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beltpop https://beltpop.tumblr.com/post/668054698921771008/rotate:

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brightwanderer https://brightwanderer.tumblr.com/post/702534495098847232/some-additional-comments-about-sudowrite :

Some additional comments about Sudowrite, hopefully of use to people.

1. There’s not a lot of point in locking your works. The AI has been trained. It’s done. Not only that, but the data itself remains archived and can be reused.

2. The algorithm in question is a bigger project called GPT-3, which gets its training data from a resource called Common Crawl. Common Crawl basically trawls everything on the web and is how search engines (including Google) index content. So it’s probably not that the people behind it have intentionally targeted AO3, though I am fascinated by the high specificity of fandom content in my results.

3. That’s going to make things difficult for AO3 staff to prevent, though, because as mentioned, if you make it so Common Crawl can’t look at the site at all, pages will no longer show up in searches at all.

4. This is understandably creepy as all hell, but my personal opinion is that locking my fanworks will do me more harm than leaving them open.

5. Action is needed to address the root problem of these AI training datasets in all fields, but I don’t think focusing on the ethical or artistic arguments is the way to change things. I think we should be leaning hard on IP and copyright law here. You can’t copyright a sentence or a phrase, but once you get enough individual factors together (character names, similarity of narrative, concepts) it starts to get dicey. So for example, if Sudowrite always gives a character named Harry glasses and black hair… well we all know why that is but it’s unlikely to be actionable.

If Sudowrite always associates a character named Harry with characters named Hermione, Neville, and Sirius, and consistently produces concepts like wands, potions, schools, etc… it starts to look like the kind of problem IP holders may take an interest in. Sudowrite claims that all its text is original and not directly lifted from anywhere - which may be technically true - but ironically, copyright and IP law is based on the whole of a work and its context… and if the AI can’t help but imitate those works and contexts, things are going to get interesting.

1. While Elon Musk is eminently blameable for all things, he doesn’t have any personal involvement here as far as I know, these people have just got some of his money. (Your picture was not posted)

on scraper bots

work, AI scrapers, panic

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This was a reblog of someone else’s post on the topic but they must’ve locked it to non-rebloggable between the time the person I saw it from reblogged it and the time I finished typing up my long well-considered response, which is annoying as fuck, so–

anyway. People are panicking and locking down their shit on AO3 because there’s evidence some AI project is scraping the Archive to train its bots to write, as far as I can tell, high school coffee shop AU omegaverse Harry Potter fic, which like, I’m not sure where they’re gonna use that but I do understand how much of a violation that feels like.

And someone pointed out that people who tend to read the Archive not logged in are gonna be barred from a lot of shit on account of people panicking and locking down their shit (and I might go on, here, that the bots have been through, there’s not a lot of point to it at this juncture guys, but also, your feelings are valid, so do what feels right). And so people might need invites, since there’s a waitlist to join the Archive.

So– 1) It is okay not to freak out individually and understand this is a systemic/larger-picture issue, and to instead pay attention to what the Organization for Transformative Works has to say about it. (Psssst donate to them, that’s why they exist.)

and 2) yeah! existing members of the archive usually have invite codes. For a logged-in user, go to your Dashboard. Up on the right is a button called Invitations; click on that to get invite codes. You have five, I think, and I don’t know how often they get replenished. I currently have five, anyway, and don’t know whether that’s typical. But, if you’re a reader and are worried you’ll lose access to important parts of the archive, maybe now is the time to make an account. Reach out to your favorite authors! Or reach out to fellow-commenters, now before things get locked down.

I think you have to give someone your email address to have it sent to you. If not, it’s possible the donor could just paste the line of code into a message to you, they’d just then have to manually remember they used that one. (Your picture was not posted)

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leviathan-supersystem https://leviathan-supersystem.tumblr.com/post/702318247731707904/ooooh-nooooo-but-a-rail-strike-around-the :

“ooooh nooooo but a rail strike around the holidays could cripple the economy” damn sounds like their labor is really really important and you should give them what they fucking want (Your picture was not posted)