I thought it was a good idea at the time

Ianthe: Oooooh, I am stuck in a love triangle, but I'm pretty sure I can beat Gonad easily, and Harrow will be mine.

Gideon: News flash bitch! Harrow doesn't love either of us. She's in love with a frozen corpse.

when readers choose to engage with a story, they're investing their limited time in an unknown outcome. they might like the story, they might hate the story, it might be the greatest thing they'd ever read. but part of the social contract between readers and writers is that it is the writer's own original writing. it is their effort that they are offering in exchange for the reader's attention.

the heart of fandom is that it is a community of people who are putting in labour for no outcome other than human-to-human enjoyment. no one is earning money. no one is "getting" anything out of participating in fandom other than comradery and community.

when people use AI to generate writing and don't tag it, there is an act of deception. it's not a story written by a person, but content generated by a machine. it is taking reader's attention under a false pretext.

my threshold for what i am willing to read if it's written by a human is completely different than if i know it's AI generated. a human with a beautiful unhinged brain may bring a brilliant horniness to a trope that i'm not otherwise that fond of and make it well worth the time to read it. a human can write a story with a take i've never considered before, or a perspective so unique it changes the way i see things.

AI can't do anything new, because it is simply averaging out everything that humans have already written.

when readers choose to spend their limited time writing comments to authors, they need to know if they're commenting on someone's actual writing or something generated by AI. it is absolutely true that some people are happy to read AI generated stories. but I'll see comments on stories that are clearly AI generated talking about how great the writing is and how much they admire the author etc. and it is my guess that at least some of the people wouldn't have chosen to leave that feedback in that way if they'd known the story was AI generated.

people can and do choose to spend their time on things created by AI. but AI can create more content than humans would ever be able to engage with. which is why we need to know if something is AI generated or not.

a human's writing is something that we can't get anywhere else. part of the deception in not tagging that something is AI generated is that we all have access to the same AI apps. do i want to read the slop churned out based on your prompts? or do i want to feed in my own prompts to get slop that is more specifically tailored to my taste? (i mean, i don't. but hypothetically.)

i think there are a lot of good reasons not to use AI to create fic (environmental, writing is great, the joy of the craft etc.), but at the end of the day, that's a choice everyone is going to make for themselves.

There was a big push to eliminate "degrading jobs" but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn't have dishwashers, but we'd have people who washed dishes that weren't eligible to be in the union.

I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn't "degrading", it's fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?

The first time someone told me that busing tables was "degrading", I was like "Oh, uhh, yeah, like it's very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?" and they responded "No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting."

In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn't like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn't in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I've talked about how said that "as a prison abolitionist" we just needed to execute most criminals.)

It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?

Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.

I've talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.