The Soap Box Papers

[Disclaimer: We’re just people in fandom who have an interest in interactive fiction and had some Concerns and Questions about Glimmer Fics and AI in fandom that we considered worth bringing attention to.] 

[Extra disclaimer: All of the information mentioned here was publicly available at the time of writing via avenues like (but not limited to) public social media accounts (TikTok, Tumblr, Instagram, etc), websites, and news articles. Only content on public accounts (affiliated with Glimmer Fics or not) are mentioned in this essay.]

For those unfamiliar with the concept, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (CYOA) stories are exactly as described—you read through a story and in selected sections, you are presented with choices to make. After selecting a choice, the story progresses until you reach the next set of options and keeps going until you reach an ending. In many CYOA stories, the options grow into a large decision tree spanning numerous choices, and result in several endings. Every re-read can feel like a whole new story. 

From Consider the Consequences published in 1930 with 43 possible endings to modern versions such as films like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, and video games like Detroit: Become Human and Disco Elysium, CYOAs are not a new concept. Even in fandom, there are multiple tags and genres dedicated to CYOAs and interactive fiction on sites like AO3 and Quotev, while sites like Twine are dedicated to interactive original fiction writing. 

So what is Glimmer Fics? How are they mutuals with Matt Mercer (yes, the one from Critical Role, the English voice actor for Jotaro "JoJo" Kujo, Levi Acherman, and Leon S. Kennedy) on Instagram? And why have Anti-AI fandom creators interacted positively with their content? 

(We reached out to some of the anti-AI fandom creators but they have not replied to us. If you see a rando in your Tumblr or Tiktok inbox asking about Glimmer Fics, that might be us, sorry.)

What is Glimmer Fics and why talk about them? 

Glimmer Fics, in their own words, is a "site for Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories, where you actually play as the main character". 

On their site, you can create or read content in the typical CYOA format, where clicking on a set of options impacts the story. This process utilizes AI so that it is highly customizable to the reader’s experience. 

Fandom and fanworks are not simply a feature of glimmerfics.com, it's the main selling point. The banner on the landing page of the site states: "Interactive fanfiction — play as the main character!" Fandoms include Harry Potter, DCU, and A Song Of Ice and Fire.

The filter menu from their website. (Link)

Glimmer Fics isn’t the first company to use Generative AI to create fanworks. Platforms like Talefy and CharacterAI have used fandom in their AI services as well. 

The key difference is that Glimmer Fics is increasingly attempting to enter online fandom spaces and position themselves as part of the community. According to their website’s about section, "Glimmer started as a project by three friends who love stories, fandom, and games." 

A majority (if not all) of their content on their various social media platforms feature talking about fanfiction and fanworks. As shown in the examples below, some of these posts also feature fandom related tags such as #ao3 and #wattpad. 

Promotional content screenshotted from their social media accounts (1, 2)

On Tumblr, Glimmer Fics outwardly mention characters and fandoms both in the post and in the tags. 

Screenshot taken from Glimmer Fics' Tumblr account (Link).

It is also important to note that there AI usage is scarcely mentioned on these social media posts.

This is by design. On the job listing for their Content Marketing Lead (with the goal to make short-form video content and build a Tiktok influencer program), they describe their ideal candidate as someone who is connected to fandom culture and understands what the fandom audience wants and trends to follow. Fandom hates AI, so Glimmer Fics does not mention it as much as they could or should. 

If Glimmer Fics aims to insert themselves into fanfiction and fandom spaces and use it, it is only right to question their motives, purpose, and practice. What are they getting out of it? 

Generating on Glimmer Fics 

When creating a story on Glimmer Fics, the writer can provide the background, character descriptions, and general story plot. However, as seen in the disclaimer below, writers on Glimmer don’t actually write the text of the story. 

Screenshot taken from Glimmer Fics' Author Guide (Link). 

Glimmer Fics claims writers are writing at a scene level, describing things such as the setting and general plot line much like a director directing a movie where the actors (or in this case, Glimmer’s AI Storyteller) can improv. But if an AI is writing for you, can you really call yourself a writer? 

It is sanitized language to disguise the fact that “writing” on Glimmer Fics is still essentially prompting. All you are doing is feeding detailed prompts into an AI that generates the story for you.  

Readers are also able to add in their own customization and options into the story. The AI will then use all of the data points to generate more of the story. 

Taken from @glimmerfics' Tumblr. (Link)

(If you want to find out more, you can check out the author guide or watch this Youtube video.)

AI Model Training Transparency 

In line with most criticisms regarding Generative AI use in fandom spaces, we should be asking, “How does Glimmer Fics train their AI model, and what is it trained on?” 

Data scrapping fanfiction websites is an ongoing blight in fandom spaces, especially after sites like Paperdemon and AO3 were scraped last year and uploaded onto Huggingface. 

One major concern is that the Glimmer Fics' AI Storyteller is in fact training on similar data sets and using pre-existing fanfiction from sites such as AO3, Wattpad, and Fanfiction.net. If this is the case, it is a disservice and slap in the face to all fan creators on those sites who have put in the time and effort into creating their works. 

On the flipside, if it is a closed system, is the AI model being trained on users' content and interactions with the AI? Are the users made aware of this when they use this platform? 

Or, perhaps, is it training on the content provided by the fanfiction authors they hire? 

Taken from LinkedIn (Link)

(Yes, apparently Glimmer Fics hires fanfiction writers to create fandom related content for them.) (They also hire content creators to run entire Tiktok accounts with undisclosed ads for their website.) (This is a whole other can of worms we cannot be worming now.) (An unopened can of worms for another day if you will.) (Or, maybe never.)   

The closest thing we could find on this is in the platform’s Terms of Service regarding User Generated Content that gives the company the rights to the content for the "use, support and maintain the Services and Website for our general business purposes" which can mean anything and nothing really. 

Screenshotted from Glimmer Fics' website terms (Link).

Again, this is all speculation in regards to how the AI model is trained and would require further clarification and transparency from the company to actually know how it works. 

In general, when it comes to text generation, AI has to train on existing materials which causes major ethical concerns. Google is being sued by book publishers for allegedly training Gemini on illegally using copyrighted material. Anthrophic settled a $1.5 billion dollar class action lawsuit by authors after being accused of using the authors’ books to train Anthrophic’s AI, Claude. More recently, second hand books have been destroyed and scanned for the AI supply chain in the effort to provide more training data for AI. 

If Glimmer Fics were truly members of the fandom communities they claim to be from and create for, they have the social responsibility to inform the fandom community at large and their own user base as to how their model is trained. 

Potential Environmental Impact 

As many people with more expertise on this subject have spoken about, there is a concerning environmental impact of using and training AI models. From data center noise pollution to excessive power and water consumption, AI data centers have a real impact on people and communities around the world.

Glimmer Fics attempts to address this by purchasing carbon offsets as a "partial measure".  

Taken from Glimmer Fics' website About section (Link). 

Credit where credit is due, this is more than what most other AI companies are doing. 

However, the use of carbon offsets as a measure to reduce the carbon footprint of companies is one that is highly debatable, with critics calling it greenwashing. 

The money procured for and redistributed to environmental programs can be incredibly useful for those green programs and initiatives. However, it doesn’t prevent or decrease the harm that's already been committed. 

Carbon offsetting doesn’t do anything to lower the impact that AI has on the environment. Carbon offsets that are used to fund programs that replant trees from deforestation won’t lower the use of electricity used by AI data centers, nor the heat it produces. Carbon offsetting can also have an unfair impact on the global south. 

The bottom line is that buying these offsets is an easier thing to do than to actually reduce the environmental impact that a company or service generates. It's offering a bandaid for someone’s pinkie after they were stabbed in the gut.

Which brings us to the final question: 

Does interactive fanfiction (and fandom) really need AI? 

As mentioned earlier, interactive fiction is not a novel idea. The concept is highly intriguing and indicative of what interests the public. For decades, people have been reading Choose-Your-Own-Adventure gamebooks and sticking their finger after every choice to keep track of the story. The I Ching: Book of Changes from the 10th and 4th centuries BC had readers toss coins as a divination technique. Modern interpretations include playing video games that have multiple endings and where player choice matters. 

Interactive works have existed long before AI and will continue to exist after it. So why use AI at all?  

In the book Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships, James Muldoon describes a “loneliness economy” and how Artificial Intelligence companies monetize and exploit this loneliness among the populace–especially companies with AI services that are personalized and emotional, like Glimmer Fics. To understand that, we must first look into the social conditions that allow for this economy to boom. 

While Muldoon’s book describes the general internet and socioeconomic landscapes, we would like to look specifically at online fandom spaces. 

Integrating into any kind of community with real people can be difficult. Even though fandom communities are meant as spaces for fandom to connect with each other regardless of distance, fandom can also amplify feelings of loneliness, isolation, and self-doubt. 

You might have come across variations of the phrase, “make art for you”. As true as that is, it can also be a little naive and dismissive of the real feelings people face. The act of writing and crafting a story may start with the creator, but the act of sharing? That is for the community. 

If you scroll on r/AO3, you can find many people sharing their stats and comments while you might struggle to even get a single comment that isn’t a scam bot. You go to draw fanart, and see other people in the same Tumblr tag posting art that belongs in galleries. It's so easy to slip through the cracks in some fandoms that some authors have resorted to promoting their fanfics on Tiktok to garner more kudos, comments, and hits. When you’re roleplaying with other people in a group chat, it can come off as clunky, cringe, and awkward. If you’re lucky, you can find a Discord server dedicated to your fandom, but what if everyone there is cliquey and judgemental? Scroll long enough on Reddit and you'll find people who argue that they only Kudos on completed works because, “what if it doesn’t turn out good?” 

Sometimes posting fanworks feels like screaming into the void hoping someone will scream back. You work hard on something you’re proud of, and only a few (if any) people actually kudos or comment on it. 

So why should you spend 10 hours on a 2,500 word one-shot to get 5 kudos when you can use AI for 3 hours and make a 15,000 word chaptered work that gets way more engagement? And even if it doesn’t do well statistically, at least you didn’t spend 10 hours on it, right? And god forbid someone finds out you use AI in your work–let alone to the point they create a siteskin to suss you out, drop a document with a list of names, and create a witchhunt. 

But then, in comes a platform like Glimmer Fics, where you can get an AI to generate the works for you, get a lot of engagement, and be rewarded for it. 

Creators whose stories get played a lot on Glimmer Fics can join their Approved Authors program, which comes with perks. Even as a reader, you can get rewarded with more turn tokens by commenting on works.  

This further drives engagement on the site and encourages people to continue creating and playing on the platform. 

But of course, nothing is free. How could it be? AI is expensive. Every choice on Glimmer Fics will cost you via their freemium business model. 

Readers get "100 free turns a day", and for anyone used to playing free mobile based visual novels, this language will sound familiar. What will also sound familiar, is that you can buy more turns. 

Screenshot taken from the shop section on the website (Link).

Muldoon argues that businesses and platforms aim to keep you hooked on their apps through intentional design and algorithmic choices. The buzzing high of notifications and engagement, the intimacy and vulnerability of talking to the virtual version of your favourite character, and the immediate ability to read and create a story in dopamine-triggering ways; these are all done intentionally, with the purpose of pulling you in and keeping you there.

Maybe 100 free turns sounds like a lot if you’re looking to just play one game of getting Dr Ryland Grace from Project Hail Mary to talk dirty to you, and you aren't worried about running out; but that's what will get you in the door. Running an AI is expensive work. Larger AI companies like Anthrophic, Cursor, and Copilot all had to review their pricing structures since it is quite unsustainable. Glimmer Fics already raised their prices in November last year, so what’s to stop them from raising the price again? What's to stop them from decreasing the number of daily free turns again, or getting rid of free turns all together?

The number one rule of fanfiction is "don't monetize fanfiction", and guess what Glimmer Fics is doing? Monetizing fanfiction. It seems obvious that as a reader, you would have to pay "turns" to read more. But on glimmerfics dot com, creators also have to use turns, once they run out of "testing turns". Regardless of what they're being called, turns are AI usage tokens with an added service fee. On Glimmer Fics, you get to pay to both write AND read.

Is it legal to monetize fanfiction in this way? We don't know. It sure doesn't feel good, though. 

As of writing this, AO3 has over 3,600 works with the tag ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ where you can read and support these interactive fanworks creators legally and for free. Those numbers don’t even include the Reader-Interactive and Interactive work tags.

Fandom and fanspaces are one of the last few remaining places on the internet (and well, the world really) where you can exist without the looming threat of payment, cost, and exploitation. But that free existence isn't without effort. Again and again, opportunists will see groups of people gathering and wonder how they can be exploited and profited off of. The threat to fandom and fan spaces still exists, and it's only thanks to people fighting back against it that we have places like AO3 at all.

Fandom is a space we can share with each other for free, because we can and we love to. To monetize it is to take advantage of the community. To use AI to interact with it can be seen as a slap in the face.

There is a real problem lying in the underbelly of fandom that drives people to use AI for their fanworks. If you are part of fandom and do not like Generative AI in those spaces, ask yourself, when was the last time you commented on an incomplete work on AO3? Did you remember to leave a kudos on the last work you read? Are you pressuring creators to update quickly? How are you supporting fancreators? 

If you are someone who uses AI to create in fandom spaces, ask yourself, are you creating fanworks because you love creating fanworks, or because you love the idea of creating fanworks?  

Some people have suggested drastic measures like suggesting removing Kudos system entirely as a response to the rise of AI works on AO3 and clout chasing in fandom spaces, but to do that is shortsighted and misunderstands both the AI fanworks issue and the point of fandom. 

Fandom is a community–and like all community building efforts, it takes time and care from all members. You cannot claim to be part of a village if you yourself are unwilling to be a villager.

So the next time you want to enjoy reading interactive fanfiction, what will you do? 

Read a story written by an AI

Support a story written by a human fanfiction author