No Such Thing As A Beautiful Goodbye

Anon is 👍 if you’re embarrassed, shy, or trying to respect (shield) someone else’s privacy.

Anon is 👎 if you’re angry, jealous, or upset.

Simple as that.

Lol. About that… 😬🤦‍♀️😂

This project is still in the works but I’m definitely stalled out on it for the moment - in large part because of the ADHD medication shortage here in the U.S. (aka that silent public health crisis no one outside of the ADHD community is talking about?!?!)

Yeah, it might be getting better, but we don’t seem to be out of the woods quite yet.

I’m having to save most/all my “self-organizational” brain power for non-optional things.

House Mormont

"Here We Stand"

Sigil: Bear

Colors: Green and Black

Seat: Mormont Keep, Bear Island

"We Are Not a Large House, But We Are a Proud One"

The Mormont bears are fierce, loyal, resilient, protective, aloof, brave, humble, and strong-willed.

House Martell

"Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken"

Sigil: Sun and Spear

Colors: Gold and Orange

Seat: Sunspear

"Girl or Boy, We Fight Our Battles; But the Gods Let Us Choose Our Weapons"

House Martell differs from the rest of the seven kingdoms. They are progressive, passionate, short-sighted, equal, defiant, vengeful, and proud.

House Velaryon

"The Old, The True, The Brave"

Sigil: Seahorse

Colors: Aquamarine and Silver

Seat: Driftmark

"History Does Not Remember Blood. It Remembers Names"

House Velaryon is one of the few ancient houses that survived the doom of Valarya. They are proud, mystical, brave, adventurous, commanding, and skilled at sea.

Hi, AI ethicist + fanfiction expert here. (This is one of those times where I feel uniquely qualified to comment on something…)

I’m seeing this weird game of telephone about the Sudowrite AI that I think started out pretty accurate, but now has become “Elon Musk created an AI that is stealing your fanfiction” (which frankly gives him far too much credit). I can probably say more about this, but here are a few things that I want to clarify for folks, which can be boiled down to “Elon Musk has nothing to do with this” and “this is nothing new”: Elon Musk is not involved in any way with Sudowrite, as far as I can tell. Sudowrite does, however, use GPT-3, the widely-used large language model created by OpenAI, which Elon Musk co-founded. He resigned in 2018, citing a conflict of interest due to Tesla’s AI development. It wasn’t until after he left that OpenAI went from being a non-profit to a capped for-profit. Elon Musk doesn’t have anything to do with OpenAI currently (and in fact just cut off their access to Twitter data), though I can’t find anything that confirms whether or not he might have shares in the company. I would also be shocked if Elon actually contributed anything but money to the development of GPT-3.

Based on Sudowrite’s description on their FAQ, they are not collecting any training data themselves - they’re just using GPT-3 paired with their own proprietary narrative model.  And GPT-3 is trained on datasets like common crawl and webtext, which can simplistically be described as “scraping the whole internet.” Same as their DALL-E art generator. So it’s not surprising that AO3 would be in that dataset, along with everything else (e.g., Tumblr posts, blogs, news articles, all the words people write online) that doesn’t use technical means to prohibit scraping. 

OpenAI does make money now, including from companies like Sudowrite paying for access to GPT-3. And Sudowrite itself is a paid service. So yes, someone is profiting from its use (though OpenAI is capped at no more than 100% return on investment) and I think that the conversations about art (whether visual or text) being used to train these models without consent of the artist are important conversations to be having.

I think it’s possible that what OpenAI is doing is legal (i.e., not copyright infringement) for some of the same reasons that fanfiction is legal (or perhaps more accurately, for reasons that many for-profit remixes are found to be fair use), but I think whether it’s ETHICAL is a completely different question, and I’ve seen a huge amount of disagreement on this.

House Stark

"Winter is Coming"

Sigil: Wolf

Colors: Grey and White

Seat: Winterfell

"The North Remembers"

A typical Stark can be seen as cold, loyal, resilient, just, defensive, grim, and honorable.

I honestly think that emails from AO3 affect the reward system very similarly to gambling. When you get a sudden, random reward (AKA a comment on your fic), it feels great, and you want that again. But as the gambler writer, you have very little control over when the rewards come in or how many. There are games fandoms where you might have a higher chance of getting a response, or tropes, pairings, etc, but in the end, the reward is up to fickle fate (or possibly fantastic marketing on your part if you know how).

Randomly received rewards are incredibly addicting.

Similarly, not receiving a reward when you think you should get one feels very, very bad.

People who are more satisfied in their lives are less susceptible to the highs and lows of gambling and other addictive behaviors. If you are finding your relationship with you AO3 stats page or AO3 emails is unhealthy, it might be worth it to 1. turn off email notifications (so the randomness of the reward is removed) 2. Pick a time each week to check for comments (now it’s on a schedule) and 3. See if there are ways to improve your life elsewhere so that your mental health does not fluctuate with the whims of strangers sending you comments.