Dearest Ships

cottagecore au where nobody dies, and no one was crying (for sure)!

Wei Wuxian: How so?

To be clear, using AI to churn out a piece of fiction is not writing.

Using a bot (possibly one that was trained using a scrape of Ao3, that is to say, the theft of work from every writer who has posted their work on Ao3) is NOT WRITING.

It is theft. It isn’t creation. It’s a regurgitation of the consumed collective work and effort and heart and time of every writer who has shared their work on Ao3.

‘I’m not a good writer’ is no excuse.

Want to be a writer? Put in the time everyone else does to practice.

Don’t feel confident in your work? Open yourself up to the same vulnerability and risk that the rest of us do.

You don’t get to use a fucking bot to vomit out an approximation of a story and pretend you’ve got skin in the game.

The sad thing? This bot-assembled fic wasn’t bad. It was bland, but it had internal logic, some passing context to character and canon. It wasn’t like those early AI art pieces that had surreal compositions and extra fingers. It wasn’t immediately obvious it was made by a bot.

In this instance the person who posted it admitted they had used a bot. Which, actually, I have some respect for. But it probably isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.

I think part of the issue here is that people who do this think of fic as an end product. As a thing to be consumed. As content.

That's not fanfic.

Fic, in its essence, is the act of creation, of transformation. It is critically analyzing characters, exploring ideas, relationships, societal values, the dynamics of love and sexuality... the list goes on. Fic is a process that encapsulates all of this, the effort to make something that means something. That says something about what it means to be human (yes, kinky smut included). That takes vulnerability and guts and love to put out into the world.

If you think of fic as content that is there to be consumed, then yeah, it makes sense to find a quick and easy way to produce it. If the point for you is getting attention (kudos, reblogs, etc) with little to no work, using AI is tempting. But that's a capitalistic mindset that entirely negates what fanfic is.

To clarify for anyone confused:

I made my original post because this is the first time I saw it happening, despite the fact we all knew this was coming as soon as midjourney landed in the art scene and we heard about the ao3 scrape.

While my writing is my own, and I’m secure and proud of it, I’m not under any self-congratulatory illusion that I was that good when I started. Many of the fics I’ve read by first-time writers are similar to what this bot produced, and those writers still deserve basic respect and civility.

Anyone working under the delusion that ai tech won’t get better at its manipulation of the data is sadly mistaken. If you haven’t been following the ai progress on visual art, you might have missed that you can now request pieces to be produced in the specific style of an established artist. And the bots can do that now! They can make visual pieces almost indistinguishable from the original artist’s style—no matter how unique, or weird, that original artist’s style is.

My post wasn’t about me, or my writing. It was about the encroachment of ai and the accompanying cultural devaluation of human artistic expression outside of the work-based capitalist model.

It was about the impact of wholesale thefts of a community’s collective work.

It was about the meaning and importance of people’s generosity in sharing their genuine creations.

I am interested in reflections on the human condition from other human beings. I am not interested in the guided narrative of a theft powered sophisticated averaging machine.

My writing was shit when I first started. Hell, it's even still questionable, but I grow with each piece and I'm happy with that.

AI is like a slap in the face.

If you want quick satisfaction and validation you're picking the wrong thing and spitting in the face of the fandom and every fucking person who puts in hours of work to make other people happy.

He’s clingy, teasing, praises them often, generally thinks the world of them and constantly says as much, always keeps their comfort in mind, and whines to them constantly about things that don’t really bother him because he knows they will indulge him.

-And yet they somehow fail to notice, even while including all these things into their relationship in their story, how Wei Wuxian fails to demonstrate any of these same actions with Jiang Cheng in the novel.

I wouldn’t say Wei Wuxian doesn’t care about Jiang Cheng at all but how he treats Jiang Cheng can really not be compared to the way he treats Jiang Yanli or Lan Wangji.

That play whining he does with Jiang Yanli and Lan Wangji? He does that because he trusts them to indulge him and receive the comfort and affection he’s asking for. Wei Wuxian complains to Jiang Cheng plenty but I can’t recall a single moment in which Wei Wuxian went to Jiang Cheng for comfort, support, or displayed any kind of vulnerability to him on purpose.

There’s isn’t even really any friendly bickering or teasing between them in the novel. There’s Jiang Cheng criticizing Wei Wuxian and complaining and Wei Wuxian waving off his comments.

Even Wei Wuxian’s biggest show of care to Jiang Cheng, giving up his golden core, feels to me like it never would have happened if Wei Wuxian hadn’t been raised to feel indebted to the Jiang’s and like it was his responsibility to keep the sect going.

Okay hear me out. What if during the drunkji scene with the chickens, LWJ gets away from wwx and runs into Wen Ning. WN is like 'oh umm idk what is going on' and tries to prompt LWJ to follow him to go find WWX. Only for drunkji to start crying because WWX isn't understanding his courting gifts.

Being the good little bean his is, WN sits and listen to LWJ very seriously. Slowly coming to realize that there has been some very big misunderstandings between the two that requires an intervention. (They're not dumb and there are many reasons for their misunderstandings!!!!!!)

So WN starts to take LWJ back to the inn. They wind WWX along the way( he was very worried!). WN drags WWX aside and gives it to him straight. There isn't enough time to do anything about that because well temple problems.

/ nsfw comments/

Procreate’s timelapse was 15 minutes, so I sped it up by 2.5x (and for twitter I will need to do a 6x speed up? crazy stuff)

What if he wasn’t.

What if he lived and returned to the burial mounds. And the seize never happened. The details on how we got there are hand wavy at best right now.

But what if it was just that the Lans decided it was in their best interest to tell Wangji he was gone so he’d stop getting involved with him-