Talk:AO3 & AI Generated Content

Twitter's Hashtag about the subject

Circulating on Twitter I saw some comments on this subject, I don't know how to add the page. If anyone knows what to do. generalfrings tweet and JonamArt tweet -- Ellakbhesse (talk) 20:02, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

Hello, Ellakbhesse. The first tweet could go in the "fan response" section of End OTW Racism, the second one fits here, maybe under a "main criticisms" heading. I'll flag the page as a stub and hopefully someone will pick it up or I'll come back to it later.

Obrigado. Seanide (talk) 04:20, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

I found another tweet where there is proof that AI steals from fanfics kaludiasays retweet -- Ellakbhesse (talk) 21:42, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Hello again! Omegaverse is an actual literary genre, meaning there's books that were probably scraped for the AIs to learn from, so I don't think this is proof of the scraping of fanfiction archives for AI training purposes. Seanide (talk) 22:23, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Page name

Didn't know if it would be appropriate to name the page "AO3, AI and scraping meltdown", but I can't come up with anything else tbh. Seanide (talk) 18:42, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I would rename this to AO3 & AI Generated Content. There are multiple incidents and aspects involved: November 30, ChatGPT was launched. December 1, someone posted on reddit stoking fears that AO3 fanfic had been scraped and used in AI models. Everyone started archive-locking their fic [1]. On December 2 AO3 coders opened a ticket to block Common Crawl from scraping the archive; the change went live December 23 and was reported in their January 2023 release notes. April Reddit discussion on AI fic already being posted to the archive. Then in May the OTW Signal post quoted Betsy speaking approvingly of AI-generated fanfic, while many fans wanted it banned from the archive. Since then there have been parallel criticisms/discussions in response to the Signal post and to OTW's followup statement[2]: 1. whether AO3 fanworks are still subject to being scraped and used in AI models 2. whether AI-generated fanfic should be allowed on AO3.--aethel (talk) 22:42, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Hey there! Thanks for the input! That's a great timeline of the events that led to the explosion, and a much better name for the page! Including this info would need rearranging of the current page, probs starting from the intro, and I don't even know from where I'd start so I'll leave it to the experienced editors~ thank you again! Seanide (talk) 02:40, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

OK, I renamed it and threw up a timeline. AI and Data Scraping on AO3 might also work as a page name.--aethel (talk) 04:59, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

more coding updates

Since this page is focused on a particular controversy, I'm not sure where to put these, but it looks like AO3 has continued to update its robot.txt file in August to prevent scraping/unwanted interaction from more AI-related bots: GPTBot, ChatGPT-User.--aethel (talk) 17:31, 5 September 2023 (UTC)