▀▄▀▄Wear Masks▄▀▄▀

We have got to stop framing our oppression in ways that promote the idea that other people cannot relate to our struggles. Not only does it isolate comrades in the struggle, it actively diminishes recognition of other struggles--often including those even more horrific than what we are at risk of. And this happens especially between Gay and Black struggles.

"when have straight people ever had to check what states were safe for them?" Sundown towns are still a thing. Starlight tours. What states have abortion access? What states have open carry? What states have stand your ground? What states have 3-strike rules? Women, people of color, disabled people, immigrants, and more have had to be abundantly cautious where they travel to. Straight trans people have much more travel risk right now than gay cis people.

It's a new iteration of the same tired question: "imagine if straight people weren't allowed to marry" interracial marriage in the US is younger than my parents. We disgrace people of color by forgetting their history and contemporary struggles, and we abandon queer people of color, Black queer people, by segmenting their overlapping fights.

I always thought that, after the reveal, a situation where, instead of Fenton becoming cool, phantom becomes lame, would be funny

This is very stupid but it’s genuinely what I think about every time I consider skipping dinner after work

Because there is no way to tell with 100% accuracy that a piece of writing was created by or with the aid of generative AI, and anything less than 100% accuracy is completely unacceptable, no nuance, no exceptions. You can tell with 100% accuracy if something is not a fanwork--like an ISO or placeholder post that does not contain a fanwork--and you can tell with 100% accuracy if a fanwork contains a link to a payment apparatus or is otherwise soliciting payment for fic in violation of the TOS, so these things can be disallowed and, when discovered and reported as violations, dealt with by PAC. And you can tell with 100% accuracy that a fic has been plagiarized, meaning that it has pulled entire passages word for word from another fic and this can therefore be detailed in a report in order for PAC to take action. (This is important to note because while generative AI is in fact The Plagiarism Machine, that can only be proven on the back end via the datasets used to train it. You can't actually look at generative output and tell which place the words were ripped from, because LLMs operate on statistical probabilities of word order, not actually pulling phrases wholesale from a specific work.)

But you cannot tell with 100% accuracy that a particular passage has been generated with AI.

And we are already seeing the problem with spurious AI accusations! People are claiming that 'excessive use of em-dashes' is a 'tell' for AI, when the only reason em-dashes exist in AI-generated output is because the machines were trained on human-generated writing that used them! (And as a writer who frequently ODs on em-dashes and italics, I find that particular 'tell' especially insulting. My overuse of em-dashes comes from my own brain, thank you very much.) So the only way to actually tell that someone on Ao3 is using AI to write their fic is if the admit as much up-front.

Guess what would happen if Ao3 decided to ban AI fics from the platform? Those fics would stop being tagged, and then we'd run into the exact same problems we had on FFN with fics being grudge-reported by bad faith actors, which was one of many reasons Ao3 was created in the first place--so that people couldn't do that.

No, no, and NO.

AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.

AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”

AO3 is not “in the cloud.” AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.