AI and Fanfic
Jan. 18th, 2025 01:48 pmI continue to spend a non-zero amount of time arguing with AI techbros, and soft-AI supporters ("I use ChatGPT to polish up my writing" "I have my own offline LLM" "We need to have guardrails and learn how to incorporate it responsibly into education"), because yours truly is an internet masochist who regularly engages in online self-harm. Nah, actually because I think the "we should abolish it altogether" position is woefully absent in the discourse. It's possible that LLMs could go the way of NFTs (a punchline that's already getting dated) or crypto (also a punchline but with a very narrow use case for the worst people you've ever met), but only if we open the Overton Window to allow an abolitionist perspective to be let loose into the mainstream.
No one asked for this. No one likes it. No one wants it. It will make your life more annoying, not less.
The second least justifiable case* for the broad grouping of technologies called AI** is creative work—writing and art. It's already led to the mass firing of journalists, which, granted, was already happening because of capitalist consolidation. You will notice that the quality or availability of journalism has not improved! Hilariously, the economic case for this is also terrible, in that artists, writers, journalists, actors and voice actors, filmmakers, and animators already make no fucking money, and a request from an under-$200/month subscriber actually costs the companies money.*** (Is it moral to use ChatGPT to drive OpenAI out of business? Discuss.) Replacing or drowning out creative work with AI slop makes no one money and creates worse things that you have to wade through to find things made by humans.
Probable source.
And yet, there are a certain number of AI "artists" or "prompt engineers" who insist that I should take their little computer pictures seriously as if it was real art. Buddy, I do not take my pictures seriously and I drew them myself. They liken what they do to collage, or sometimes Pop Art. Unfortunately for them I studied Art History and they usually shut up real quick when I tell them that my prerequisite for discussing it is them reading the entire judgment in the Warhol Estate v. Goldsmith case.
(Incidentally, I disagree with the judgment, and the last people who should be defining fair use are the ghouls of the US Supreme Court. But it's an interesting case, and one that to my non-legal mind conclusively shows that all AI "art" is in violation of US copyright law.)
My moral argument against LLMs is:
1. The catastrophic environmental cost.
2. The intellectual property theft.
3. The economic consequences of job loss.
4. The world doesn't need more shitty art.
If these people knew anything about art at all, which they don't, they might bring up fanfic rather than Pop Art. After all, we're talking about transformative work, specifically of creative intellectual property. It got me thinking, in a tangential comment on one of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
princessofgeeks 's posts, about how fanfic is the bright mirror of AI.
Because I think transformative work is good, actually. It's the main way we've had, for the entire history of humanity, to engage with story and art. The idea of a work being the sole property, for the purpose of sole profit, of the artist who created it is relatively new, and has to do with economic conditions far more than it has to do with an accurate description of the creative process.
Hence, I would pose the question: What is the difference between a fanfic of a piece of intellectual property (you can insert your own fandom here, the way [REDACTED] inserts their [REDACTED] in [REDACTED]'s [REDACTED])? After all, you are taking a thing that belongs to some other creator and making your own thing out of it.
This is where having a moral framework comes in handy.
1. Is there an environmental cost? No more than any regular activity you'd do on a computer. The energy difference between me writing this post, or my own books, and someone posting smut to AO3 is nonexistent. We all need to cut our energy use down but let's ground the private jets first, y'know?
2. Is it intellectual property theft? I would argue no, actually, and while this has been litigated a few times, people don't get sued for writing fanfic as a general rule. It's not, morally speaking, for the same reason that collage is not. No one is claiming that Hannah Höch photographed all of those magazine images she put in her collages; you are very obviously seeing found work that is repurposed, with intent, to create new meanings. Fanfic is the same—it can't exist without the acknowledgment of the authorship of the original canon. If the original canon suddenly disappeared, or was overshadowed by the fanfic, the meaning would be lost. The purpose of fanfic is to honour the original work, or subvert it, or deconstruct it; it is never to erase it.
3. It's the economic aspect that I find most interesting. Companies like OpenAI speak openly (hah) about crushing entire industries in order to somehow extract profit. Although, again, why they plan to do that with the arts, which are famously unprofitable, is beyond me. Blood from a stone. Fanfic, however, is a gift economy. That's why I call it a bright mirror. Paying for it would seem gauche; when fanwriters have tried to charge for their work, they're soundly mocked by a community of accidental anarchists.
In fact, this is a reason why fanfic writers aren't sued. Fanfic and fanart inevitably creates more income for the original creator. How many times have I checked out some show because someone has drawn an incredibly pretty, incredibly filthy illustration of the characters? A non-zero amount of times, I can tell you. If you ever write fanfic of my work I will love you forever.
4. Well, one can argue that a lot of fanfic is shitty. But because it's published, most of the time, through a parallel ecosystem, you don't actually have to wade through whatever the modern-day equivalent of My Immortal is to find an actual book. So the shitty stuff harms no one. Maybe the calculus shifts a bit with the publication of, say, Ali Hazelwood's stuff, but that's not my genre so I don't care.
Artistically, fanfic is communal and process-oriented, whereas AI slop is individualist and product-oriented. I can probably still go to AO3 and find something, within one or two clicks, that floats my boat. (Like I'd do that. I am a lazy asshole. I'd ask one of you, and you'd give me a recommendation.) To find something in the sea of slop that has any kind of artistic merit is impossible. Even if it did exist, and it doesn't, it'd be impossible to find. During one argument I had with an AI fanboy, he claimed to have rendered 100 images in the time it took for me to destroy his argument.† With one person creating that volume, how can anyone find anything?
It has never occurred to any of these people to turn to fanfic or fanart to improve on their skills. This is because they are genuinely uninterested in creative work. They don't want to be artists or writers; they want to claw themselves a little higher on the pyramid scheme, not understanding that they're the product no matter how hard they try.
It's actually because fanfic writers and fan artists exist that I have hope that the scourge of slop can be defeated. Creativity is so innate that it can thrive even in the absence of a profit motive, and for all its flaws, AO3 is an example of elegant, usable website architecture with safeguards built in against monetization. Even if everything goes wrong, we'll still be telling horny stories in the burned-out irradiated ruins, and I really love that for us.
No one asked for this. No one likes it. No one wants it. It will make your life more annoying, not less.
The second least justifiable case* for the broad grouping of technologies called AI** is creative work—writing and art. It's already led to the mass firing of journalists, which, granted, was already happening because of capitalist consolidation. You will notice that the quality or availability of journalism has not improved! Hilariously, the economic case for this is also terrible, in that artists, writers, journalists, actors and voice actors, filmmakers, and animators already make no fucking money, and a request from an under-$200/month subscriber actually costs the companies money.*** (Is it moral to use ChatGPT to drive OpenAI out of business? Discuss.) Replacing or drowning out creative work with AI slop makes no one money and creates worse things that you have to wade through to find things made by humans.
Probable source.
And yet, there are a certain number of AI "artists" or "prompt engineers" who insist that I should take their little computer pictures seriously as if it was real art. Buddy, I do not take my pictures seriously and I drew them myself. They liken what they do to collage, or sometimes Pop Art. Unfortunately for them I studied Art History and they usually shut up real quick when I tell them that my prerequisite for discussing it is them reading the entire judgment in the Warhol Estate v. Goldsmith case.
(Incidentally, I disagree with the judgment, and the last people who should be defining fair use are the ghouls of the US Supreme Court. But it's an interesting case, and one that to my non-legal mind conclusively shows that all AI "art" is in violation of US copyright law.)
My moral argument against LLMs is:
1. The catastrophic environmental cost.
2. The intellectual property theft.
3. The economic consequences of job loss.
4. The world doesn't need more shitty art.
If these people knew anything about art at all, which they don't, they might bring up fanfic rather than Pop Art. After all, we're talking about transformative work, specifically of creative intellectual property. It got me thinking, in a tangential comment on one of
princessofgeeks 's posts, about how fanfic is the bright mirror of AI. Because I think transformative work is good, actually. It's the main way we've had, for the entire history of humanity, to engage with story and art. The idea of a work being the sole property, for the purpose of sole profit, of the artist who created it is relatively new, and has to do with economic conditions far more than it has to do with an accurate description of the creative process.
Hence, I would pose the question: What is the difference between a fanfic of a piece of intellectual property (you can insert your own fandom here, the way [REDACTED] inserts their [REDACTED] in [REDACTED]'s [REDACTED])? After all, you are taking a thing that belongs to some other creator and making your own thing out of it.
This is where having a moral framework comes in handy.
1. Is there an environmental cost? No more than any regular activity you'd do on a computer. The energy difference between me writing this post, or my own books, and someone posting smut to AO3 is nonexistent. We all need to cut our energy use down but let's ground the private jets first, y'know?
2. Is it intellectual property theft? I would argue no, actually, and while this has been litigated a few times, people don't get sued for writing fanfic as a general rule. It's not, morally speaking, for the same reason that collage is not. No one is claiming that Hannah Höch photographed all of those magazine images she put in her collages; you are very obviously seeing found work that is repurposed, with intent, to create new meanings. Fanfic is the same—it can't exist without the acknowledgment of the authorship of the original canon. If the original canon suddenly disappeared, or was overshadowed by the fanfic, the meaning would be lost. The purpose of fanfic is to honour the original work, or subvert it, or deconstruct it; it is never to erase it.
3. It's the economic aspect that I find most interesting. Companies like OpenAI speak openly (hah) about crushing entire industries in order to somehow extract profit. Although, again, why they plan to do that with the arts, which are famously unprofitable, is beyond me. Blood from a stone. Fanfic, however, is a gift economy. That's why I call it a bright mirror. Paying for it would seem gauche; when fanwriters have tried to charge for their work, they're soundly mocked by a community of accidental anarchists.
In fact, this is a reason why fanfic writers aren't sued. Fanfic and fanart inevitably creates more income for the original creator. How many times have I checked out some show because someone has drawn an incredibly pretty, incredibly filthy illustration of the characters? A non-zero amount of times, I can tell you. If you ever write fanfic of my work I will love you forever.
4. Well, one can argue that a lot of fanfic is shitty. But because it's published, most of the time, through a parallel ecosystem, you don't actually have to wade through whatever the modern-day equivalent of My Immortal is to find an actual book. So the shitty stuff harms no one. Maybe the calculus shifts a bit with the publication of, say, Ali Hazelwood's stuff, but that's not my genre so I don't care.
Artistically, fanfic is communal and process-oriented, whereas AI slop is individualist and product-oriented. I can probably still go to AO3 and find something, within one or two clicks, that floats my boat. (Like I'd do that. I am a lazy asshole. I'd ask one of you, and you'd give me a recommendation.) To find something in the sea of slop that has any kind of artistic merit is impossible. Even if it did exist, and it doesn't, it'd be impossible to find. During one argument I had with an AI fanboy, he claimed to have rendered 100 images in the time it took for me to destroy his argument.† With one person creating that volume, how can anyone find anything?
It has never occurred to any of these people to turn to fanfic or fanart to improve on their skills. This is because they are genuinely uninterested in creative work. They don't want to be artists or writers; they want to claw themselves a little higher on the pyramid scheme, not understanding that they're the product no matter how hard they try.
It's actually because fanfic writers and fan artists exist that I have hope that the scourge of slop can be defeated. Creativity is so innate that it can thrive even in the absence of a profit motive, and for all its flaws, AO3 is an example of elegant, usable website architecture with safeguards built in against monetization. Even if everything goes wrong, we'll still be telling horny stories in the burned-out irradiated ruins, and I really love that for us.
* The worst use case for AI is anything having to do with war or police or surveillance, obviously. The immediate case for abolition is that this is used against Black and Brown people to kill them. For that reason alone, it's ethically justifiable to build a supervillain-sized magnet and take it to any data centre in your vicinity.
** To be clear, AI used to detect cancer is not the same as LLMs, and anyone trying to convince you of this doesn't want to cure cancer, they want to get every journalist fired so that the Nazi App is state media.
*** This is because capitalism does not in fact work the way they teach in business school, where companies are required to turn a profit. Companies like Uber run at a loss. Uber has never made money. It just drives the cabs out of business and defunds public transit, so you're now reliant on Uber and will eventually pay anything for the service.
† All of them looked like bad, slightly thirsty knockoffs of Coraline. This was a few weeks ago, so that aged like sour milk.
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