#sudowrites

Because this is very new news, and I’ve not seen a full explanation for the repercussions of this--nor a formal response from Ao3--I’m not making permanent decisions about how to handle this yet. (It may be that locking works does nothing, or that we simply can’t avoid this at all; it may also be that Ao3 can prevent it.) I certainly won’t be deleting works.

However. As a precaution, I will be locking my works to Ao3 users only for now. Once more news comes out and we have a better understanding of what’s happening, I’ll reassess and decide whether to keep them that way. This might be permanent; it might not.

Many of my readers are guests, and I sincerely appreciate every one of you. I’m deeply unhappy about doing this. That said, I seriously value my privacy, and I would prefer to protect my work where possible.

As of 13 December 2022, we have a response from AO3 on the Ai Scraping and Mining from this reddit post.

[ID: The headline of a reddit post by user kafetheresu that reads “Update: Ao3′s response to Sudowrites/AI scraping issue”. It is marked as a long post. End ID.]

This person, kafetheresu, reached out to the OTW, and on 2 December 2022 they received their first response. The email from them basically said that they would look into it and try to resolve the issues.

On 12 December 2022, kafetheresu received a second response. It was what many of us really expected out of this: As we, fanfic writers, post things online, we always run this risk of having our works scraped and copied. Users are always welcome to restrict their works -- this this post for more information -- but at the moment, that is all we can do.

The OTW cannot take legal action on our behalf, as many of us do not hold any legal rights to any of our stories. However, if you do post original fiction on AO3, they may be able to assist you. Data scraping and mining is, sadly, still legal in the USA. This does not mean things cannot change. Laws can always be made or altered.

What do we need to do in the future? Well, for right now, you can leave your works as restricted to AO3 users only. The OTW is currently working on the technical end of things to better secure the site from Sudowrites. It’s going to take some time before we get anymore updates, because everyone working on this are volunteers. They also cannot fully block bots, as it would prevent Google from being able to search anything from the site.

This link has been going around: a Redditor and their friends "suspected that Sudowrites as well as other AI-Writing Assistants using GPT-3 might be scraping using AO3 as a 'learning dataset' as it is one of the largest and most accessible text archives."

So I've seen people joking around about writing the dirtiest a/b/o fic they can because then SudoWrites will "learn" to write that.

Except: a) SudoWrites already did that (see link above) and b) all that will do is make SudoWrites better at writing porn. It will only make SudoWrites more convincing as a writer and as an intelligence.

But. What if we write stories ALL IN CAPS? With weird grammar? Write from the POV of the Hulk! Or Cookie Monster! Or Doctor Doom! (@wotwotleigh-prime and I are actually doing this right now.)

What if we write stories backwards? Not just structured backwards, but with every sentence or word in reverse chronological order?

What if we write stories disemvowelled?

I get it, you don't want a bunch of trollfic clogging up your tags, but if you tag it "sudowrites", people can easily exclude that tag from searches.