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dawnfelagund https://dawnfelagund.tumblr.com/post/717317429350612992/this-week-in-fandom-from-a-small-site-owners :

This Week in Fandom, from a Small Site Owner’s Perspective

This past week has offered an interesting example of synchronicity in fandom history. On 5 May, a comment on the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild Discord about “AI fanart” prompted the mods to collectively make a uncomfortable noise like, “ummmm …” and swiftly open discussion on whether AI-generated “fanworks” were actually fanworks. (We decided no.) The next day, 6 May, the *OTW Signal *highlighted the interview with legal chair Betsy Rosenblatt, where she expressed excitement for inclusion of fanworks in AI training and pissed off a bunch of fans. By this point, I’d mostly written the SWG’s AI policy but was giving my comods the weekend for further research and discussion on the issue before turning the document over to them for comments and edits.

As a small archive owner, it is interesting to undergo this process, first with my comods and now with SWG members, at the same time as the OTW/AO3 is wrestling through theirs. Yesterday, my afternoon was spent researching and implementing, with the help of my co-admin Russandol, strategies to block as much AI scraping https://www.tumblr.com/dawnfelagund/717299056394813440/how-to-block-ai-bots-from-scraping-your-website?source=share of the SWG as we can. In the aftermath of that work, I wrote this post about a small archive owner’s perspective on the issue https://href.li/?https://dawn-felagund.dreamwidth.org/453681.html and how it has unfolded on the SWG vs. AO3.

Then, in a second instance of synchronicity, while I was writing this post, AO3 was clarifying their stance on AI https://href.li/?https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/25888. First, as a PSA to anyone reading this, AO3 does block AI scrapers and has since December 2022 (though I’ll be petty and note that it doesn’t seem that they’ve gone as far as the SWG in the tools they’re using, at least based on this post). But AI-generated “fanworks” are allowed: “If fans are using AI to generate fanworks, then our current position is that this is also a type of work that is within our mandate to preserve.” This is what I predicted in my [synchronous] post, and I was right.

Two big points emerge from my consideration so far of this issue and how it has been handled on a small site (mine) and AO3:

Keep reading https://dawnfelagund.tumblr.com/post/717317429350612992/this-week-in-fandom-from-a-small-site-owners (Your picture was not posted)