#otf

So at work I’ve been forced to learn about “AI Agentic Workflows”. But being an AO3 author, I couldn’t help but think of how this technology affects authors on AO3 (and honestly on other social media platforms too).

What I learned was this: Agentic AI workflow software makes it extremely easy to automate, and bulk-post, HIGHLY-STORY-SPECIFIC negative comments to AO3 fics.

If you’re not familiar with what an AI Agentic Workflow is, I highly recommend informing yourself. You’ll be hearing it a LOT very soon. Basically, it’s a linked linked chain of AI prompts on one/many software platforms. Each “agent” completes a task. Then it hands off the completed task to the next AI Agent in the chain, which builds on it. Then that result is handed off to another agent, etc etc, even potentially to a final agent which analyzes what worked well and what didn’t, and changes what the other agents do.

There are a ton of repercussions here.

But let’s stay focused on AO3.

With AI Agentic workflow software, a person/group who wants to silence the voice of a community can easily scrape a tag, analyze stories by the thousands, then post thousands of highly customized, story specific negative comments, all without a human being ever seeing your words.

They could even set up AI agents watching to see if you delete your story, or delete your profile, which would be a marker of success. That success marker could be shared back to the other AI agents, and the whole workflow could be changed via automation to use that more effective approach.

I’m sure the OTF is working on ways of stopping this. I’m sure most social media companies are too.

But as usual the tools to create havoc are ahead of the ones to prevent havoc.

Anyway.

TL;DR: If you get a highly-story-specific negative AO3 comment — it does NOT MEAN it was written by a HUMAN! You were probably just story 20,031 in a scraped database of 50,000 stories, all of which were being targeted because they belong to a group/topic/tag that some shitty group or agency wanted to silence because of their horrible political or social.

If you follow me, you know my "thing" this year is making fake posters for movies I watched based on real posters for other movies. Sometimes it's hard to find a poster that's easy enough to parody by distinctive enough that someone might recognize the reference.

A few months ago I was looking for a poster I could mimic for Splitsville. I really like this poster for Black Belt Jones:

...and here's the version I made for Splitsville:

Most of the poster is just easy layout and color stuff. The hardest part is also the coolest part: the custom lettering. That font isn't available anywhere, so I ended up rebuilding the existing letters and making up missing ones. Then I had so much of the alphabet I decided to do the rest of the letters. And then the numbers. And some symbols and punctuation. And I used a plugin for Illustrator to convert it to an actual, usable font that you can download here. Totally free, no cash or credit required. I'm not a font designer so it's a little goofy, but I think it looks pretty darn decent. if I add to the font I'll update the link.

The Algebra font is a slab serif typeface designed by Susana Carvalho and Kai Bernau for the US edition of Esquire magazine.

https://www.fontfreedownloads.com/en/algebra.font-free-download