randominstance

So the OTW just released a news bulletin including an older interview with their legal counsel where she praised scraping fanfics as a way to help AI become more 'diverse'

The fanfic community has not Taken This Well.

It's also become known that AO3 didn't take even the simplest action to prevent Common Crawl bot-scraping of the site's content until January of 2023.

That means, if you have been on the site for a decade like I have, with works dating back before AI scrapers were wet dreams in the pants of techbros, your work has already been scraped, stolen and shoved into an AI dataset, while the OTW passively allowed it.

I removed a large number of my modern fics from the site a couple of years back due to a number of concerns that had already made the site uncomfortable for me, but I had left my older material available and unlocked.

I have now locked those as well, even though that's basically bolting the barn door after wranglers stole my horses and sold them to another farm.

And I'm angry about it, and I'm tired about it. We provided a decade worth of free writing under the belief that the Archive would at least minimally protect us from various threats. I consider bot scraping and AI remixing to be the newest threat and a significant one. Now that our stories have been ripped away from us without even the courtesy of a simple mass email saying 'hey, guys, you should be aware that scraping is becoming a thing', it just reinforces my conviction that AO3 and the OTW are asleep at the wheel, coasting on community good will and volunteerism while actually... not doing a lot to innovate the fanfic experience,  provide users with any sort of user-level access control tools, or actually help and protect authors beyond just 'providing a consistent space that hasn't been deleted yet'.

But the Archive seems to be fine with commercial entities scraping the shit out of us, while punishing us if we want to raise a few dollars a month with a ko-fi link.

I won't be using the site for anything I create going forward. AO3 has proven itself a poor steward and their current position on AI scraping as a 'positive for diversity' is a joke. I'm disgusted. This is, admittedly, a rant and one that I'm not taking a great effort to be fair about. What I do feel is a sick feeling in my stomach knowing that I lost control of some of my works - after already having been plagiarized by other 'fans' in my previous fandom.