I’m not a fan of ai, but I can accept that if someone chooses to use ai for their fics or their art, that is their choice. not something I agree with. but still not my business, and I will never condone harassment.
if anything, I think it’s better if these people feel comfortable enough to tag their stuff as ai, so that other people can avoid their works if they’re not comfortable with ai-generated contents.
that said, I think ai writers will stop tagging their stuff as ai entirely if people shame or harass them for it.
so now their stuff is still ai, just untagged, meaning there’s no way for others to know if it’s ai.
keep in mind that speculation, accusations and witch hunt harm genuine artists and writers as much as ai does, if not more.
so if you go to the “ai-generated” tag on ao3 just to harass people for using ai, just know that you’re not actually fighting against ai — you’re just being a bully and you’re also making people more wary of properly tagging their ai-generated works as such. so you’re just making sure they no longer tag their ai-generated stuff as ai. also you can be reported for harassment, and ao3 will not take your side. (whether or not you like it, ai-generated works are allowed on ao3, whereas harassment is not.)
the “ai-generated” tag on ao3 is there so people can either find or avoid works with ai (but in order for it to work, ai users must feel comfortable enough to be honest and tag their works properly, that won’t happen if people keep shaming and harassing them for it — the only thing harassment will do is make sure ai stuff go untagged, harassment doesn’t stop people from using ai).
the “ai-generated” tag is not there so that you can freely harass people with no consequences.
Also trying to guess if a work is AI generated based on arbitrary criteria like the Em dash or whatever, is 1) objectively inefficient because AI mimics human writing, so human writing will contain all those things too and 2) a witch hunt and we shouldnt condone witch hunts on principle. You're hurting those human writers you're trying to protect. Doesn't that ring bells...
So yes. AI generated works is allowed on Ao3, because people will use AI whether you like it or not.
You don't go harassing people because they have written a [insert here your worst ick] fic, you don't go harassing them for tagging a fic AI. Remember the old saying "Don't like? Don't read"
I personally won't use AI, I won't read AI generated fic,and I'd rather have a tag so I can filter them out.
Yes. This.
Tangential, yet related example: I spend a lot of time (too much, let's be real) on Pinterest. I click through to a LOT of sites from pins.
And every time I get part way through what I thought would be a nice blog post/article on craft room organisation or a new recipe or X other topic, and I realise that the images/text are AI generated, I feel betrayed. Every single time. I want to know what *actual people* have done to solve problems similar to my own. A gen-AI image can't show me that. It's gotten so bad that I installed a blocker extension in my browser so I can block entire whoops!AI websites from my presence.
Out of the dozens of web pages I've landed on in the last few months, ONE has had a disclaimer at the top saying that the images were AI generated. It's the only one I didn't block. Because *they were honest about their content*. I even read about a third of the post before deciding that no, this wasn't what I was looking for after all.
They told me what to expect up front, so I didn't feel tricked. That's really all it took. That's the point of tagging things.
