Episode 201: Artificial Fandom Intelligence 2: Rise of the Grifters
Following closely on the heels of last December’s “Artificial Fandom Intelligence” episode, Elizabeth and Flourish bring you the extremely depressing sequel, “Artificial Fandom Intelligence 2: Rise of the Grifters.” Spurred by recent comments from a Silicon Valley VC about the potential “market” for AI-fueled chatbots amongst fanfiction fans, they take a deep dive into the state of fandom and AI in recent months. Spoiler: it’s bleak. They also read to a trio of letters responding to the “Reflecting Reality?” episode, on placelessness in fic, and the centering of U.S. experiences in stories written by and for people in other parts of the world.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:57] That was Episode 199: “Reflecting Reality?”
[00:06:17] Colleen Hoover is, in fact, 43; Ice Spice is 23. Also now that Elizabeth has googled Ice Spice, she realizes Flourish thinks all curly haired people look the same. (TOTALLY DIFFERENT CURL TEXTURE, FLOURISH.)
[00:06:58] Laura Miller on Colleen Hoover’s work: “The Unlikely Author Who’s Absolutely Dominating the Bestseller List”
[00:09:26] Classic Pacific Northwest!!!
[00:20:08] Wow, has Anne Carson ever thought about letting joy into her life??
[00:22:16]
[00:36:26] Our interstitial music throughout is “Under suspicion” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:38:00] The “Fake Relationships” special episode is the NINTH in our “Tropefest” series (click through for a full list). You get access to all of these and 21 other special episodes if you pledge $3 a month or more!
[00:41:42] If you actually want to read the original thread, godspeed. Elizabeth’s tweets (and the many great replies) start here.
[00:46:06] Steve was the author of the letter that prompted our first foray into fandom + AI topics last December, “Artificial Fandom Intelligence.”
[00:47:20] That’s “The Fanfic Sex Trope That Caught a Plundering AI Red-Handed” by Rose Eveleth in WIRED.
[00:47:33] Sudowrite’s tool is called Story Engine, and here’s a walkthrough if you’re curious what “AI novel-writing software” looks like:
The Verge’s Adi Robertson tried it out and wrote about her experiences.
[00:52:29] The official OTW statement on AI and the AO3, and if you’ve only heard about this second-hand on social media, we recommend actually reading it in full.
[00:56:17] The End OTW Racism campaign—another thing we’d recommend checking out directly if you’ve only heard about it second-hand (because we saw A LOT of misinformation about their intent and goals).
[00:59:07] Reporting on the AO3 AI comment spam.
[00:59:50] “Professor Flunks All His Students After ChatGPT Falsely Claims It Wrote Their Papers”
[01:03:23] That’s “Custom AI chatbots are quietly becoming the next big thing in fandom” by Allegra Rosenberg at The Verge.
[01:04:40] What happens if you interact with a character and they’re not real, but you’re emotionally connected to them?” As our transcriptionist, Rachel, noted, “You end up in holo therapy with Vic Fontaine”:
[01:05:10]
[01:06:00] What Joe Russo specifically said was:
So potentially, what you could do with it is obviously use it to engineer storytelling and change storytelling. So you have a constantly evolving story, either in a game or in a movie, or a TV show. You could walk into your house and save the AI on your streaming platform. “Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe's photoreal avatar. I want it to be a rom-com because I've had a rough day,” and it renders a very competent story with dialogue that mimics your voice. It mimics your voice, and suddenly now you have a rom-com starring you that's 90 minutes long. So you can curate your story specifically to you.
[01:08:24] Knot In My Name
[01:18:07] A few of Flourish’s AI art examples:
Articulations by Allison Parrish
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeeeth.
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish.
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining! The podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #201, “Artificial Fandom Intelligence 2: Rise of The Grifters.”
FK: [laughs] OK.
ELM: Yeahhh.
FK: I think that that makes it clear what the topic is going to be, but before we get into that, we have some letters about a previous episode.
ELM: Right. So, two episodes ago, we talked about a bunch of letters that were about the different ways that…well, they were about a bunch of different things, you know? It was all about fanfiction, and it was about the reflections of the real world within fanfiction, and the ways that fanfiction deeply does not resemble the real world, often.
FK: Right, and one of the central things there was about, especially like, how cultures are represented in fanfic, whether fanfic’s taking place in sort of like a placeless U.S.-ish space that doesn’t really reflect any individual spot in the United States, nor does it reflect, you know, even like, the culture that the thing it’s about is set in, that was a major theme. We received three letters about this, so…should I read the first one?
ELM: Yeah! Do it.
FK: All right. This one’s from Sofia.
“Hi, Elizabeth and Flourish!
“Long-time listener, first-time emailer! I was just listening to episode 199, ‘Reflecting Reality?’ and loved the discussion about the standard pop-culture-U.S. setting of fics, and the English-centering of global fic fandom. It made me think a lot about my fic-writing habits and how that intersects with language (for context, I’m Brazilian, and English is my third language).
“I realized I tend to write fic in canon’s original language—Portuguese if it’s a Brazilian canon, English if it’s an English-speaking canon et cetera, and the fact that I have no fluent grasp of any given language will actively prevent me from writing fic in a certain fandom (e.g., I have often wanted to write fic after watching episodes of Élite, but my written Spanish is dismal and writing it in English feels clunky to me).
“I wonder how that goes for different fans, and whether canon language and fic language overlapping is important to them, or how this internal translation process works for them, and to what extent it affects their fic reading/writing habits! (I am a professional fiction translator, and work a lot with YA, romance, SFF and ‘genre’ fiction, which means my job is literally to translate books that often have their own fic fandoms, so this whole thing is extra interesting to me on that level as well.)
“On a related note, I thought about writing style tendencies I see in the Brazilian publishing market, especially for romance, and the effect English-language fic has on it. There's a lot of talk in fandom about ‘AO3 house style,’ and all those language quirks you mentioned on the pod (orbs!)—”
ELM: Orbs.
FK: “—but things get even—” [laughs] Orbs. [ELM laughs] “—but things get even more particular when expanding into cross-cultural foreign-language fic fandom.
“In the same way there’s a growing wave of current romance and SFF novelists in the U.S. that got their start in fic writing—or are still fic writers, and you can sometimes sort of tell that by reading their books—there is a similar wave of romance novelists in Brazil that learned to write romance by reading English-language fanfic, and then intuitively translated this style into Portuguese.
“The result is both in language (e.g., literally translated English idioms, or specific sentence structure) and in plot and character (e.g., supposedly Brazilian characters with English-language names, the feeling of placelessness you both mentioned, settings that are built like generic-pop-culture-U.S. even if they’re supposedly in Brazil, cultural markers that come from English-language pop culture but also more particularly fic).
“Of course fanfic isn’t solely to blame here, and there are other factors (a publishing market dominated by translated fiction that crowds out Brazilian-written books, the dominance of English-language, in particular U.S.-centric, pop culture in general, U.S. imperialism and all it entails, et cetera). But I’ve (anecdotally) noticed these things particularly in the subsect of fic-writers-turned-professional-writers. I would be really interested to know if fans from other countries have noticed similar or related things happening in their corners of the world as well.
“I hope you're both having a great day! Sofia.”
ELM: Aww, thank you so much, Sofia. That’s so interesting.
FK: Yeah, it’s amazing to hear from a professional translator about this.
ELM: Yeah. So, I have a few thoughts about this. One is, I don’t want to immediately undercut it and say “Oh, this happens in America, too,” but I do think it does. Right? [FK laughs] Like, I think there’s another, there’s a whole set of layers… I think it was really helpful for you to articulate in fic, and maybe helpful for people who live in other countries to hear that, as Americans, we often find American-authored things to feel generic and placeless and, you know what I mean? I thought that was a really good articulation, really helpful, and obviously there’s many many more layers going on here when it’s like, in translation, and coming from fic to pro romance, and you know, this idea that it could feel like a generic U.S. setting set in Brazil, it’s like, [FK laughs] oof, God. But it also made me think about Colleen Hoover?
FK: Oh, yeah!
ELM: Have you read her?
FK: Oh yes, I have!
ELM: You have! Interesting, I did not know.
FK: Oh yeah, absolutely. Because Colleen Hoover is a best-selling novelist, and has been for a long time, and so what do people in the entertainment industry do? They look at people who are bestsellers, whether or not they have gotten the imprimatur, [laughs] of, you know?
ELM: Aha, right, right. OK, so Colleen Hoover I find very interesting, is one of the most successful novelists currently writing, but seems to kind of exist in her own… I remember she was a trivia question answer in our trivia league, and a lot of people got it wrong, and I was like, [FK laughs] “Oh, these people do not know who this person is.” It’s that kinda thing, like where the huge pop sensation totally misses a certain part of culture. You know what I mean?
FK: Oh, you mean like when I mentioned Ice Spice having the same hair as you the other day, and you were like, “Who’s Ice Spice?” [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] No. No. Colleen Hoover’s, like, our age. I’m sure Ice Spice, this person, is like 22.
FK: Yeah, that’s right. She might be younger than that. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] No, that’s, this is just, this is just me being old. [FK laughs] Right? Our contemporaries are reading Colleen Hoover. Whereas—
FK: Absolutely, and by the way, like, I can say this, her books are, I would not call them good, but I would call them gripping, [ELM laughs] in the way that sometimes you read a fic, and you’re like, “Give me more! I don’t know what this shit is, but give it to me more,” she has whatever that indefinable thing is, and that’s [laughing] definitely why she’s famous [ELM laughs] and bestselling. Like, I know why.
ELM: So, this letter made me think about last summer, Laura Miller, the critic, who I really respect when she does this, she will read a genre thing that people say is bad without reading it, and she’ll be like, “No, I’m gonna read it. I’ll read it for you.”
FK: Yeah!
ELM: “And I’m gonna take it seriously,” right? And I always respect it, because all sorts of other literary journalists will just be like, “That’s probably garbage,” and she’s like, “No, I actually sat and read them, and here’s why I think it’s not good,” right? [laughs]
FK: Yeah, well, and she also tries to take it on its own terms, right? Which I really appreciate.
ELM: [overlapping] Absolutely, absolutely.
FK: [overlapping] Like, it’s…and I feel trust that she, if she thought it succeeded on its own terms, she would say so. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, and she absolutely likes a lot of genre stuff.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So. Here’s the paragraph that it made me think of though: “The blandness of Hoover’s characters makes them easy for anyone to identify with, and the smooth, featureless quality of her prose makes her novels easy to breeze through in a day or two.” And then she goes on to say, “Hoover never, for example, wastes words in conjuring a sense of place or atmosphere. She might set a novel in Boston, or San Francisco, or Upstate New York, settings chosen seemingly at random, and with a minimum of research. There’s no such thing as local color in Hooverland. Hilariously”—and Laura Miller lives in Maine, for context—“in It Ends With Us she has two teenagers in a small Maine town discuss their desire to move to Boston, where people talk in such a funny way, saying ‘cah’ instead of ‘car’—as if Mainers don’t pronounce the word similarly, with an even heavier Yankee accent.” [FK laughs] That was just a, a detail I found particularly funny to imagine, a bunch of people in Maine going, “They say ‘cah’ down theah!” [both laugh]
FK: Can you imagine. Yeah, that is funny.
ELM: But you know, it’s interesting, the idea of the “smooth, featureless prose” extending to both characters and setting, right, because that’s something that we didn’t, we didn’t talk a ton about the characters, but I think there is an element of that that happens in a lot of fanfiction, too. But we’re talking about place right now, and I find this very interesting, that I think Colleen Hoover is based in Texas?
FK: Yeah, I think that’s right.
ELM: [overlapping] But she’s picking out random…random locations, and…they could be anywhere, right, Hooverland is this place, this like, placeless place, you know?
FK: Right, and it’s interesting because this is not a critique that you can level against everybody who’s writing prose that you might find questionable, right? And thinking about how, like, Stephenie Meyer, not from Forks, Washington, famously sets her stories there—but you know what? She may or may not have it right, but she definitely, like, found out about the town, and wrote about things in the area, you know?
ELM: [overlapping] Get some vibes, yeah…trees! [laughs]
FK: Yeah, I mean I’m not saying that she’s doing the most, like, has the most evocative prose in the universe, but you can tell that she really did try to set it there.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: It’s true, it’s not the case in Colleen Hoover. Colleen Hoover’s stuff is in an anyplace.
ELM: Right. So that’s interesting. So take that as a baseline, and this idea that this is being exported into other markets, is being translated, and you know, I’m sure Sofia is right, citing…having noticing this coming in these people who are known to be fanfiction authors, who are recognizably fanfiction authors based on their prose, going professional. But I suspect it’s coming from other parts of the professional writing world as well. So, this was a very helpful letter to kind of put it all in context for me, because I hadn’t been thinking about pro romance, or pro like, commercial fiction, when we had this conversation last time.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: But the idea that this isn’t necessarily some fandom-specific problem, you know what I mean?
FK: Absolutely, and you know, it’s making me think again how my instinct, when I said, you know, when I was reading Colleen Hoover, was to say “Oh, it’s more-ish in the way that certain fanfic is more-ish.
ELM: [a pause] Moorish?
FK: More-ish, like, I wanna read more, I gotta read more, I gotta finish it, you know?
ELM: [overlapping] I, I truly…I thought M-o-o-r-i-s-h, I was like, “Like Othello? [FK laughs] What’re we doing here?”
FK: That’s not what I’m doing, [ELM laughs] uh…
ELM: I know! [laughs]
FK: Uh…no, but I mean like, it’s interesting to me that I have said that multiple times, I’ve said that like, in work contexts talking about Colleen Hoover’s work, and trying to be like, “Yeah, that’s why this is so appealing,” but it never occurred to me—maybe this actually has to do with that, I don’t know, I’m gonna have to think about that a lot more, right?
ELM: [overlapping] That’s interesting…
FK: Is there something about the frictionless surface that is part of why it’s so easy to just, you know…
ELM: Yeah, you’re just slippin’ on down the road, you’re like, yeah, I don’t know…
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, maybe!
ELM: [overlapping] There’s no scenery here, these people are very unmemorable, but I gotta keep going, keep going, keep going. Yeah.
FK: Maybe.
ELM: It’s totally possible.
FK: I mean when I think about the things that people do talk about within Colleen Hoover stories, it’s usually like…
ELM: [in a New England accent] Cahs? Lahbstahs?
FK: [laughs] I was, [ELM laughs] I was gonna say it’s sort of the plot twists and so forth, right? Like, it’s very um…in my experience it’s very much sort of about the, you know, one of her books, there’s like a famous—I shouldn’t say too famous, but like—people really love it because it’s like, you get to the end of the book and you don’t know what’s true. And people argue about what really happened. Right?
ELM: Mmm hmmm, mmm hmmm.
FK: And yeah, that’s something that, that pleasure doesn’t require having memorable characters or a memorable place. It’s cool that she actually, I think it’s cool that she managed to pull it off, that she managed to write something that people really had that…like, are fighting back and forth about what happened in, you know? But it doesn’t have anything to do with the other stuff. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: All right, well this is not the Colleen Hoover podcast, so maybe we should move on to the next letter. [both laugh]
ELM: Yeah, but before we do, I would say, um…heeding Sofia’s suggestion, I would love to hear from people from other language groups, language backgrounds, you know, because Portuguese, too, and Brazil as a nation, obviously massive, and also these ideas about like, writing in Portuguese for Portuguese-language media, right, or Brazilian media, it makes me curious. I see in my own fandom people writing in all sorts of languages, and I assume based on how small it is in English at this point, [laughs] for only a few other people, [FK laughs] and so I always wonder about that. It’s interesting that her motivations, whether she feels like the language aligns with the source material, feel different than maybe some of the ones I’m seeing in my English-language source material fandom, where people are like, writing in French. Maybe a few French speakers really like it, you know what I mean? So I’d be curious to know, of people who write in multiple languages and who write for canons that are not in their native language, how they think about that.
FK: Yeah, me too, for sure.
ELM: OK, but our next letter is also language-related, I believe.
FK: Yeah! Sock it to me.
ELM: All right. I’m sockin’ it. So, this is from Selma. And they write:
“Hi Flourish and Elizabeth!
“First off, of course, thank you for always making such an interesting and insightful show. While most episodes make me reflect on my own experiences in one way or another, episode 199, ‘Reflecting Reality?’ was the first one that made me wanna write in about that experience.
“More specifically, your conversation about placelessness and general U.S.-ness of much (most?) fic brought up a phenomenon that’s fascinated me for a really long time—the way this behavior stretches over in modern AUs taking place in e.g., Westeros or Coruscant.”
Is that how you say that? I don’t know what that is.
FK: It’s, uh, it’s a Star Wars thing? But I…only read it in the extended universe novels, when I was a kid, and I’m not following recent…
ELM: [laughs, overlapping] OK, so…we’re picking a pronunciation.
FK: We’re pickin’ one. [laughs]
ELM: CoruSCAHNT. Coru— [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] I always said, I always said CoRUS—CorRUScant, I think?
ELM: CoRUScant?! All right. All right. All right, it’s a fake place.
FK: But I always say things wrong.
ELM: Yeah, so that’s definitely not it.
FK: CORuscant.
ELM: OK, back to the letter.
“For context, I’m Swedish, and even after twelve-ish years in English-speaking fandom I get annoyed with how these modern AUs taking place in ostensibly fictional places all have characters driving everywhere and expensive uni tuition, two for me very American things. I once got a comment on a Westeros-set modern AU accusing me of being hurtful and out-of-touch for writing a world where attending university was free, ignoring the student-debt problem of real life, when I live somewhere where that is the case (have had the same interaction with regard to free school lunches). I don’t really have a specific point to this observation, but find this phenomenon of specifically Americanizing fictional places an interesting complement to your conversation of a U.S.-setting being the norm even for non-U.S. people.
“Would love to hear your thoughts if you have any. Thanks for the pod, Selma.”
FK: Ahhh, that’s fascinating!
ELM: And wait, I’m sorry, that’s bananas that someone would have the audacity to come into your comments, Selma, and be like, “Westeros? You’re, you should—unsensitive,” like, that’s, that’s bananas. Bananas!
FK: Yeah, that is, that is wild to me. I mean, I understand, I totally understand why somebody who, you know, lives in the United States might choose to write about…like, write a world in which student debt is a big problem, because that’s a big problem in their own lives, and they’re like, writing about that.
ELM: Yep.
FK: No question, that’s, I totally get it. But it is…yeah, I mean, [laughs] not everyone lives in that world. We could not live in that world, if we made different political choices.
ELM: I mean, we are making the right political choices.
FK: Yeah, I mean, as a culture. Collectively.
ELM: As a group? As a group?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so, I’m trying to think, the one time I have done this is when I wrote—I’m just so tease-y with this, I’m like, “When I wrote that Star Wars AU that I’m never gonna post on the internet,” but when I wrote that for you, I had, [laughs] I made Jakku, implied that it was in Western New York, because it just felt like a really…a sad, forgotten place, no offense to my whole family.
FK: Sure.
ELM: But you know, so setting it just kinda, because the whole point was that it was supposed to be in my hometown, but, which is in Upstate New York, but why not just call them the names of the Star Wars things, as opposed to—
FK: Right.
ELM: Which is kind of a tease-y little joke, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So like, yeah, I guess racetracks exist in that, in my version of the Star—you know what I mean? So it’s like…but that’s not, that’s the only time I’ve ever done this. But sure, if I was writing a fictional Westeros or whatever…I don’t know what I’d do, actually. Yeah, I would probably make it reflect an American place, because that’s where I live, and American concerns, but the idea that someone else’s would need to do that when they’re clearly from somewhere else is…ethnocentric and egocentric. You know? It’s the kind of, “I don’t see my exact experience in the world reflected in a piece of fiction, so I find that offensive”? That’s bad! [laughs]
FK: Yeah, I also, I have to say that I find this weirdest. Like, I, having read and considered writing—never actually written, but considered writing—Westeros modern AU, I’ve read a lot of it, and one of the weirdest things about this to me is that often a Westeros modern AU is kind of seat in a fictional European nation of Westeros?
ELM: Oh, just like a fake nation, it’s not like…? It’s not, like, England.
FK: [overlapping] Well, or like, no, the whole world is—a lot of them is like, the whole world is, it’s Westeros like we saw it in the show, except speeded forward to modern AU, and so like, it’s sort of, kind of like a Western European country.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And the political system is not like the U.S. political system, because actually a lot of that wouldn’t make any sense. [laughs] You know? Given what the characters’ roles are and stuff.
ELM: [overlapping] Right, right, right.
FK: And so it’s just like, OK, so we’re already in a place that’s in a lot of ways not the United States. [laughs] So why is it weird?
ELM: Yeah! Right, right.
FK: You know, why don’t we just decide that this is like, like if Westeros is Western Europe… [both laugh] actually, maybe the modern AU should be set in Western Europe, right?
ELM: Right! But like, I mean, I think if you really wanted to, it could be set anywhere, and it could be based on your own, because it’s like…
FK: Oh, you could, you absolutely could, it’s just weird to me that people would find this troubling, because it’s like, have you not been reading all of the fanfic in this, where a lot of the modern AUs are not set in the United States at all? You know?
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
FK: Or like, they’re trying not to be, and maybe they’re betraying people’s, like, cultural obsessions and stuff, but they’re not…it’s not like yours, where you’re like, “Jakku is Western New York because I’m just translating it,” right? [both laugh]
ELM: Yeah, it needed to be somewhere she had to get away from, [FK laughs] to come to the other side of Upstate New York. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, don’t worry, if I were doing this, Jakku would be like, Arcata, California or something—no, not even Arcata, somewhere, Stockton. Arcata is a place you want to go to sometimes. [both laugh]
ELM: Like, I’m hopeful that my—actually, I don’t even know if I named the town that she had come to, but I hope it felt real, because it’s literally my hometown. [FK laughs] And so everything is based on something literal.
FK: Yes, having been there, I know. [laughs]
ELM: Yes, you understand now. But like, yeah. I just think that—I mean, not to go too hard on like—to me, this kinda connects back to a broader conversation we’re having around reading right now, and this idea of like… Did you follow that incredibly stupid Anne Carson discourse?
FK: You know, when you say these words, I think, I feel this wash of relief being off Twitter. Just a wash of relief. Tell me about the incredibly stupid Anne Carson discourse.
ELM: It, it, it migrated out of Twitter because people, it was mostly, people on other platforms took the opportunity to make fun of people on Twitter.
FK: Great, love it.
ELM: [overlapping] Basically it was a screenshot of a prose poem by Anne Carson, I don’t know from when, it was a sad little prose poem, kinda melancholy…
FK: Yeah, it’s Anne Carson. I have the, I know what it’s gonna be.
ELM: It was about like, going out to dinner, and just feeling kind of alienated with the people that you’re out to dinner with, whatever.
FK: Sure.
ELM: And so in the replies, people were like—and whatever, it’s beautifully written because it’s Anne Carson, she’s a beautiful poet, right, you know? And it really evoked the specific feeling that she was trying to evoke, because it’s a poem.
FK: Yeah! And that’s the point.
ELM: Not like a tweet. And all the people in the replies were like, “God, has she ever tried to be happy for once in her life,” and things like “This is immature, you’ll grow out of this by your thirties…” [laughs]
FK: To Anne Carson?!
ELM: [still laughing] And just interpreting it so literally, like it wasn’t a poem. I mean to be clear, maybe they...they didn’t know it was a poem, because it was a prose poem—
FK: [overlapping] It’s a prose poem.
ELM: —so it was one big paragraph, but it was obviously—it was, you know, clearly screenshotted or whatever from The New Yorker. And I thought it was a really good illustration of people not being able to understand that it was a work of art, and not meant to be a literal reflection of their lives. And like, part of this is a Twitter problem, you know, the famous, like, my favorite, the woman who said she liked to drink coffee in the garden with her husband every morning and talk.
FK: [overlapping] Oh yes, yeah. [laughs]
ELM: And everyone is like, “I wake up in pain, I don’t have a husband, I don’t have a garden, [laughs] you should feel ashamed, you must be a landlord, you must be a factory owner, because you have ten minutes a day to talk to—” I think she said she talked to him for hours, but whatever. But still.
FK: [overlapping] But whatever!! I don’t care! [ELM laughs] Like whatever! On a Saturday, like, sure! Shouldn’t we want people to have this?
ELM: I think they were both like small business owners or something, and so they have flexible work schedules. [laughs]
FK: Well and shouldn’t we want people to have this?! [ELM still laughing] I’m gonna, I’m gonna…yeah. No.
ELM: [overlapping] It’s just like…the Twitter response of like, “I’m mad that you have anything. I’m mad that this doesn’t align with my experience,” and this was an extra level of “I’m mad that you’re happy and I’m unhappy.”
FK: Right.
ELM: But this kind of idea, I think we see this in conversations about literature, like, endemic to all sorts of genre conversations, people saying, “My exact experience was not reflected here, so this is bad.”
FK: Right.
ELM: You know? And I have to wonder if there’s some degree of that going on, and especially…Tumblr likes to go on and on about how Americans on the internet don’t have any conception of the rest of the world, and I think there’s some truth to that, I also think that a lot of non-Americans on Tumblr don’t have a great conception of America or of other parts of the world that they’re not from. But that’s another discussion.
FK: Yeah, I think people are bad at knowing about places they’re not from. I’m bad at it, you know? [laughs]
ELM: Right, and I think that one of the problems of the internet is, you can get a surfacey sense…
FK: Yes.
ELM: …of things, and think that then you have some kind of expertise. But, I do think there are a lot of Americans in fandom, and I think that, so you could say, this isn’t my exact experience—I’m sure I’ve complained, I don’t know if I’ve done it on the podcast, but I’ve complained to you before—I’m in a ship where one character’s always written as an ultra-rich person, and I’ve seen multiple fics where he’s worried about insurance! And it’s like, you just said he was a billionaire! You know? And so it’s like, people unable—because, yeah, I’m worried about insurance, because I’m a normal American person, right?
FK: Yes.
ELM: But like…some of my fellow Americans do not worry about this, because they’re rich, and some people in other parts of the world don’t worry about it because they have better political systems and representation.
FK: Yeah. You know, honestly, I kind of wonder how much of this has always been going on, but we didn’t know about it because we didn’t have the opportunity to like, comment on a novel you were reading? Right? [laughs] Like…people’s inability to connect—right? I think, when I think about, well how would I have known? What anybody’s reaction—like, just a random person’s reaction—to something they saw, by someone writing a letter to the editor? You know?
ELM: Oh, so you’re saying that if, if the Westeros AU was a novel published in the past…
FK: People might have thought that. And just like, put it down, you know what I mean? But we never would’ve known, right?
ELM: [overlapping] Oh, 100%, 100%. Yeah, “Oh, I don’t know what this person’s talking about, this is not my experience.” Right, yeah, absolutely. And I do think there’s some element, too, of how you can put it out in the world, you can put your complaint out in the world, people can see it, and then can validate it.
FK: And that’s, and I think that’s part of the Twitter thing, right?
ELM: [overlapping] “The five of us don’t relate to this,” [laughs] you know? Yeah yeah yeah.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, and I mean like, whatever, I don’t know, there have been times where I’m having a bad day and I see someone who’s clearly having a good day and I’m like, “Fuck you,” you know? [both laugh] Because I am a human being, and not always a great person, right? And yeah, I have that feeling, but Twitter makes it really easy to respond to them, “Fuck you,” and then to have other people be like, “Yeah! Fuck that guy!” and the pile-on begins, and the first thing was not a great response, but a very human one, but [laughing] then like, the preced—you know?
ELM: [overlapping] Right, but these are—but—that’s about people’s individual, like, just tweeting about their lives, like the lady and the coffee with her husband.
FK: Right.
ELM: You know, as opposed to books, which are inherently not going to be about you, because they’re not your autobiography, you know? And so just this idea, this constant quest, especially, I have friends who are professors and they say that this has just been growing and growing in recent years, the only thing that matters to their students is relatability. Right? And it’s definitely something we’ve seen reflected in fandom over the last decade.
FK: Yeah, that’s true.
ELM: And it’s reflected in conversations in the media, about representation, and I’m not saying representation is bad or whatever, but this kind of one-to-one-ness, and this exact representation, “Oh, I would never do that, so I can’t relate to this character, so this piece of work is bad,” you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: Like, “I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in a country where my schooling was paid for.” I mean, I can imagine it, it’s not that hard for me to imagine. I’ve never experienced it, and it just seems nice! I wouldn’t get mad about it.
FK: Well, now I’m depressed.
ELM: I want that for all my fictional characters. [laughs]
FK: Me too. All right, should I read the third letter? Because now I’m just in a depression hole.
ELM: Yeah, cool, all right.
FK: Thank you, by the way, [both laugh] for that letter, Selma.
ELM: We are extremely on your side and in fact maybe more offended than you were, if you could tell from this, maybe you were offended too. [laughs]
FK: All right, all right. Third letter. This one is from Avery.
“Hello Elizabeth and Flourish,
“I wanted to write a response to your ‘[Reflecting] Reality?’ episode. One question asked whether you had seen a trend of fic getting more generic the longer the fandom runs, especially after the canon ends. Another question asked about the prevalence of U.S. or Western AUs, even in fandoms where the canon does not take place in the U.S. or Europe.
“I wanted to throw my two cents in as someone who has written and read primarily K-pop RPF in various fandoms for the past three or four years. My experience has been a journey from starting with reading and writing very generic AUs to finding, creating, and enjoying more and more deeply place-specific AUs the longer I spend in this fandom.
“I believe there are a couple reasons for this. One is that RPF fandoms don’t ‘end’ in the way TV show or movie based fandoms do; the longer I follow the real people I am fanning over, the more there is to know, because they constantly do more interviews, make more social media posts, release more projects, et cetera. I, and the whole fandom, can keep learning new ‘lore’ (aka ‘real information’) [ELM laughs] about the idol forever, which can lead to our ability to fill out a richer and fuller persona that can be translated as a character into fic. This often means that fic about very new K-pop groups is quite generic as the fandom doesn’t know very much about the idols yet; but as time goes on, the fic can get more and more specific because we just have more information to work on.
“Another more personal reason is that I am a white fan living in the U.S., and when I first started listening to K-pop music, I was pretty much completely ignorant of Korean culture and history. When I first started looking for fic, I remember primarily searching for university and office job AUs, because I remembered enjoying reading those types of stories in my previous TV show fandoms. When I wrote my first K-pop fic, it was set at a random unnamed U.S. college. There was nothing recognizably Korean about the characters aside from their names.
“However, as I spent more time in the fandom, I realized there was an active ongoing conversation about place and representation in K-pop fic fandom. There were many Korean diaspora fans who loved seeing South Korean idols getting a lot of love and attention; but when they went on to AO3 they were frustrated to see so many whitewashed stories, like the one I first wrote, that completely ignored Korean culture. Once I had been exposed to this mindset, I also started to notice how hollow and flat much of the K-pop fic set in the U.S. felt. My interest in the university and random job AUs I had initially searched for waned. I started trying to find fics set in South Korea; whether they were ‘idol verse’ stories where the characters still had their IRL idol jobs, or AUs.
“This didn’t limit what I found to read, on the contrary, it opened up a whole new way to search for stories and I found SO many good ones. These stories made me want to stretch myself as a writer, and challenge myself to write fics set in Seoul, a city I have yet to visit. This commitment has sent me down many a research rabbit hole, watching YouTube guides to get the vibes of different neighborhoods, searching real estate rental sites to get an idea of the average rent and floor plan of Seoul apartments, scrolling through Google street view to see if one area has a lot of trees, or a lot of cafes, or a good train stop, and so on.
“I know that I, as a white author, cannot write a story about what it means to Be Korean. But I can write a story about what it’s like to be an idiot with a crush, and have my idiot mope while walking through Jamwon Park along the Han River in November, and describe how the muhly grass is in full bloom, making the roped off sections of the Grass Garden look like they are full of pink cotton candy flowers, and how tourists keep ignoring the fences to step into the flower beds to take pictures, and how his irritation at this behavior cuts though my character’s brooding, and he half wants to scold the tourists and half wants to join them to get his own picture. Shout out to the YouTuber who uploaded a video of walking through this park in the fall so I could set a scene there.
“In my humble opinion, this kind of specific attention to place has been one of the biggest level ups in my writing practice in recent years. I can’t go so far as to say my experience is universal, or even common; but I can say there are some people trying to write more and more specific stories, both in terms of setting and theme, the longer they are in fandom.
“Best, Avery.”
ELM: That is such an interesting letter, thank you so much, Avery.
FK: Yeah, seriously. It’s delightful to hear that this has been someone’s experience, and I imagine that for some of the people who have been like, complaining and talking about this issue of whitewashing K-pop idols, it’s probably nice to hear that people are—at least one person is listening, and has learned things that way.
ELM: Yeah, I, you know, I think it’s interesting too, not just in the writing practice, but in the reading practice, right? The idea that… “Oh, I don’t really know much about this world, so I’m gonna start with a generic point of entry,” and I wonder if a lot of people do that. Because that feels accessible. “Oh, I’ve been to college! I’m just gonna get the college one, because I don’t really know this other stuff that they’re talking about, the stuff that’s specific to a nation that I haven’t visited.” I don’t know, I mean I’m just spitballing here, this is not something I’ve personally experienced.
FK: Yeah, you know, this made me think a lot about…I don’t have any experience with K-pop or something that’s set in, like, a culture that is as different to me, maybe? I don’t know. I was trying to think about, like, well what was I doing when I got into One Direction, and I feel like it’s a totally different question. It’s similar in the sense of like, not knowing much about the, you know, the characters, as it were, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Not having the same thing…and I think that actually, to some extent maybe, what I was doing was similar, which is that I was really interested—still am, mostly—interested in the fame aspects of it. Which is something that felt like, I know a little bit about that, right? Just from a person with cultural osmosis.
ELM: [overlapping] Oh, I, I don’t know. You remind me, with your One Direction, a lot of people I know in hockey fandom who also like hockey. You know what I mean, right?
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah yeah yeah, absolutely.
ELM: [overlapping] Or other sports RPF who really like the sport as well. I think that you are partly, you know, you are actually interested in the canonical…realities.
FK: [overlapping] Right, right, that’s true.
ELM: [overlapping] Whereas I feel like, especially what I hear from K-pop folks, is this huge, huge, huge AU world, right, and we had a letter a few months ago that was talking about how there’s like, people call them AO3 versions of the BTS fellows…right, you know?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, yeah. And to be fair, that exists also in One Direction fandom and I don’t mess with it. So that’s a good point.
ELM: The other thing I wanted to talk about, this was not the main thrust of the letter, but it was mentioned early on, that resonated with me: you know the part where they were talking about getting more lore, and the characterization starts generic and then, [FK laughs] you know, actually has more detail as people go along. Which is interesting to me thinking about, I think we’ve mentioned how much each Harry Potter book changed…
FK: Yeahhh.
ELM: Especially the characters that we liked, because you know, it’s not like…if you’re writing about Harry, you’re with him from the start. But learning more information about the characters as the book series goes on, and that feels similar.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But it also made me think of, so since we recorded that “Reflecting Reality?” episode, I read a few older fics in my fandom, like, from more than ten years ago, by authors who only wrote one story. Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: You know, particularly from a few authors who were the kind who’ve written in a hundred fandoms, they just do one story and then they go on to the next one, right? And I was really struck by how incredibly in-character the characters felt to me.
FK: Hmmm.
ELM: In a way that I see less of as time has passed, in later stories.
FK: Interesting.
ELM: And so I was thinking, oh, this is a person who—I mean maybe this is the effect of the fandom.
FK: Yeahhh.
ELM: You know, fanon interpretations start to supersede a really direct reading of a character from the canon, which is the opposite of what Avery is talking about, right? Like, this isn’t “more time goes on, we all get more information, we build a richer, more accurate version,” whereas this is “more time goes on, and fanon starts to take hold.” You know?
FK: Well, particularly because you don’t have a lot of new canon in your…right? It’s not like you’re getting new canon…
ELM: [overlapping] Well, it’s, yes and no, I mean there is, and a good portion of this fandom is also in the comics fandom, and that’s still happening constantly.
FK: [overlapping] OK, all right, that’s different, yeah.
ELM: And like…I mean, there were four movies in this set with these actors…I don’t acknowledge two of them, so… [laughs] You know what I mean? So yeah, it’s also like there’s not a lot of new—I mean these are also 50-year-old comics characters, they’re always kinda different versions of the same thing. So like…it’s more like, the version that the movies chose, at least in the first one, these fics felt like they were a lot closer to that, and they didn’t have time to like, water down the kind of sharp edges of Charles in particular, right? They felt like this is the character I recognize, you know?
FK: Interesting.
ELM: This is the morally complex person…you know, as opposed to this soft little sweater boy version you see in a lot of fics that came after that. So, that was interesting to me too, the kind of idea of—I mean that goes to our original letter-writer’s thing of like, do fics get more generic as a fandom gets older?
FK: It does! It does.
ELM: And maybe that’s why, that’s part of it, you’ve got this kind of softer, more palatable fanon-y version of a character, maybe that happens in other fandoms too, and then you’re just kind of in this sweet romcom space where they all are classmates in a university, or officemates in a…widget…office, you know?
FK: Yeah, I’m gonna have to think about that one more, and maybe there’ll be another episode in this, because I’m not sure that we wanna go all the way down this rabbit hole right now. But I think there’s…this is making me think a lot about Star Trek fanfic, and the ways that I’ve interacted with it and the characterizations that I’ve seen, and I’m gonna need to go away and like, [laughs] you know, really read some fanfic and take notes on it, and think about this.
ELM: This is great, I wanna hear what you learn. That’s your action item, addressed.
FK: I will do that. That’s my action item. [ELM laughs] OK. But, I think at this point we should take a quick break, because we’re a long way into this episode and we’ve not even gotten to the letter that gave us our title and our main point.
ELM: All right. Time for the grifters. [FK laughs]
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back. Before we talk [laughs] about grifters…
ELM: AI grifters.
FK: AI grifters, we should grift a little bit ourselves, in the sense of asking people for money.
ELM: Oh my God! No! That’s not grifting!
FK: Uh…well…
ELM: If we were grifting, we would make a lot more money than what we do from Patreon.
FK: That is absolutely true, OK. So the way that we make this podcast happen is through the support of listeners and readers like you, through Patreon.com/Fansplaining! On Patreon, you can support us at any level you feel comfortable, from $1/month up to a kajillion dollars a month. That’s you, Jeff Bezos. And there’s different rewards that you can get at different levels, ranging from accessing one special episode to like, a ton of special episodes, to…getting a real little enamel pin, to getting your name in the credits, to getting periodic Tiny Zines in the mail! So, go check that out. Fansplaining on Patreon.
ELM: So, we have a new special episode, it’s the latest in our “Tropefest” series, it is on fake relationships, and we really went to town, let me tell you. We talked about every variation of fake relationships that I can think of.
FK: And some that arguably are not fake relationships, but are related. [laughs]
ELM: No, well like, cousins, you know, we’re talkin’ about like, bets, woke up married, you know? All these, the varieties of, like, someone is faking this. One or the other or both.
FK: There is a, there is a lie somewhere. [laughs]
ELM: Yes. And that was a really fun conversation, so that is I believe our ninth “Tropefest” episode? We also talked about…
FK: [overlapping] Wow…
ELM: …enemies to lovers, we talked about found family, we talked about Omegaverse, um, and other topics that I can’t remember…soulmate AUs, most recently. And if you haven’t heard any of these yet, we kind of discuss them…I would say semi-critically? We talk about the things we like about these tropes and also the things we strongly dislike, so it’s a wide-ranging convo. That’s at $3/month, and you get access to all of those, so it’s like, this was Special Episode #30, so there’s 30 specials in total. Also, you know, about television shows, movies, stuff like that.
FK: Yeah, it’s a pretty good deal. [laughs]
ELM: Well, yeah, $3, so that’s what, $3, you could listen to all 30 in one month, so that would be…
FK: Don’t encourage people in this behavior.
ELM: …ten cents per episode. Yeah. We would love it if you didn’t cancel after one month, if you become a patron, but you do you.
FK: All right. If you don’t have the money or don’t want to become a patron, you can still support us by spreading the word about the podcast, especially our full transcripts! Which come out at the same time as every episode, for complete—well, I guess probably not complete, but for better accessibility. And you can also send us messages, letters, comments, like the ones that we’re talking about today! You can do that at fansplaining at gmail.com; you can put it in our ask box on Tumblr, fansplaining.tumblr.com, anon is on; you can use the form on our website, fansplaining.com; you can send us a voicemail by calling 1-401-526-FANS, we will not pick up, this will not be socially awkward, [ELM laughs] you’ll just get a voicemail and leave us a comment. Yeah! So, do those things!
ELM: All right, is that the end of the business?
FK: I think so.
ELM: OK. So. The impetus for the main thrust of this episode is, a few weeks ago I tweeted something, and I was dunking on someone, and it went viral, to a degree I’ve never experienced before. Not just the tweet, but like, I muted it very quickly because it was going too fast, I saw viral quote tweets of my tweet, and viral quote tweets of that, and then I saw it screenshotted on Tumblr with tens of thousands of reblogs. So…
FK: Too much.
ELM: It was a lot.
FK: What if the internet, but too much, Elizabeth?
ELM: It was a lot, but I mean, I stand by what I said. So, Steve, a friend of the pod, who has written before, tweeted at me the other day saying, “Can I lightly cyberbully you into talking about this?” And I was like, “Yeah, ask us a question.” So he did. So, I think it’s probably helpful if I read the tweets first.
FK: I was just gonna ask you to do that, for anybody who has not seen them.
ELM: Yeah. So, um, I’ll read the tweets and then maybe you wanna read the letter.
FK: OK.
ELM: So I will not say the name of the tweets, though I guess we could link to this, from a venture capital person, who I should note, appears to be a lady. Everyone was calling this person a dude. [laughs] And she wrote—
FK: Ladies can be grindset venture capitalists too! [laughs]
ELM: Right. So she, this person is a venture capitalist at a firm that you’ve heard of, and she…first she wrote: “Calling it now. Interactive fanfiction is going to be a killer use case of QLoRA.” And just side note, QLoRA appears to be a way to reduce memory usage with LLMs, large language models, which are what AI is trained on.
FK: OK great, a technical thing.
ELM: So, it’s a technical thing, a way to save space. She continues, “It’s now feasible for consumers to fine-tune an LLM on the massive amounts of fan fiction,” of course, a space in the word, “that’s available publicly. I expect we’ll see models for individual worlds and even specific characters.” All right, so that’s obviously annoying to start, right?
FK: Sure.
ELM: The one I screenshotted, she had screenshotted the user traffic on the AO3, Fanfiction.net and Wattpad, and she writes: “The three largest fanfic sites, AO3, Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad, get 3 billion plus annual visits in the U.S. alone. They’re in the top 300 sites in the U.S., and AO3 is number 100 globally.” Get ready. “Imagine how much bigger this market could be if you could chat with characters versus reading static stories.”
FK: Gosh! Because those are the same thing…
ELM: Ah, so I retweeted it. [laughs] And I said: “Imagining having such a—”
FK: You know who I don’t wanna chat with? Almost any of the characters—nevermind, we’re gonna move on. I’ll let you move on.
ELM: [overlapping] All right, we’ll get to this, we’ll get to this, we’ll get to this. So I said, “Imagine having such a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of reading fanfiction—let alone reading fiction more broadly,” and then I used the melting emoji, he’s one of my favorite guys. And then I said in a follow-up—I like how I’m reading my own viral tweets, that’s great—“I’m writing a piece about the overall failure of book disruption startups right now, and so much of that stuff is just like this, people who can’t grasp why anyone likes plain old reading.” And then I finished the thread with “‘Static’ lol,” which 4,000 people liked. [both laugh]
FK: Ohhhh man… OK.
ELM: [overlapping] All right. So, that was, that was the viral tweet, um…and I stand by everything I said, so, that’s the context for Steve’s letter.
FK: Right. OK. And so this is the letter that he wrote to cyberbully you into talking about this.
ELM: Yes.
FK: “Hello Fansplaining!
“It's me again complaining about AI—the other option would be a Taylor Swift deep dive.” [ELM laughs] Thank you for sparing us, Steve.
ELM: I don’t have thoughts on that. [laughs]
FK: Sorry, Swifties.
“So Elizabeth recently did numbers on Twitter—last time I looked it was at 15K retweets and now is at 82K likes. Flourish you may have seen a screenshot of it on Instagram.” [both laugh] Touché.
ELM: All right, side note, Steve, you are my hero, thank you very much. Check’s in the mail.
FK: Ugh, oh Lord…
“Clearly there is a lot of passionate conversation around the rotten stench of hustle culture tech bro grindset disruptors [both laugh] embracing AI as they did with NFTs, crypto, et cetera.
“The self-insert sales pitch seems to be one of the big use cases AI advocates are making. I think one of the Russo brothers had a horrific quote about imagining inserting yourself into a romcom with Marylin Monroe.
“While I could not imagine anything more mortifying than imagining myself in a fic with my faves there is a sizable aspect of fandom that is self insert. It seems like so many people intrinsically understood the difference between fic and having some commodified app. And I think that’s super interesting! Do you think that that is down to the community and structures that have evolved around fandom? To be honest, it’s actually just Elizabeth’s tweet in that so many of these guys just are idiots, isn’t it? I look forward to the piece Elizabeth hinted at—perhaps we can get a bit of a preview?
“Maybe some general thoughts about how things have changed in AI? That article about some models being trained on datasets that include fanworks was interesting. I’m a photographer in my day job and Adobe just launched a generative AI feature in Photoshop and a lot of the content around has been putting it in its best light but from actually trying it I’m pretty confident in how bad it generally is. It makes censorship decisions around nudity when there isn’t any and definitely won’t allow any copyrightable IP to be used. Which immediately exposes how bad the business case for a fandom chatbot is.
“Thanks again for everything, look forward to listening! Steve.”
ELM: Thank you very much, Steve. On so many levels, a great letter.
FK: [sighs deeply] I have been dunked on.
ELM: Yes, that’s the best, that’s the…
FK: Fortunately without 82,000 likes…
ELM: That’s the best. [laughs] OK. So, I think Steve was the one who wrote the last letter asking us to talk about AI, and that’s what I wanted to bring up first. So we talked about AI in…December of last year. And I have thought over the last few months how different our conversation would be now, because I do think a lot has changed. And it’s a little upsetting to think how quickly things have changed.
FK: Mmm hmmm.
ELM: Because I think that when we talked about it first—and I don’t think we feel dramatically differently now, but we had some ambivalence, it wasn’t a hard line, [in an intense voice] “No, AI is theft and I’m never going to engage with it in any way, and anyone who ever touches this is evil and should go to Hell!” Right? It was more like, hey, here’s the thing though, what about all the people in fandom who aren’t artists and aren’t writers, and maybe they do wanna use it to make—probably pretty bad—but their, still their own fanwork, right? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That kind of ambivalence was in there, and I’m not prepared to let that ambivalence go.
FK: Me neither.
ELM: But, I do feel like the conversation has changed a lot. So. We should say, a few things that have happened recently.
FK: [laughs] Just a few!
ELM: Just a few. Involving fandom and AI. So, ah, one is the article that Steve is referencing, I’m almost positive is the one that was in WIRED a few weeks ago, so there was this company called Sudowrite, and they put out a like…novel-writing assistant AI software. First of all, I don’t know if you watched that guy’s announcement, but it was just like, it was bleak. It was just like, oh my God…
FK: It seems like it’s drawn from like…you know, when people who are novelists and do use AI to assist their writing talk about this, first of all, almost all of them who are seriously using it are the kind of people who are writing, like, ten—just churning them out to sell on Amazon, you know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Marketplace, which, by the way—fine, actually that takes a level of commitment, I’m not dissing them. I couldn’t do their job. That said, it’s like…OK, yeah, no wonder you can’t think of a word to use, because you’ve just written like, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of words of like, kinda trashy romance novels, and you have to write hundreds of thousands more in order to make rent.
ELM: Sure.
FK: It’s like a dystopia, and it felt like this guy was the combination of that and also then people who have no ideas. It’s like, wow. This is awful. [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, no, I thought it was more about people who have no ideas. It was the first time that I really felt—so for months people have been saying like, “Everyone who wants to use AI, they’re just jealous because they can’t write a novel themselves.” And this, this software and this guy’s presentation of it, the founder’s presentation of it, was the first time that I truly felt deep in my soul, oh, the people making this are jealous. That they cannot write novels.
FK: Yes!
ELM: And maybe that’s unfair, but that’s how I felt. So, the problem with this one is that they had built their model by scraping things off the internet, and also there were some accusations—and I don’t know if these actually wound up being true, but—when this all came out, one of the accusations was that they had, one of the guys involved in the company had been in some writers’ workshop, and he had told the other writers that he had been feeding their stories into AI so he could give them feedback without their consent, and they were like, “Excuse me?” Now it turns out that those were being used potentially to train this model, right, so there were all these shady ways that they were getting text.
FK: Right.
ELM: They had opened a beta up to novelists, and said that they, that their software would spit them out like a prospectus or something, you know, a summary of their work?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Another shady way that they were getting people to put stuff in that they could learn. And then, it turns out that they were also, what they eventually were generating, involved terms like “knotting”—that’s with a k [FK laughs]—and just an unusual amount of the, you know, the term “omega,” right, which is, [FK laughs] obviously a word that does come up in everyday life, but when you don’t live in the Omegaverse, maybe not as often as it was coming up in this stuff. [FK laughs] And so that was how people started to say, “Oh, you have been training this on fanfiction.”
FK: Yeah. We can see.
ELM: Yes, we can see the knot, it’s expanding, it’s in… [laughs]
FK: Wow, thanks for making that gross. I was just thinking like, you know…
ELM: You think the Omegaverse is gross? And not a beautiful expression of the gender tr-trinary?
FK: I’m going to murder you right now.
ELM: [overlapping] What’s the word for six—hep, heptenary?
FK: [overlapping] I’m going to reach through the computer and strangle you.
ELM: What’s six? Hexenary?
FK: I’m gonna reach through the co—I’m like, doing the Force choke. [ELM laughs] Um.
ELM: In the Omegaverse we’re into that.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, I mean, right, because you’re never going to—AI is very, very unlikely to spit out some kind of a sentence from a fic, but you can tell that the word distribution [laughs] is really fucked up here.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, I mean if you only read stories, if you were just scraping stories in the Omegaverse, people are gonna start to think that those are the words for man and woman, because they never, they rarely say “male” and “female” in Omegaverse, so, you know.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, they say, yeah.
ELM: [overlapping] Even though those genders still exist usually, right? And obviously there is, there’s lots of now pro-published Omegaverse, but the vast majority of it is on fanfiction sites.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah. “But.” But not enough to train a large language model. [laughs]
ELM: So there was a good WIRED article breaking this down, and the guy was kinda like, “Well, whoops!” You know? And it was just like a total…anyway. So that’s been going around.
FK: Which then has set off a panic about fanfic being in AI, right?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: And I feel like “panic” is the right word to use, because…
ELM: Yes.
FK: I have been, in preparation for this episode, [ELM laughs] I’ve been poking around people’s comments on this, and like, oh wow, people are freaked out.
ELM: Right.
FK: And not, I mean I’m not trying to say that’s entirely wrong, but the level of freakout is high.
ELM: So…then, bad timing, simultaneously, one of the members of the OTW Legal Committee gave an interview in which she was pretty positive about AI, and the OTW then shared that, not saying it was the official stance of the organization, or the AO3, but…
FK: Which it wasn’t.
ELM: It was definitely not. But not really clarifying that it wasn’t the official, you know? It was just like, “Hey, look at this!”
FK: Right, when you see someone who’s an AO3 lawyer like, talking about something that’s relevant…
ELM: Head of the Legal Committee, in fact. Has worked there for a long time, and has been a guest on this podcast, as several of the people on the Legal Committee—actually, I think most of the Legal Committee has been on this podcast at some point, to talk about the law.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So that caused an additional panic, and the OTW and the AO3 acted very quickly, released a statement saying “No no no, actually here’s our official stance.” And one of the things they said—which is true, and it’s not a secret plot, which I wish people would stop saying—is on a technical level, there’s very little they can do. They have made some technical changes, to stop certain types of scraping, but there is a real limit to what they are able to do, it is a publicly available page on the internet.
FK: Right.
ELM: And so they say, you know, “We advise, if you are worried, lock your fics, because then it’s not publicly on the internet anymore.”
FK: Well and this is, this to me is a lot like what I have consistently been saying and banging the drum about with regard to people’s conversations on Twitter, Tumblr, et cetera, right? Like, I personally was scraping all of that—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: —and using it to do like, market research. Don’t post publicly if you don’t want that to happen. We can say whether or not that’s a good thing that it is happening, like, I am…ambivalent, actually, still, about [laughs] my own role in doing those things, but it’s, it’s out there and it’s happening, it’s gonna happen, lock your stuff if you don’t want it to. Without there being some form of regulation.
ELM: Right, I mean…I think that in the case of the market research that you did, and that other people continue to do, there is an element of it that’s just, social media can be psychologically misleading, in the sense of you do feel like you’re just talking to your friends, right? Because if you worked for a, I don’t know, a t-shirt company, and you went and sat down on a bench in the main street of the town and wrote down how many people were wearing blue shirts versus red shirts, and then you were like, “Well, blue is really popular, so,” you know what I mean? That’s not seen as an invasion, that’s just observation, that’s research in the world, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: But you know, when you say, “80% of people are talking about this character and 20% are talking about this character, so clearly that’s a more popular character,” it feels different.
FK: Right. Yeah, yeah!
ELM: Because they think that they’re just talking about it with their friends, but they’re not, they’re talking about it publicly. I understand why it’s hard for us to process social media being public, and feeling private at the same time, right?
FK: Right. And I also appreciate that this feels different, and why it feels different, to have AI like, to have your work be training a model, it feels different because instead—like, in the case of me listening to Twitter conversations, basically, I’m not then reproducing Twitter conversations that are some…you know, I’m not creating new, right, I’m not, it’s not… [laughs]
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah. Fake, fake fans…you know, yeah, that you’re using as marketing tools.
FK: It’s not, it’s not going into a sausage grinder, whereas in this case I—even though it’s not plagiarizing your work, it is going into a sausage grinder, in some sense, and potentially resulting in more work like this. Which…I get why that feels different and worse, for sure.
ELM: Right. I have seen people—I mean, this was, we talked about this in the first one. People still keep using the term “plagiarizing,” and I’ve seen people even using the term “copy-pasting.” I wish people could wrap their heads around the fact that that is not how it works, it is not just taking sentences and changing words. It’s millions and millions and millions of words…that’s just not how it works. That is. And that’s not to say that it’s morally correct, it’s just, that’s factual, right?
That’s not to say you can’t use the word “theft,” because, or to say that, “Oh, someone is profiting from my work,” because in a many-stepped way, that is accurate. Right? If someone is gonna generate a novel from my works and your works and the other several million people who put things on the AO3, you know, and they scrape all those things and then the eventual output is a novel, yeah. They have profited off the labor that we did.
FK: Right.
ELM: That’s all of that. The OTW—and I wanna say as a side note, too, this is not the same conversation, but just because of the way our timing worked out with recording, if you follow us on social media you’ll see we’ve also been promoting the End OTW Racism campaign, and…so, a lot of these things are kind of hitting at once, and it felt like a big messy conversation.
FK: Yeah, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of different AO3 things happening right now, [laughs] all at once.
ELM: Just many things, and there’s other stuff going on right now with the Board, which I’m sure if you’re on our social media you’ve seen. You know, I will say, I think it was a fair critique from the folks supporting the End OTW Racism campaign, people got way, way more upset about the AI conversation than they did about the idea that people were, like, doing racist targeted harassment.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I am glad to see, I think we should say on the podcast, though we said it on social media, glad to see that they did respond to that campaign, and I’m hopeful that they will continue to try to be more transparent on issues of racism, and the work that they’re gonna do around that. So, just because of how the timing of our episodes worked out, we hadn’t actually gotten a chance to talk about it on the podcast.
FK: Yeah. But the AI conversation is also continuing to happen, for better or worse, and one of the things people are often leveling against the AO3 is they’re saying, like, “They don’t really care, because they won’t”—for instance—“ban AI fics on the platform.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Which, you know, so there’s the issue of the scraping, which is, I think…I think we both feel like, well they’re doing what they reasonably can do, and…I mean, to me I feel like that part of this is almost analogous to like, there has to be some kind of government regulation. Like, you’re not, they’re not, unless the AO3 put everybody’s fics private, which is not how it’s historically been, and not what people want?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And even then, someone could easily, like…
ELM: Why can’t you make an account?
FK: [laughing, overlapping] Write something that logged in, yeah! You know?
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah yeah yeah, I don’t understand why that would actually be a barrier, like, it’s a…it’s a light barrier right now, just as it is for search results, right? There’s a reason why RPF fandoms have historically locked. It’s just to create, like, friction.
FK: But if somebody’s determined, they’re gonna get through that lock too, right?
ELM: [overlapping] Like the lady in that tweet, yes, absolutely, look at this free body of stuff, all I have to do is create an account. And then I’ll get access to eleven million stories.
FK: Yeah, exactly.
ELM: Yeah. For sure.
FK: Exactly.
ELM: Right…I’m not, I think as far as the allowing the works on the platform, I think one of the arguments—a lot of platforms are going through this, I know DeviantArt has been having this huge issue with this, they’re getting flooded with stuff. I have seen some platforms presenting, like, an optional checkbox, so you could acknowledge that it is computer-generated, because, or AI-generated rather, you know, because there are a lot of people who are experimenting and using it for art.
FK: Right.
ELM: And I think that there are so many worries involved with the AO3 stuff here, that there’s just not anything that I think the organization can do. This idea that, oh, say they banned AI, and then people started reporting other users saying, “This is generated by AI,” right, you know, like…or people leveling—there was a spambot a few months ago, where people were getting comments saying, “Your fic was obviously written with AI.” Which is just—first of all, it’s total spam, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Second of all, what a frickin’ confidence killer! You know? Especially if you’re insecure about your work, right, if you’re a new writer, or you know, like, just learning or whatever, and you get this comment being like, “Obviously this is generated by, you know, a janky machine” or whatever, it’s like, ugh, that’s so mean! [laughs]
FK: I mean, the other question is like…do you actually know for sure that that fic is written by AI? That’s the other side of the coin, is that there’s plenty of cases where humans write things, and people accuse them of it—there was a case with a professor, I think in Texas, who accused his students of writing everything with ChatGPT.
ELM: Oh my God.
FK: And like, half, a few of them had, but a bunch of them hadn’t. It was just kind of a generic assignment. And like—so I’m not confident in my own ability to spot—like, I think I can spot things that are definitely not written by AI, but I don’t know if I can spot [laughs] things that are, right?
ELM: Yeah, no, absolutely! And like, these are the things that are the, the confluence of millions and millions of stories, and like…yeah! This is always the old joke on the AO3, is, like, “I’ll read the same kind of story again and again and again and again,” right, you know, it’s like…I’m happy for the repetition.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so you say “Oh, what, they lived happily ever after? You, that’s obviously AI, that’s so…” you know? It’s like, come on now. I don’t know.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So I don’t know what any—I see, there’s real fear, and I think it’s justified fear, that this is gonna be used as a tool against people, I’ve seen in, people who are writing not in their native language, being concerned that this is gonna be leveled against them, because they are learning to write in a different language, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: Absolutely, if I was learning to write in a different language, I would worry that someone would accuse me. I don’t know, it just, it just—
FK: If I was learning to write, you know what I mean? If I were a younger person, I can, yeah, just like you said. That would be so devastating, to be a teenager, sticking your nose into this, and having someone…
ELM: If I got that thing now, I would just laugh, I would be like, “This is shitty spam.” [FK laughs] Or I don’t know, it’s wrong, but yeah, absolutely when I was younger I probably would have taken it really personally, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So there’s all of that. And then you have [laughs] this lady in this tweet. And these grifters. And so…that brings us into this kind of idea of…and what Steve is getting at, too. Also using fanfiction to think that there’s some other fan activity that we can use, “Oh, you’re mentioning all these characters over and over again,” which, again, the legality of this, I have no idea. I’ve seen a lot of bad legal takes here, but we’re also entering a real legal gray area, if you think you can take a million Harry Potter stories and turn it into an interactive AI-generated Harry Potter story? For money?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s like, I don’t know what, what the plan is here, lady, it’s like underwear gnome situation here, [FK laughs] like, profit, and the middle section is like, “get sued by Warner Bros.” I’m not sure what the intent is here. Unless it’s just to use the broader corpus, and then to…I don’t know what. I mean I guess you’ve worked in Hollywood, is the worry that they’re gonna say, “I’ve trained this model on all these Harry Potter stories, and I’m gonna go to Warner Bros. and say why don’t we make an interactive Harry Potter chatbot,” that, you know?
FK: Yeah, but…they would have to, that would be the way that you could do that. [laughs] Given trademark and copyright law.
ELM: Right.
FK: There’s a wide variety of problems, I will start—I will enumerate a few of them, number one being obviously fanfiction is a different mode of engagement than the closest thing to an interactive chatbot, which I would think would be, like, a roleplaying game. Right?
ELM: Right.
FK: Like, fanfic and roleplaying are not the same thing, they both have pleasures, I’m not saying that no one would ever want to talk to an interactive chatbot, I might want that in certain contexts. But fanfic probably ain’t the thing to…right? They’re not the same!
ELM: Well yeah, I mean obviously that was the most absurd part of the tweet, and everyone in the quote tweets before I muted it was like, “Lady, you just invented RPGs.” Which, like, sort of?
FK: Yeah, not quite.
ELM: I will say as a side note, Allegra Rosenberg had a really good piece on the idea of fandom chatbots, and saying…the word she was using repeatedly was “solipsistic.”
FK: Right, mmm hmmm.
ELM: So this kind of idea that like, yeah, you know, if you really wanna chat with your favorite character with one of these, go ahead, but it’s going to wind up being a very…I don’t know, self—you know, solipsistic is the right word, a very like, cuts off the community element and it’s completely inwardly focused.
FK: Right, and for what it’s worth, there’s a lot of science fiction that’s been, that’s tried to think through this, and I mean all sorts of stuff, like Connie Willis has a book Remake, which is about an idea—like, a future movie industry that has a lot more of this stuff. There’s a…you know, like every Star Trek holodeck episode is actually like, kind of working through some of these questions sometimes, of, like, are they movies? Are they RPGs? What is it like, what happens if you interact with a character and they’re not real, but you’re emotionally connected to them, you know? Whatever. So this is not a new idea, and I think it’s not surprising to me that people are going in those directions, because it’s been…it’s been a fantasy, [laughs] right, of the book that talks back or whatever, for a long time. But…
ELM: I guess…
FK: This is like, a very dumb [laughs] take on it.
ELM: [overlapping] Yeah, it’s like a thought experiment. Can I side note, I’m rewatching Silicon Valley, which I don’t think you’ve ever seen and probably couldn’t see because of your secondhand embarrassment issue.
FK: No.
ELM: But I’m rewatching HBO’s Silicon Valley for a piece, and…in the fourth season, they hit hard on a lot of the tech fads, right, and so I think the fourth season which is probably like 2016-2017, was VR.
FK: Right.
ELM: And there’s a, Haley Joel Osment plays a version of the guy who invented Oculus Rift. [snorts] So they’re like, playing this big game, and they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was amazing, it was amazing,” and they’re all men right, it’s Silicon Valley men, engineers.
FK: Of course.
ELM: And they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, so I walked up the hill to the tavern, and then I went in the tavern, and like…the barmaid was there, and I just looked at the barmaid.” Right, so this is the running joke, and they keep describing that exact action, and you’re like, this is funny. And then one of them says, in one of the tellings of it, is, like “I looked at the barmaid. You can look at her as long as you want.” [both laugh] It’s just like, that’s, you did it, you perfectly did it. This is the one joke you need to make about this right now.
FK: Yeah! Yep.
ELM: Just thought it was exquisite. [FK laughs]
FK: Anyway…
ELM: And that’s what I hear, especially from the guys, this idea, like one of the Russos, the directors of the Avengers movies or whatever, was like, “You can be with Marilyn Monroe,” all I hear in that is “I’ll be in the room with Marilyn Monroe and I can look at her as long as I want.” You know? [FK laughs]
FK: Well, and like, I don’t know, that’s fine, I’m not saying that that doesn’t have some level of pleasures to it, [ELM laughs] I’m just saying that the idea that that’s the same pleasure as you’re getting out of even self-insert fanfic is weird to me.
ELM: Yeah, the fact that people kept bringing up self-inserts, and Steve does, too, and I don’t think it’s wrong to bring them up in context, but this idea of like, “I’m looking, I’m looking,” is so different from if you actually read self-inserts, you know? Self-inserts are often very embodied, they’re not really about your gaze at all, they’re about the idea of something happening to you, often.
FK: And I mean I think that some of that can potentially be embodied by…maybe not a chatbot, but by some kind of interactive—right? There could be, I’ve had experiences playing RPGs with other human beings where you’re acting, and you feel caught up in a scene, and you feel a romantic emotion or something like that, because that’s the thing that you’re in, and that’s fun! Right? So I’m not saying that that can’t happen, but the real question I keep coming back to is, are we gonna train this on fic? And then also, if we’re having a corporate situation, do you think that Warner Bros. is gonna be cool with 99.9% of things that fic people think are good? In their Harry Potter thing?
ELM: [overlapping] Not knotting…
FK: Because the answer is “No.” Let’s get back to the knotting, yeah, exactly! [laughs]
ELM: All right, so I get in there, I’m like, [in a high voice] “Hi Harry!” and Harry’s like, “I’m ready to knot you,” and you’re like, “So soon, Harry? So soon?” [laughs]
FK: [overlapping] I mean…uh, Warner Bros. is gonna lose it, right? That’s not what’s gonna be a possibility, which is like, they’re not, this is one of the key problems that comes up with any of these interactive things. Is that you can’t get at the id of the internet. And also [laughs] have a, you know, family-friendly interaction. That’s…
ELM: Right, even not family-friendly, even if it’s labeled adult, the kind of…the point of all of these, it’s interesting. Omegaverse is so interesting to me, too. We’re kind of in this world right now. But like, I was reading one last night, just out of curiosity, that was very biological and I was like—what is it about this that like, it feels so niche, but it hits a niche for so many people in fandom? But just that?
FK: Yeah. Yeah.
ELM: You know what I mean? It’s very interesting to me in that regard. But so, you saw the Knot In My Name campaign, k-n-o-t, right?
FK: [a breath and a pause] Yes. [laughs]
ELM: So that’s suggesting, oh, we should be—flood the zone with more Omegaverse so we really ruin it for them, because they truly don’t want just the words “omega” and “alpha” and “knotting…”
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, they don’t want this, they don’t want this.
ELM: “Cloaca,” I don’t know what some other…Omegaverse words are, slick? “Slick.”
FK: Yeah, “slick” is an Omega—but that’s a word. [laughs] That sure is a word.
ELM: But you know, I’ve seen opposition to that too, saying, “Stop, don’t, why is the”—and this feels a little bit like I don’t know what you’re gonna do about this at this point—saying, “No, don’t, this is buying into…” There’s an idea of like, that means that they’ve won, and so we’re just gonna ruin it for them, because they’ve won. They’re already able to scrape. But they kinda have.
FK: They kind of are.
ELM: Right.
FK: Yeah. This to me feels a little bit like, you know, people individually being like, “I would like global warming to stop, so I’m going to compost.” And it’s like, yes, that is a good thing to do. Here composting is like locking my fics or trying to prevent people from scraping my personal fics, right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: So that’s a good thing to do, I compost, I do those things. But that’s also not what’s going to like…stop global warming. There has to be a…a larger governmental and societal response.
ELM: [overlapping] Right, which is, I obviously not going to happen, yeah.
FK: [overlapping] And to me, like, there has to be a larger governmental and societal response to stop people from scraping things and using them in a big data way, whether that’s for AI or something else.
ELM: Yeah…I mean the other thing that I’ve seen, too, is—which maybe I could further this metaphor by saying, I don’t know, it’s like someone picking up your compost bin and just dumping it in the trash, on an individual level. But people complaining about people feeding stories into AI, WIP fics.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: To “finish” them, because they don’t wanna wait for the ending.
FK: Yeah, that’s just socially shitty. [ELM laughs] You know? Like…
ELM: I mean, me picking up your compost and dumping it in the trash would be quite rude. You took the time to compost that shit.
FK: Yeah, I’m not—right, it’s like, OK, that action is probably bad because it’s slightly adding to global warming by making it degrade in the trash instead of break down in the compost, that’s true, it is, it is. But that’s a tiny thing compared to “What the fuck, Elizabeth? [ELM laughs] Did you just, like, take my compost bin, look at me, in the eye, and dramatically dump it in the trash? To disrespect me?”
ELM: [still laughing] Oh, wow…I like how you added my gestures, and eye contact. I was doing like a—
FK: Yeah, that’s what you would do, if you did that.
ELM: Like when a cat does a crime, they just stare right at you, and you’re like, “Yes?”
FK: [laughing, overlapping] Yes, exactly! Well that’s how I feel about this idea of people like, feeding a work in progress that’s like, actively updating, into an AI to finish it. It’s like…it’s like a cat doing a crime! It’s like, what is wrong with you, do you not live in the world with humans?
ELM: [overlapping] I think even if it—no, a cat—cats would never do that, because they don’t read.
FK: [laughs] But they would if they could read and wanted to annoy you.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, they’re not even doing stuff to annoy you, they’re doing stuff because they want to.
FK: Yeah, like the people who just want the fic to be finished.
ELM: Yeah, it’s true, it’s true.
FK: But it happens to be a, like, antisocial behavior.
ELM: Yeah. I hate…you know, I love cats and I hate to connect cats to this behavior, but you’re right. If a cat did want the ending, they would just make it with AI.
FK: And that’s antisocial because it’s like, part of the point of the fic community, the thing that makes it good, is that we’re humans in it together, writing things for each other, right?
ELM: Correct.
FK: It’s like saying, “Thanks for this thing, now I’ve replaced you with a computer, and that’s all I wanted from you.”
ELM: Right, right.
FK: You know what I mean? It’s just so dehumanizing and demeaning to the writer.
ELM: Right! And I mean, that brings me back to what we talked about in the first one, to say like, you know…maybe for the person who just is in fandom because they want what they want. You know? “I want a story where xyz happens, I don’t have money to commission—” I mean people aren’t really supposed to commission fics, but some people do do that—
FK: They do.
ELM: Or, “I don’t have an interest in developing community relations with people so they would want to write a story that I request,” you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “So I’m just gonna make it for my—and I don’t write, so I just wanna make it for myself.” Right? Or “I don’t have money to commission art, and I don’t draw, so. I’m just gonna make it for myself.” And that’s a big part of fandom! People want the thing that they want, because it’s their deep desire, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: For all of the collective anger about this AI stuff with fic writing over the last few months…I know there’s people out there who are really in it for themselves, there’s no communal spirit there.
FK: Yeah. But that is, that to me is the part that I find offensive and problematic the most, right? I mean yeah, of course, do I want someone to, without asking me, feed my fic into a large language model? No, I mean, I’m sort of at ease with the fact that my fic has already been scraped and is in these language models, but like, no, I wouldn’t love it if somebody did that. But the reason I wouldn’t love it would be that it feels like a personal act. That like…someone is doing something to me, and not because of the actual outcome. [laughs] Right?
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
FK: The outcome is kind of already happening, that’s happening with or without my one fic.
ELM: Right.
FK: And my one fic isn’t gonna make a difference. But like, come on, we live in a society. [both laugh]
ELM: Well that’s interesting, because I feel a little different in the sense of, like, this lady that I dunked on, virally dunked on…she, it was the first time that I really personally was like, “Fuck you! [FK laughs] I don’t want, I don’t wanna be, ten stories out of 11 million that go into your—” You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “I don’t want you, individually, lady, to get anything out of this.” Because it was, it was so…you know, just treating the work like a crop to be harvested, kind of, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That’s the grifter element, you know? And I have friends who work at, in tech, who do, have worked in AI stuff, related stuff, for years. And so much of what I’ve known of their work has been, like, trying to help other disciplines and other industries use AI to improve—you know what I mean?
FK: Right. Yeah!
ELM: And it’s like, people who are opting in, giving the data, to say like, “OK, help us figure out, what are more efficient ways to analyze this data so we can actually improve our processes and help people?”
FK: Yeah, “Can we use AI to find new markers that we can identify cancer earlier,” which I think is a literal use it’s been put to, right?
ELM: [overlapping] Exactly, I’ve, yeah. I have a good friend who’s now a professor of machine learning, and I know that when he was doing his research, he worked a lot with neuroscientists.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And, like, to, you know, they were actively collaborating, because they wanted the computer scientist field to help them—I don’t know what they do, I don’t know, brain stuff, computer stuff, I have no idea what they were doing, but presumably the end result of that is good. Like, to be able to use that power at scale to analyze things.
But this just feels like it wasn’t, “Why don’t you all pool in and then we can create something else,” and I think yeah, you bringing up the communal spirit of fandom is really important here too. Because it’s like well, we’re already pooling our resources. With our human brains, together. And now you’re talking about coming in and kind of, scraping? You know? The thing that we communally made? To make something shitty that no one wants? Also, that’s the other thing—
FK: And that we’ll have to pay for.
ELM: Yeah. I think that it’s the grifting element too, “Oh, this is a super untapped thing.” There are so many things with this, also the idea that like, “Oh, if these people who are writing fanfiction could only chat with a character, they’d just love it.”
FK: Right. Like, we know what you would like even better than you already do. Lemme tell you, if fanfiction people really wanted to do that? People would learn to write chatbots, and would make chatbots, and this would be a genre of fanfic that was a big deal.
ELM: And people literally already have fandom roleplayed a bazillion—I know tons of people, including you, who simultaneously write fic, and have fandom roleplayed.
FK: Yep.
ELM: And that is a thing that, it’s two different activities! You know? And maybe there’s crossover in your ideas about the characters, but two totally different activities.
FK: Yep. Yep. I—you know, I think one thing that I want to emphasize within this also, is…so, even though I don’t totally enter into your, “Fuck this person individually” thing…
ELM: No, her though, you could do it for her.
FK: I mean, I don’t love it. Uh.. [laughs] Yes. But yes, I would say that I find that particular thing offensive. I don’t think that there’s necessarily something wrong, even, with the idea of using AI to look at art. Like—and this is my point of view, I’m not trying to put this on you—I don’t think there’s something necessarily wrong about using AI to analyze art, or even generate things, or what have you. A lot of it’s not very interesting so far, but you know, I’m interested—people can mess with it, and try to do things, I’m not mad about that. I do know some people who do AI art that I find occasionally, there’s been a project that I think is kind of interesting, especially with, like, machine-generated language or whatever. You know…yeah! That’s all fine. It’s the grift. [ELM laughs] It’s the grift. You know? [laughs]
ELM: Right.
FK: And I think there’s some people who would communicate—who would say that those two things are the same, so that’s why I want to, like, emphasize that I can name several art projects that I actually do like that use some form of machine learning.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But the grift, man! Fuck that.
ELM: Yeah. No, I absolutely—and I mean, I think we mentioned this last time, but I think you in particular are very much, you are unique amongst people I know for being in the kind of computer-generated art scene, and like…
FK: Yeah! Which, by the way, is not everyone’s cup of tea, and just because I like something doesn’t mean that you’ll think it’s artistically valid. [laughs] To be clear.
ELM: Right. But—
FK: But! I do like some of that stuff, genuinely. [laughs]
ELM: And a lot of it, the stuff I have seen through you, it feels very arty, [laughs] in a sense of like…
FK: Yes. Yeah!
ELM: Yeah, that’s not going to be something you can really make any money off of, maybe a teeny, like a grant, you know?
FK: I’ll put a, I’ll put an example in there, and maybe somebody will think it’s cool, and maybe people will look at it and be like, “What?” [laughs]
ELM: OK, but the point is that it’s not, it doesn’t have that Silicon Valley true believer…like…
FK: Yes.
ELM: Yeah. VC kinda grifting vibes. Like, “This is an untapped market, if only people knew that they wanted this instead of this thing that they’re already doing for free, they could do this—”
FK: No, the interest is actually in aesthetics. That is the interest, is aesthetics.
ELM: In art.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Right.
FK: It’s not about money, [laughs] it’s about aesthetics, which I think people can probably relate to, right?
ELM: Yeah. So I mean, one thing I will say, this is something I meant to mention earlier, too: my other worry here is that I did see some authors in these conversations, professional authors, people that you’ve heard of, making statements like, “Oh I don’t know how I feel about this, because I said I was OK with fanfiction, because people weren’t making money off my work. But if you’re telling me that their fanfiction is then going to be used in commercial projects…”
FK: GAAAAHHHHHH!
ELM: “I don’t know how I feel about that.” Right?
FK: [laughing] Oh no…
ELM: And my worry here too, is there’s so little understanding of how the law works. At this point, fair use is like a mythical creature that everyone seems to have a different—everyone except lawyers—seems to have a different interpretation of, and lawyers are like, “It’s not that complicated, and also it’s contextual.” You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But it’s reached this strange mythological status within fandom, and I see people saying utterly wrong things about that, or the, you know, OTW’s stance on fair use, and non-monetized fanworks, et cetera. But the idea that authors are now saying, “Maybe I’m not cool with fanfiction if people are gonna create works off this,” when the fanfiction authors are the ones who own the copyright to the stories…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Grifter lady trains a model on my fanfiction, she can’t use the bits where it says “Erik Lensherr and Charles Xavier” unless she strikes a deal…with Disney. I was just like, what company? And then I remembered that’s who owns them. [FK laughs] But the other things that she got out of that? The prose?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That doesn’t come from Fox, the other company that previously owned them.
FK: Nope.
ELM: That comes from me! Right? And I don’t like the idea, and I’m not in a fandom of the kind of author that would be on Twitter, but I don’t like some of the stances from some of these authors, starting to talk about, “I mean technically when you get right down to it, I own—you know, those fanworks are of my work, so I own them.” And it’s like, it’s literally not how it works.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, that’s banan—no! You don’t. [both laugh]
ELM: So, that was really worrying me too, and it does worry me knowing how mangled a lot of the narratives have gotten within fandom around the law.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And then to see professional authors kind of…presenting these sort of mangled statements too, all of that worries me. Even outside of AI. I didn’t, I don’t like that. That’s bad vibes.
FK: Yeah, I agree. And I don’t know what to do about it beyond saying that like, [laughs] we will continue to monitor the situation [ELM laughs] and report back. I mean what can we say?
ELM: Yeah. I think that the total rejection of this woman’s sentiment…it kind of simultaneously heartened me and really bummed me out, because…yeah, great, bazillions of people seem to agree with me and you…about this. It’s not gonna change her mind. She’s gonna plow ahead. I think the thing that’ll stop her is the law. [laughs]
FK: Yeah, I was gonna say, this thing will fail, but it won’t be because she changed her mind. [both laugh]
ELM: Right? Then it’s just like, and what happens when there is someone? What happens when there is Warner Bros. says “Oh, you’re right, you’re right.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I think that’s a real worry.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I get why people are panicking, I wish people weren’t spreading misinformation.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I think that maybe some of these people should learn to enjoy reading.
FK: [laughs] And the official, I believe that the official advice of this podcast is: if you’re concerned about this, the only thing that you can do is to lock your fics.
ELM: I mean if you’re truly concerned…and this is gravely concerning to you, I think you have to take your fics offline. And it’s probably, it’s probably too late.
FK: For sure. Yeah.
ELM: You know? It’s already happened.
FK: [overlapping] Yeah, well that’s the thing, it’s too late, it’s already happened, but.
ELM: [overlapping] But, for anything in the future, that is literally the only thing you can do.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Unfortunately. I mean, yeah. If you wanna flood the zone with more knotting…like, godspeed.
FK: Yep.
ELM: You know? I don’t know…it’s just funny. I mean that’s my take on that. Kinda hilarious.
FK: [overlapping] I mean whatever, more Omegaverse fic in the world, I guess that’s a net good. [both laugh]
ELM: Do we need more? There’s so much already. Whatever, there’s always room for more fic. Write more.
FK: Anyway.
ELM: I don’t know, it’s, it’s also genuinely worrying to me, this is a follow-up to an episode we did six months ago! Right?
FK: Mmm hmmm.
ELM: And to think about how much the public conversation has changed, and how…
FK: Yeah, it’s goin’ fast! [laughs]
ELM: How little action we’ve seen from anyone who could actually be effective? It’s bad.
FK: Great. Well, on that uplifting note…I think that has to be the end of our episode. More later, I guess.
ELM: All right, more TK. As we say. In the media biz.
FK: For what it’s worth, I’m not locking my fic, because it feels like it’s closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out, and, uh…
ELM: Yeah. I haven’t done it yet. I said in a thread that I might, but um, I haven’t done it yet, and I don’t know, like…[sighs] It’s not like some big existential crisis or something, but…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Yeah! How much of this is just for me to feel a little bit like [in a kid voice] “Eh! Fuck you! I locked it!” You know? There’s nothing wrong with that.
FK: Sometimes you need that.
ELM: Sometimes you do, yeah.
FK: Sometimes you need that. All right, I’ll talk to you later, Elizabeth, I’ll look forward to hearing about your decisions.
ELM: [laughing] OK, bye, Flourish.
FK: [laughing] Bye.
[Outro music]