Originally human-created fic please

[schneefink]

I've stumbled across "this fic was written by Chat GPT" on AO3 for the first time and I hate that this is apparently a thing now. I also found a post with replies on Tumblr that articulated some of the reasons for that. It feels a bit like, hm, regurgitated writing mush: no thought behind it, no ideas. I think Chat GPT could be useful as a tool for writing sometimes, for prompt generation or brainstorming or something like that, but I don't want to read stories written by an AI. I know that probably at some point soon an AI will be able to read a story that I can't say for sure is written by a real person or not but that's not the point. I want fandom and the fanworks in it to be in conversation with other fans, not translated through a machine copying from other writing.

I also think that out society is woefully underprepared for the current challenges posed by the use of AI but that's entire topics on top of that.

Comments

[yhlee]

Hah, crossed threads. Yeah. I mean...some people seem to enjoy doing this for whatever reasons of their own...a lot of people (such as yourself) clearly disapprove. At this point my prediction is that it's just going to keep happening because disapproval isn't going to stop a lot of people in the former category, and possibly become increasingly accepted as (probably) younger people acclimate to it as the state of affairs.

I've been writing dystopian science fiction professionally for the past 20 years, so I'm sort of at the jaded "this is just another Tuesday in the history of humankind." :/

[schneefink]

I think you're right, there's not really any way to stop it, it's almost certainly going to keep happening. Chances are that it'll even become more common, though as they become more common the backlash and social disincentives could become larger as well, and things with ChatGPT and AI in general develop so rapidly atm that it's hard to make any predictions.

On a larger scale, among the many dangers of AIs like that it's not among the most important issues by far; sooner or later I'm sure there'll be a bigger discussion about AI-written fiction in general, not fanfic in particular.
So realistically telling people to properly label it so it can be avoided is probably the best way to go. I still don't like it and don't think it should be there >.

[yhlee]

Yeah, it could be really interesting (in the "may you live in interesting times" curse sense) to see how this develops. And, I mean, I'm not unaffected; on the contrary. AI-written fiction (or nonfiction - also big business in traditional publishing) is definitely going to become a thing and it's already being discussed among writers I know in both indie and trad pub; I'm a full-time professional writer making a very good living at this. At some point, for me, probably within the next couple years, it's going to be "adapt or die," because not liking it won't make it go away, so that's what's left.

I do think one of the potential interesting silver lining applications is in accessibility - imagine, as an extreme case, someone who is paralyzed such that they can type with an assistive device, but they are much much much slower than someone who is not in that situation. (I'm thinking of this real-world example). If that (very hypothetical) person wants to save time by typing prompts instead of full fics, and then posting the best fic from their favorite prompt, I'm not sure I would have the heart to say "No, you shouldn't."

[schneefink]

I can see how it's scary for writers! Probably for technical writers even more so than fiction writers. Cursed-interesting indeed.

Accessibility is a good point, but I think that's more relevant for things like form letters, as a kind of very advanced autocorrect, not for fiction. In a case like that example I still wouldn't consider it the same as a non-AI written story.

[yhlee]

Huh, I'm not so sure about that! The thing is that this type of "AI" (neural network) has no internal semantic model (knowledge of how the world works). It's all probability-weighting etc. And for technical writing, understanding and clearly, CORRECTLY conveying the content are really important! (Source: my sister is a senior technical writer at Google.)

Whereas for fiction, it's probably genre-dependent...I mean, there are genres like crackfic or niche weird kink smut or wacky comedy where continuity or good characterization or deathless prose simply do not matter to the target audience, so the weaknesses of the AI-generated text simply wouldn't matter. But yeah. It's...gonna be interesting times.