Real Life Is Messy

Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.

Including (sigh) the em dash.

There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.

A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.

No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.

You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.

Defend the em dash.

(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

*cackling*

AO3 was built by a bunch of us with our free donated labor for the purpose of being a space free from commercial spam.

It’s not a public service. It was built by us to house the type of fandom culture we liked.

AO3 forbids commercial links because they are making a very specific claim about the legality of fanworks, and that claim is about noncommercial fanworks.

They’re not saying that commercialized fanworks are against the law. They’re just not prepared to host them–nor defend them in court.

In case people missed it: The OTW will not honor DMCA takedown orders that are basically, “I own X work and that’s a fanfic of it, and that’s copyright infringement so make it go away.”

The OTW says, lolnope, we don’t think that’s copyright infringement. If you disagree, sue us.

The OTW says: Disney - we will not remove explicit Mandalorian fanfic. Rowling, Warner Bros - we will not remove trans Harry Potter fanfic. Gabaldon - we are not removing Outlander fanfic no matter how much you think it’s illegal or a personal violation. Yarbro, if someone puts “The Adventure of the Gentleman in Black” on AO3, you will need to actually take it to trial to (try to) get it removed; none of this C&D order followed by fans caving because they can’t afford a lawyer.

…So far, nobody has sued them. (This is, in my mind, the strongest proof we have that fanfic is not copyright infringement. In 13 years, not a single person or company has scrounged up a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against AO3/the OTW for hosting fanworks.)

But they’re not willing to put themselves on the line for commercial works. Those get considered differently in copyright law. They’re not always infringing - there’s a whole history of parody books & songs to prove that - but the OTW is not dealing with them.

The OTW does not care if fans are making money. The OTW cares if fans making money interfere with its legal defense of its archive.

Events like Strikethrough and Boldthrough happened in the early to mid-2000s. It felt like you’d wake up every day in 2007 and find another fandom group on LJ gone. (And not just fandom groups either, important community groups for education and trauma survival were also wiped out in those purges as well.)

And while not exactly the same, Yahoo Groups–and yes Yahoo Groups was a major online fandom hub at one point–were deleted as late as 2019 with very little warning, leaving a lot of older fandom groups scrambling to back up decades worth of content.

I might be projecting, but Fanfic.net seems to be wobbling too. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out they go under in the next few years despite performing similar purges of adult content in 2012 and allowing for obnoxious ads, which made the site unusable on mobile unless you wanted to see an ad what felt like every couple of paragraphs. (It might be better now, I haven’t checked in a while.)

It has only been in very recent memory that fandom has gained any sort of foothold that isn’t poised directly over a precarious faultline that could at any moment open up and swallow entire communities whole, and a huge part of that is the volunteers at Ao3 who decided to play chicken with the likes of Anne Rice and won.

The comparison to antivaxxers is fitting because it’s a very specific kind of reactionary. When a solution to a problem fixes the problem well enough, it becomes less obvious why the solution needs to be there in the first place. You stop seeing the costs of the problem and see only the costs of the solution. Inevitably, a certain unfortunately common kind of idiot with a disinclination to think or learn from the past or both will go “We don’t need Solution, Problem isn’t a real issue anyway!”

So yeah, the polio vaccine reduces a once-common childhood health spectre to a footnote and suddenly people are going “why are we getting all these shots anyway”. People stop falling to their deaths because of shitty railings and suddenly OSHA and safety-related red tape seem like a distant priority. The list goes on.

like not for nothing but literally when sam was hallucinating that meant he should keep hunting as long as physically possible, and the very second he stopped actively hallucinating & was physically functional he was supposed to take hunting back up again and continue even after dean's death, and the fact that he stopped when dean died is a profound and hideous betrayal. but martin is endangering the general public by hunting which we know because he was in a loony bin which makes him untrustworthy forever and ever.

and it is extra odd because martin is like. extremely normal by hunting standards. he wants to kill benny on the aforementioned shreds of evidence but 'there is a dead body and a monster exists in the vicinity who fits the MO' is LITERALLY how the winchesters decide to kill MOST of their targets. which sam and dean both acknowledge out loud. and then martin, with some degree of certainty that she's ultimately safe ('he won't hurt his own flesh and blood') puts a civilian at risk which is not best practices but is something we watch a Lot of other hunters do onscreen and for some reason it is not generally attributed to their being """crazy."""