sine lucro friget ludus

Sure, stories—and in fact everything in the world!!—is ultimately meaningless, but assuming that we all value our precious time in this beautiful universe, asking “Is this worth my time? Is it worth someone else’s time?” is obviously good practice.

Brown Hyenas (Parahyaena brunnea), adults and pup, family Hyaenidae, Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, South Africa

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

Currently, it's marking season for us in the UK. I have an exam board in four hours, in fact, which is where we all go over every profile of every student on our courses, see what results they've achieved, and work out their "decision" - if all is well, the decision is to let them continue the course, or the final degree grade calculated if they're in final year. If it hasn't gone well, the decision is about whether they get to rework the pieces that failed, resit exams, repeat the whole year, or be required to withdraw.

And, as has been the case for the last two years, the profiles are now littered with plagiarism investigations. Every one of those - every single one - will have come in as an assignment that the lecturer received, and started reading, and then with a sinking feeling thought "This isn't your work." Every one had to go to an academic misconduct hearing. Every one is an enormous draw on time and resources, including the emotional reserves of the lecturer.

And I know that's not the main issue! I know in the grand scheme of things, our feelings aren't the most important part of this equation! But as we're talking about rudeness, let me explain:

Firstly, the work itself. You begin reading, you see it's AI. Contractually, we have to read it anyway, and give feedback on why it's shit, and what makes it bad, and that is absolutely fucking soul destroying. Most students who use AI are doing so because they've managed to train their brains to find reading something boring abhorrent, and they want to skip that part; but a ChatGPT-generated report is bland, vague, and utterly devoid of any passion, insight or personality. In short, it's boring. You simply passed your boredom on to us.

Secondly, regardless of your personal feelings about the assignment, it at least had a purpose. It was there to stretch you, and make you think about the topic so you could learn about it, and to test that learning so we can all make sure you have actually learned what you need to. But the slop you handed in, that I now have to mark? What's the point? Literally what is the fucking point of me marking it? You didn't even write it. None of the feedback I'm obligated to give means anything to you. I'm marking ChatGPT, and it can't read.

Which means, not only is it fucking boring, it's actively pointless. Ask anyone in the world what a boring but pointless obligatory task does to your mood. Imagine that.

Thirdly, the misconduct hearing. Because listen, again, the lecturer's feelings here are, once again, not the main point. Students who cheat like this aren't doing so because life is hunky dory. They're stressed and overwhelmed and struggling, and they think they've found a magic way out, and so being pulled into a misconduct hearing - where the best they can hope for is to have to redo the whole piece for a capped mark, on top of all the rest of the work they have (functionally, a bonus assignment), and the worst is expulsion - is a mental breakdown-inducing experience. That, obviously, is the biggest issue.

But, the lecturers know all that, which means we know what we're triggering if we do report it. I cannot tell you how upsetting it is to receive a slop assignment, realise what it is, and then have to make the call to report it. I know damn well how upsetting that's going to be for you. I know how stressful and painful that's going to be. I know this might mean you're going to be thrown out of university. In some cases, I know it means you will be.

I know I could look the other way to spare you that

And oh, that gets tempting. When things are really bad for you, and I see you struggling, and this is your third strike; fuck me but it's tempting to pretend that I can't tell.

I cannot do that.

Which brings me to number four: the soul-bleachingly fucking horrible ordeal that is the misconduct hearing itself. Most people are non-confrontational; I'm no exception. I also simply do not enjoy a sobbing, panicking student sitting in front of me, telling me about how stressed and scared they are and how they're terrified they're going to fail. But that's how these things go.

Our most recent example is an international Masters student. I don't know the particulars for him; but I do know it's not uncommon in his part of the world for families to go into obscene debt, often to loan sharks, to send their kids to UK universities. Failure means more than just academia for him. Having to sit through him turning white and quietly begging us to give him another chance before he left in tears he tried to hide from us was, obviously, much worse for him than us; but it was honestly traumatic. Even now, two weeks later, I can't get it out of my head. There's nothing we can do; but, I feel guilty anyway. I could have looked the other way.

(It wouldn't have passed anyway. It was terrible. But at least he'd probably be allowed a resit - we're still waiting on the outcome of this one, but he may well be withdrawn)

To bring this back to the point of the post:

a) Most students who use AI are doing so because they've managed to train their brains to find reading something boring abhorrent, and they want to skip that part

b) Students who cheat like this aren't doing so because life is hunky dory. They're stressed and overwhelmed and struggling, and they think they've found a magic way out, and so being pulled into a misconduct hearing - where the best they can hope for is to have to redo the whole piece for a capped mark, on top of all the rest of the work they have (functionally, a bonus assignment), and the worst is expulsion - is a mental breakdown-inducing experience.

c) Our most recent example is an international Masters student. I don't know the particulars for him; but I do know it's not uncommon in his part of the world for families to go into obscene debt, often to loan sharks, to send their kids to UK universities. Failure means more than just academia for him.

there was a great moment for curiosity here re. why students are using ai that could have been fed by either statements b or c - are students bearing financial responsibilities in addition to university work? are students struggling with external stressors that you, the professor, have no idea about? are students uncertain and unconfident in their own skills? has the student actually done the work themselves and then been falsely flagged because of the way they write in english? are they getting this degree with the hope that credentials might get them paid better? if so, why? what could drive someone to think about their life in that way? are they struggling with earlier pedagogical failures that make coursework difficult for them? - which are instead glossed over for a) this is rude and b) experiencing an entry into the stressors and pressure of someone else is personally traumatising to me.

is it within a professor's remit to consider all these questions in the balance? probably not. but maybe then in that case, it is also not within the professor's remit to insist that the student is simply lazy and incapable of engaging with a text. perhaps the professor's remit is to look the problem in the eye and work to solve it, instead of passing moral judgements on people whose lives the professor has no idea about: moral heuristic judgements that are inevitably based on the edifice of various prejudice and reactionary laments, whether about the laziness of racialised people or the fecklessness of youth.

watching this from afar but thought you might find this interesting...i personally don't use AI in fanfic bc well that's not the joy of it to me + environmental concerns but this is so fascinating to me - i didn't know how widespread ai use was in fic but also the fact that people feel like they need to use ai! and all the people in the comments who are either vindicated that they knew it was ai from the writing and the people who are very disappointed by it...i think this is going to result in witchhunting and fandom drama but i think we're going to see more of these posts sadly

god i'm sorry but i'm so sick of this shit. completely unnecessary and the endless disclaimers about "this is not for harrassment" and "we are just trying to help people make ethical choices" and the claim this is supposed to get people to tag their fics for having used ai combined with language about "ai corrupting fan spaces" is extremely fucking disingenuous lmao. you cannot in one breath use supercharged language about "corruption" and "real human connection" and then in the other claim you are not shaming people. the shame is baked into these moralised judgements about the "corruption" of fandom and "real" connection. this is exactly the sort of deeply slimy two-faced shit that i absolutely abhorr.

i am going to say several things now that i have been saying in private for months. i am going to sound judgemental, but frankly, if you're sitting on your moral high horse passing down judgements about people you can take it. you cannot talk shit without expecting to get hit (as i almost certainly expect to w this, tho obvs i am switching anon off in a couple of hours bc fuck that noise).

1) i genuinely and truly believe that call outs like this are far more corrosive to fandom than minding your own business or feeling sad because you got got by some mid claude generated prose. all this does is foster an atmosphere of paranoia, hypervigilance, increased scrutiny and systemised unpersoning & dehumanisation of "immoral" and "deceptive" others. in every single case i have seen where someone is deemed to have used ai to create a fanwork, i have only seen people gleeful that they actually finally have a "moral" target they can get mad about and rip to complete shreds sans consequence and sans repercussion.

2) this is the literally most counterproductive way to get people to tag their fics for ai use. once again, i point to the shrill insistence that fandom is about Real Human Connection and the language of "corruption" - do you think these are neutral terms? are you incredibly naive and foolish? these are words loaded with shame. the subtext of all these statements is: if you aren't putting your own real blood and sweat into this work of art, you are corrupting and poisoning fandom. in one breath you are invoking both the protestant work ethic and its moralisms and dirt/purity binaries in relation to literal humanness and being part of community. shaming has literally never worked in the history of anything to get people to adhere to something. if you want people to tag their ai fics, you, person who gets upset at the concept of being "tainted", have to manage your own big feelings and create a space where using ai is a morally neutral thing* and where engaging with ai created works does not make you a fandom outcast.

3) i do think some reflection is in order to contemplate why people even feel the need to turn to ai to create fic. what are the circumstances that produce such a feeling? let's think about this, for a moment, with some empathy. do people feel like they need to create something in order to participate in fandom? if so, why do they believe that? are there certain ideas that we entrench viz. artists and writers as "real" fandom and everyone else as "second class" members of fandom? (lbr, this statement is implicit in a lot of posts that go around about how authors deserve more comments. ask for feedback by all means; but the insistence that there is a "real" fandom and implicitly therefore, a fandom which does not matter, which is not productive, which does not contribute and therefore make fandom "real" are ideas which i simply think is point blank wrong. merely being in fandom IS fandom.) if people feel the need to create, why do they believe merely writing it out themselves is not enough? are they afraid of "failing" as writers? why? do they feel they're not good enough to make art? why? if they believe this is the only way they can make friends and have community? if so, why? the answers to all of these questions, in my opinion, at least partly indicts fandom culture at present and should call for some serious self-reflection!

4) genuinely WHAT harm is being done to you by the existence of an unlabelled ai fic? what actual harm? why does it hurt you so much? what are you feeling so deceived about? yes i get that you come to fandom for human connection, but what about a fic writer using an llm actually precludes there being a person behind the fic? what specifically is upsetting you? can you actually sit with your feelings and identify what specifically you're mad about?

5) now for my really mean and problematic opinion :) : i frankly believe half the "distressed" feelings about being "deceived" by ai use are because people have created a moral identity out of not reading or using ai which butts straight up against their tastes in fanfiction running heavily towards the kind of deeply ubiquitous ao3 house style fic which almost certainly underpins LLM data training sets. in making a whole moral personality out of something which directly implicates your taste, you fabricate an insecurity which must be excised: what better way than by turning it outwards to claim that you were deceived and taken in and therefore, that the deceiver has committed some unspecified crime against fandom and must be sent into the proverbial corner? there are exactly two solutions to this. either you become more confident about your taste and you own it and you also own the recognition that this kind of prose is pretty easy to generate using an llm; or you develop a taste for the difficult, which is currently more difficult to generate using an llm but most probably will not be in a couple of years (i'm not being a doomer here, but realistic. at some point llm capacity will cross the threshold of what even a canny reader will be able to identify).

6) i think we could all do with a good hefty dose of a) DON'T LIKE DON'T READ and b) MINDING OUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS

One factual counterpoint I would offer is that shaming does, in fact, work as a useful deterrent. Shame is not a good motivator, so it doesn't help in inspiring people to DO things, but it is a good depressant, so it does help people avoid doing things.

Specifically related to fandom and fic writing cultures, shaming has been productively used to counter both plagiarism and racist writing. I'm aware those two things are different in scope and intention. I reference both to point out the difference in how shaming as a strategy has been mainstreamed or not.

In regards to plagiarism, it is absolutely a part of dominant white fandom culture to cheer on people who track down plagiarists, and to report them and get those fics taken down. Authors thank eagle-eyed readers who spot plagiarising stories in the wild, and the OTW built in rules against plagiarism, and therefore for reporting it, into the very first iteration of AO3.

One of the fundamental arguments against using generative LLMs or 'AI' is that it is a plagiarising machine on a scale as yet unavailable to individual plagiarists. It is a fact that every free-to-use commercially funded AI software out there has currently been trained on massive amounts of stolen data--stolen in the sense that the creators of the data have not given permission for it to be used in that way, nor have they been credited, nor have they been paid for it. (I will insert my obligatory disclaimer about piracy here because there is no stripping of authorship credit there in the way that plagiarism works.)

So when you look at fannish pushback against AI as an extension of its culture against plagiarism, it makes perfect sense, that is, it is morally coherent, for the treatment that fandom extends towards plagiarists of individual works to also be applied towards industrial scale plagiarists.

This maps on to the cultural schism you can see between the fans who support OTW's stance that AI-generated work is a valid transformative form of art welcome on AO3, and those who are offended by the OTW's mendacious 'because we cannot successfully distinguish between two things, we will state that there is no difference between two things' position.

This is part of a much larger conversation around credit, attribution, and cultural appropriation, and I respect people who have differing views on all of these. But I do want to highlight that 'passing off as your own some work that was built on an uncredited, unacknowledged foundation' is literally the subject of several international lawsuits, often led by people from Global South, marginalised identities. (It's why the Geographical Indicator label exists.) And 'shame, copy cat, shame' is an artistic position that has been made across cultures and art forms, many times by artists who are not making financial profit from their art. So I see no reason why fanfiction writers and artists cannot participate in this cultural stance along with other creative people.

The second example of shaming I brought up, about racist writing, ties in to the point the OP made about "the noncon and underage labels on ao3 are morally neutral statements". I think there was also a reference in tags to the "toxic LJ culture of call-outs".

Now, I was around before the OTW was formed, and noncon and underage labels were definitely NOT morally neutral terms back then. There were many, MANY heated arguments around labelling that happened on Live Journal (and Dreamwidth) and they were extensions of arguments that happened on mailing lists, because writers and readers alike fell across a spectrum of positions from 'you are abhorrent if you publish something on the internet without warnings' to 'you are censoring my artistic freedom by asking for content notes'.

This was ALSO the same time that racism in fanfiction was being discussed, and for a brief period of time, it was acceptable, if you were a member of an LJ/DW community for posting fic for a certain fandom or theme, to be able to say, 'hey, the fic you posted is racist'. Because it was considered ok for the community to have rules like 'don't post racist stories'.

Like I said, it was a brief period of time, and one of the many things that the OTW did to shape fandom culture was to create a place where you could publish fiction, but not participate in a cultural community. And again, this is a development that has been critiqued by many writers and readers--so it is an acceptable stance for a non-white fan to say that critiquing a piece of fannish writing is fine, actually.

Which brings me to the whole 'don't like, don't read' stance that I personally find juvenile. I believe that many fans use it in good faith as a shorthand to say 'if you didn't like something, don't comment in the author's space to tell them that'.

But as OP observes, the hierarchy of who is considered a 'real' and 'productive' fan excludes certain forms of cultural creation and consumption, and the fan critic has always been on the very periphery of permissible fan. "Don't like, Don't read/watch/listen" when applied to non-fannish art, whether it is behemoth produced commercial media or endangered folk tradition, is an absolutely bonkers statement to make. It removes one of the well-springs of new and original art, which is the critique of art that people disliked enough to talk about, that seeps into cultural influences enough to be incorporated by other artists. It erases the fact that criticism of art is in itself a creative activity.

Now, I am aware that 'you used AI' is being wielded as an accusation against writers from marginalised linguistic backgrounds, and as an in-group policing tool, and as a grudge cudgel. Several of the points that OP makes deserve reflection upon.

i think that's a great observation about the ao3 anglophone fandom approach to ai fic emerging from this segment of fandom's approach to plagiarism. i do think that's one of the animating preoccupations behind the tenor of fannish response to ai, but i disagree that its a useful framework to think about what llms do and how they function and i disagree that ao3's plagiarism policy is actually all that simple to enforce. (and yes i also think that it is a silly framework to use in the context of published authors and other working artists talking about how ai works)

its a provocation, certainly, but llms especially function basically on the basis of creating an averaged prediction of what comes next in a series of words. i think these two posts are useful explainers for why its not actually plagiarism, though they're talking about it in the context of art. the best an llm can do is reproduce statistically likely phrases and statistically likely plots and statistically likely characters - and i have to be frank, that is in fact, what a lot of highly structured genre fiction already does, and what i personally think a lot of litfic does. it is exactly why it was so easy for the commonwealth short story prize judge to be taken in and why it was easy for the harpers bazaar short story prize judge to be taken in: both writers have written narratives that are statistically approximate stories that are original, yet bear high resemblance to a certain brand of postcolonial fiction. the failure again is one of reading and racist reading practices.

but okay to get back to the point, i actually also do not think that ao3 is equipped to handle this kind of "plagiarism" if we're calling llm-generated fic "plagiarism", so i don't think its fair to call their policy mendacious! for example, there are at least two reasonably "big" fics in the fandom that i'm in that are rip offs of two other popular fics - one very noticeably so and one less so. neither of them can really be taken down by reporting them even though the plot structure and character work is so similar, because they cross a certain threshold of being "transformative" i.e. they have enough original stuff going on that it can't be counted as plagiarism - even though a reader reading will know exactly where they're pulling from. another case: a couple of months ago a friend of mine sent me the links to two different fics that had basically reproduced twilight the novel as fic. one had only swapped the character names out. the other, however, had replaced names of places and also altered the plot in some minor ways, again, just about enough to cross the threshold of being transformative. the first fic was taken down, the second fic still remains up.

ai plagiarises much less than any of these cases i've illustrated above do. can it reproduce individual phrases? notably yes, when chatgpt reproduced a nabokov simile in a story - decontextualised from its original context and rendered silly and facile as a result. but then, we all borrow language from each other! think about the ubiquitous "toed off his shoes"! can it reproduce plot structures? yes. but then, so do some kinds of genre fic like mystery and romance. can it even reproduce individual authorial styles? yes. but then, so do we when we do pastiche fic of wodehouse or sayers or tolkien. does it reproduce premises? yes, but then again: so do we when we remix fics, or try our own spin on specific premises. so what exactly are we objecting to as plagiarism? what compensation are we seeking precisely, as fandom?

re. "'passing off as your own some work that was built on an uncredited, unacknowledged foundation' is literally the subject of several international lawsuits, often led by people from Global South, marginalised identities." - i don't actually think this is a fair comparison at all! bioresource protection & cultural protection is a complicated and thorny issue that deserves more attention than to be brought into a fannish argument like this. we are comparing apples and peas here. the harm caused by bioresource theft are the communities disenfranchised from being able to use ingredients/produce that have been vital to their lives and nutrition historically, the degradation of ecosystems and the enclosure of lands. the harm caused by cultural theft is a similar process of disenfranchisement and poverty. what precisely is the economic harm or disenfranchisement taking place here in fandom via ai use? how are we as fans being harmed more so than the cases i've outlined above? what resources are we being deprived of? what is the wealth we are being deprived of?

if we want to make the case for ai use in fandom being antisocial, which is the drift of all the arguments i've seen, we have to actually make that case. racism in fandom is antisocial because it creates a hostile atmosphere and is cruel to fans of colour, ultimately driving them out of fandom. the same is true of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and ableism in fandom. why is ai use antisocial in fandom? what specific harm is occurring? can we name the exact harm?

there are exactly two cases i can think of against ai use in fandom that aren't already touched on by the antisocial nature of social injustice in fandom (i.e. ai reproducing prejudices): 1) it makes bad art and 2) the same case for plagiarism/reproduction as of fellow fandom authors who "take" our "ideas" and write their own spin on these fics without credit or referring people back to the "original". against 2, ao3 is impotent and there are limits to fandom shaming there, especially when its someone popular in fandom who seizes on an idea and then writes their own spin in a way that's still identifiable with the original. against 1, well fandom has fought and died on the hill of the right to make bad art as hobbyists, so unless we want to let that cat out of the bag, i don't know what we can do. the erosion of trust in fandom only happens if you care about whether or not a fic is llm generated.

as for shaming as strategy 🥲🥲🥲 - i think we really diverge here, because while i care about racism in fandom a lot, i don't think it has actually worked in any useful ways. it takes you just about as far as getting people to not actually say outright slurs to someone or in reference to characters. but it has not actually helped us deal with the problems of getting white fans to engage with racist structures and ideas in their canons (lmao ask me how i fucking know), getting white fans to look at characters of colour with interest, getting white fans to engage with characters of colour in-depth, getting white fans to eliminate forms of liberal white racism... instead we just sort of spin ourselves deeper into the rut of keeping on pointing to the fact that white characters get more attention than non-white characters, while white fans invent ever more (and increasingly ludicrous, racist) excuses to explain exactly why they find the non-white characters so impossible to engage with and we go exactly nowhere. it frustrates me and i think that at the very least maybe an examination of new fan strategies are in order on that front. but that doesn't mean i'm averse to reading fic critically in fandom or being critical of fandom's practices. god knows i spend half my time on here kvetching about it. but you know, i'm willing to do it in the case of racism specifically because racism has real and tangible antisocial outcomes within fandom, because it creates real harm.

in some ways i do think you're making my argument for me because the fact that noncon/rape and underage went from hotly contested to accepted as morally neutral is a testament to the fact that ao3 was able to make it "neutral" i.e. to make it something that people felt they could safely use, which merely described the contents of the fic. one of the best cases against shaming in relation to fic with this content was written fully a decade ago by anarfea, who rightly observed that the more people were shamed, the more likely they were to either not tag their fic appropriately or rationalise why what they were enjoying wasn't actually noncon. so again: if we can't get rid of ai fic because it is difficult to detect, it cannot be defined as plagiarism in a way that doesn't implicate fandom's legitimacy as derivative but transformative works, and shaming people out of using it doesn't work, what can we do? how can we make labelling an ai-derived fic widespread enough for those of us who don't want to engage with it be able to disengage?

so again, my question is: what do we actually want from this? what do we actually want to achieve?

Fat Horse No. 11

It’s the year of the horse and I’ve always been a horse girl at heart, so I’m finally taking advantage of the excuse to fill the world with fat little horses! These felted friends are about the size (and shape!) of an apple, and if you happen to have any apples to share I’m sure they’d help you out! This pretty palomino just needs to take a little break, don’t ask him to do anything active right now.