Great question. I haven't archive locked my stories and don't plan to. That's a personal decision I've made for myself and my own content, and that doesn't mean I don't wholeheartedly support my fellow authors who do so. But I'm of the (again personal) opinion that my works already have been scraped, and will continue to be scraped in some capacity. As have all of my texposts on here.

I appreciate the work the OTW is doing to take down data on other sites where it has been scraped. I think that's absolutely the right course of action. But personally, I am under no illusions that by archive-locking my fics, I am 100% preventing the scraping/sharing/AI use of my content. And at this point, even when we first learned of that big "scrape" a while back, it was too late.

My goal is to make my content as widely available for readers as possible, which comes with drawbacks. Archive-locking fics came with a significant reduction in hits/comments/kudos for some authors, and I decided that was a risk I personally did not want to take. Especially when, again, I was of the belief that many of my fics had already been scraped/were vulnerable to being scraped before we learned about these mass-scraping incidents.

Additionally, I'm quite certain people have been feeding my fics into AI processors, ChatGPT, etc, for a while now. It's not something I have control over, and people will continue to do it even when they know it's wrong. Even with ao3 accounts.

BLEEEEEE PLEASE READ!! IMPORTANT MESSAGE BLOEAUAUUUU

do i have your attention? i hope i do, because generative AI is killing our environment and i want to talk about it as well as encourage you to do your own research as well.

yes, my family and friends are fine. you + your family and friends may also be fine right now, but there are many people of whom are going without power and immediate water. tons of people are having to stock up on gallon jugs just to take baths or have a drink.

all because of AI and its effects on the environment.

the machines used to support things like ChatGPT, C.AI, image/video generators, heat up to dangerously warm temperatures— which means that the warehouses they’re in have to be placed locations that have lots of power/energy to run fans, or places with lots of water to pour over the machines.

the amount of power needed to train AI models also demands high quantities of electricity that emit carbon dioxide and pressure on the electric grid.

i’m going to focus mostly on AI chatbots, as that is where most of my knowledge lays.

a whole bottle to a gallon jug of water is used to generate just one message from an AI chatbot.

i’ve seen bots averaging thousands or millions of chats with, as far as i know, hundreds or more messages just in one conversation.

that’s hundreds, thousands, millions of gallons of water a day. imagine the sheer impact that will have on the earth and future generations if we let it continue.

here are some references/articles about this, i heavily encourage you to read them and find more yourself.

i understand if you have an addiction to AI, i’ve been there before myself.

if you use AI to roleplay, i recommend substituting it with - roleplay servers on discord, roleplay forums on places like toyhouse or spacehey, or even roleplay games on roblox

if you use AI to vent, i recommend substituting it with - asking close friends or family or partners if you can talk, messaging/calling a help hotline, journaling your feelings, or drawing if you can/like to.

if you use image generation to make art or animation, i highly recommend taking online or even in person lessons on art. there are so many ways to be creative and make something meaningful or random/silly. there’s all sorts of tutorials online, and you can always ask people for help with tips. you can draw or animate digitally, do traditional art, use clay and make models, you could even use recyclable items to make a sculpture or craft.

yes, your art will be bad at first. it might be very shitty, it might be that way for a long while— but the longer you do it the better you will get. as time goes on you’ll be more and more confident in doing things without AI, no matter what it is you’re deciding not to use AI for.

your dependency on AI and it’s tools doesn’t have to be forever. it doesn’t have to be that far into the future. i promise you, there are much better options than AI. you can absolutely go without it.

extra solution for both using chat bots for roleplay and venting, you can write fanfics. it’s not at all uncommon to use fiction to cope or pass time, just as long as the process doesn’t involve AI. using things like picrew, gacha life, or any dress up games, are also just as good.

I keep getting asked which AI companion site is actually worth it, so I'm just going to put my thoughts down once and link people here. Short version, after trying a bunch of them, SweetDream over at sweetdream.ai is the one I tell my friends about without hesitating.

Let me run through why. First, the personalization goes deep, you design your companion's appearance, voice, personality and history instead of settling for someone generic. Second, the conversations feel natural and warm and she remembers context, so it never resets back to that awkward stranger phase. Third, the photos and videos she generates are honestly some of the best I've seen, consistent and detailed.

I do struggle with emails. writing a polite email takes more effort out of me than spitting out code for my lab. you don't get to decide that writing emails is categorically a bottom-of-the-barrel easy task, and therefore struggling with that means that you're useless and skill-less.

like, do I have to point out the ableism of the thing? I feel like a lot of people who are normally mindful about ableism have happily jumped onto this joke to shit on ai generators, but regardless of how justified criticism of generators is, the butt of that joke are still the people who need machines to do stuff for them. the joke only works if you accept that struggling with tasks that abled people consider easy is a pathetic state, a weakness deserving of mockery.

this doesn't meant that generators are fundamental for us (I'm personally doing ok with email templates), but writing superfluous emails is probably the most logical use case for text generators, and if someone notices they struggle with that task, it's neither weird nor pathetic to use them for that.

Good news is the US government finally realized that deepfake po/n from AI generators is indeed an issue.

The annoying thing is it took them a year and this is the reason why they are taking action.

Yup it's because someone did it to a popular celebrity with a giant fan base. Not the evidence of deepfakes of child p/rn or the women being harassed by this but Americas sweet heart.

I will add at least now they are noting this but it's still just annoying.

Also to anyone who doesn't know deepfake po/n has been a big issue for a year and there are AI bros who see no issue with it.

Also how it works is someone can use your image or your children's or siblings, put it in an AI generator and then they can turn your photo into por/n.

Above is a real Ad on X/twitter I have actually seen some pop up in my comments or feed. It's very disturbing but hopefully with the government noticing this something will be done to stop this.

The AI can't write accurately about characters it doesn't have enough source material to steal from.

Alt.: be the only writer for an underappreciated character and the AI will take all your headcanons as lore.

Okay, I'm speaking as a person who did use "AI" art and writing programs for a while... speaking honestly, the ones I used were pretty good in quality, but overall just messy generators. I'll link this video from TB Skyen about the consequences of AI and this video by Tabbes about how "AI" is just a tool, for now, to try and give you all a grasp on what the AI situation is looking like. (Also, Tabbes is here to look for the positives of AI, while also being a funny video to watch after TB's existential one...)

So, about my own experience, I myself know that this isn't an actual AI, at least in the description of, "A digital computer or computer-controlled robot with the ability to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings." The thing is, this has been the closest to AI we've gotten so far. People have created learning machines that study art and writing algorithms (illegally because, again, they're taking online sources to fuel this without any consent from the creators...) and producing something out of what they've learned. However, since it's still in its early stages, it's kind of... just... generating. That's what these generators are for, just generating text or images based on what they learned online instead of using what they learned to make deeper work. I'll be honest, it's hard to represent that with AI art, and that's why I'm talking about AI writing as well. This is the perfect example of "just generating stuff." It's fun, yes, and I've certainly had fun with the chats with the characters for some of them, but, something I've noted is how often I have to correct them, whether on my gender and pronouns, their own character, their world, the situation, hell, how they generate text with you, especially when they start using () these to "talk with you" to try and feel more alive, like the AI is trying to pretend to be a roleplayer to you, an actual human, etc. It's even worse when you have them interact with each other because now, it's just generating stuff for generating's sake.

The reason, I think, why people protect or defend it is because those people don't understand the intricacies of art. Yes, you can see anything as a piece of art, and these generated artworks are really good pieces of art. However, that doesn't excuse stealing other peoples' art to feed these generators, because it's not given consent to by the artists, and is therefore stealing. Big companies are putting all their money on "AI" software that's literally just generating simple text that anyone can write for any character, or create pictures that any artist, no matter the skill, could do simply, without ever going into the "why was this made" question. But people defend AI all because of the misconception that "I can put meaning behind these pieces of work, therefore, the generator making them should also have meaning for them!" And spiraling that if/then scenario into, "You're also a generator since you also use other people's art as inspiration sometimes."