIT: And they're using it for Omegaverse fic? Yeah...just, yeah.
SEZ
BZG
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#4
Frankly, this sounds like a nothingburger. They are trying to sound like they discovered an unheard-of scandal when they are actually stating the obvious,

Setting aside the moral issue about whether these so-called AIs plagiarize or just imitate, EVERYBODY knows that the training datasets for ChatGPT and its cousins are created from scraping the web.
Fanfiction archives like AO3 are openly available on the web (which is their whole point)
Therefore ChatGPT has incorporated them in its dataset. Big news! Not.

Not to mention that they think their genre is some kind of unknown club, but if you search Google for that mentioned sex trope and the genre name or the show autocomplete suggests "fanfiction" or explanations of what it is. So you could say that Google autocomplete also "knows" that impossibly secret trope. Which I guess IS correct because ChatGPT is basically a more powerful Google autocomplete and if one can associate those words by their proximity in their usage in the web so will the other.

And finally I object their claiming that their genre is only found in AO3. Even the chinese are writing (PAID for) web novels and web manwhas using those tropes and settings.
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#5
I think the point is less that a private club is being invaded and more along the lines of what other groups are concerned about -- the copyright issues. And, as they note, the courtesy of attribution for inspiration. Only one of the engines out there -- Bing, I think, bothers to tell you where it drew its information from.

In the mean time, I doubt anyone is going to turn to an AI language model for fanfiction any time soon. I've been playing with Google's Bard, which is now free to use for anyone, and the best it can do is two- or three-hundred-word things that read like they were written by a third-grader. (And as the article notes, it seems to think fanfiction=Harry Potter unless you tell it otherwise. It also has a little difficulty understanding that original fiction and fanfiction are different things.)

I have to admit, btw, that Bard can be a lot of fun with the right prompt. At one point the first night I was playing with it, I asked it to give me a synopsis of the general premise, plot and characters of the (non-existent) classic 1950s sitcom "Me and My Serial Killer". It came back with a vaguely admonishing reply that there was no such program -- but also offered me two alternative answers. One was also "No such program exists" but then suggested I might be thinking of a particular episode of The Twilight Zone. The other, however, was a surprisingly detailed article a la Wikipedia about a show in which every episode was about the madcap adventures of a man trying to keep his serial killer wife out of trouble -- it read kind of like a cross between Bewitched and Silence of the Lambs. I now find myself wishing I had saved that, it was disturbingly amusing.
-- Bob

I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Clark Kent, Mary Sue, DJ Croft, Skysaber.  I have been 
called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the sun grows dim and cold....
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#6
Pfft, well, complaining about copyright infringement on fanfic is a little cockeyed to begin with, but the lack of distinction between that and original fiction that just happens to be freely available is another thing entirely. I don't think there's anything that can really be done about it aside from putting everything behind a paywall, and that's burning down the chicken coop to keep the fox from raiding it for eggs. Even then what's already been included in the database would still be there.

I've always figured that anything I put on the internet is more or less public and out of my control all along, but I seem to be on the extreme laissez-faire end of feeling attachment to my creative output, so I can't really take my own feelings on the issue as representative.
--
‎noli esse culus
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#7
Wow. Spot the outdated information.

Stumped?

Quote:So it is possible in some situations to file for copyright protection for works of fanfiction—although most fanfiction writers don’t, whether it’s because they don’t know how, or don’t want to spend the money, or simply aren’t interested in jumping through the hoops.

The last time that this was true, Ford and Carter were both running for President.

Copyright is automatic now.
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#8
Not the point, Rob. The point is that complaining about your work being used without permission as a source for an AI pastiche when the work itself is a remix of something else, used without permission, is either hilarious or grounds to despair over the nature of man. And that's in the best case of fanfic that uses familiar characters and settings to tell a new story, rather than, say, an SI who follows the stations of canon religiously and may even repeat entire sections of dialogue with only minor changes to have their addition snark at the rest and/or steal the best lines for themselves.

(And speaking personally, that the law only matters if you can enforce it, and there's very little chance I'd ever find out about someone using my stuff in a way I'd object to let alone be able to prosecute a case against them if just asking them to stop didn't work.)
--
‎noli esse culus
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#9
The point is that according to internationally agreed-upon law, fanfiction writers own the copyright to their works, even if they are creating them based on someone else's IP. Saying that they're not entitled to their rights of ownership is like saying because you didn't build your car from scratch you don't have any ownership rights to that. This is particularly critical because Sudowrite is a for-profit product that you have to pay to use... so basically, a user is paying a company, neither of which know you from Adam, for content scraped from something you wrote, which you own all the rights to, and which you presented free for the enjoyment of others. Would you feel the same about finding a family photo of yours being sold by an image library that just lifted it off your website and neither got your permission nor offer you a cut of the money they make off it? (Not an invalid comparison, some outfits have done exactly that.)
-- Bob

I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Clark Kent, Mary Sue, DJ Croft, Skysaber.  I have been 
called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the sun grows dim and cold....
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#10
I would, yes. I already said that I realize that's not the case in general.
--
‎noli esse culus
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#11
Huh.

Nothing I can do about it beyond be angry and annoyed. I get enough of that as it is.


Means for once, I was ahead of the curve. I had a college assignment to do a text predictor 14 years ago. In search of a large corpus of text to feed it and train it, I turned to the obvious - The Bubblegum Zone.

I tried feeding it my own fanfics and it self-terminated. Wonder why.

I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.

One day they're going to ban them.
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#12
I mean, given the writers strike at the moment includes demands not to have AI 'write' as their replacements, I can't wait until these idiot programs end up putting something like omegaverse concepts on television without the management realising.
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#13
You think someone will read it before it goes out and then unfuck things - or go 'Fuck No!'

The AI is the first draft and then the credited writer just doctors it right.

I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.

One day they're going to ban them.
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#14
(05-16-2023, 03:40 PM)Dartz Wrote: You think someone will read it before it goes out and then unfuck things - or go 'Fuck No!'

The AI is the first draft and then the credited writer just doctors it right.

Some exec somewhere is going to try to remove the underpaid monkey to save more money.
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#15
...aaand we're back to being hilarious or cause for despair, as Dartz is the one being too optimistic in the thread Big Grin
--
‎noli esse culus
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#16
(05-16-2023, 03:40 PM)Dartz Wrote: You think someone will read it before it goes out and then unfuck things - or go 'Fuck No!'

The AI is the first draft and then the credited writer just doctors it right.

The thing is, while that would be sensible from a commercial point of view, lots of management is actually very shit at being management.

And that is before we get into feuds, egos and pressures to perform.
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RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#17
And honestly, what I've seen of AI-generated fiction, they might as well just start with the writers.

Or use the AIs as the management.
-- Bob

I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Clark Kent, Mary Sue, DJ Croft, Skysaber.  I have been 
called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the sun grows dim and cold....
Reply
RE: AI plundering fan works to fill its language model
#18
As a fanfic writer, I would be the biggest hypocrite on Earth if I whined that 'my' content was being taken. I remix the hell out of stuff other people create, which is why I even have a note in my profile that says, 'If you're going to use my stuff, you don't even have to tell me'.
SEZ
BZG
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