I know I just reblogged this but I think the really important takeaway here is that this techbro is not genuinely asking “how can we improve fanfiction?” What he’s asking is “how can we tap into this massive market?”

I keep thinking about how many of these chat bots are free—for now. And of course they are! It’s a classic marketing technique when you’re trying to get your foot in the door with a novel product: let folks use it, let them get used to it, then start charging for it. You don’t have to look any further than streaming to see a very recent example of how this happens.

And it’s going to happen with AI.

There’s nothing these assholes love more than making money off of other people’s hard work. But you can’t legally charge for fanfic! So how do you get around that? You charge for a chat bot (which you trained on other people’s fanfic). You can’t charge for the content, but you can charge for the thing that produces the content.

AI is theft, and there are a whooooole lot of people gleefully looking to make a buck off of our hard work.

Don’t use AI, don’t feed AI your favorite fic writers’ and artists’ work, don’t read AI fic, don’t engage with it. And if you do, well, I can’t force you to give a shit about other people, but AI is a paywall being built, brick by brick, between you and the things you love. Stop slathering on the mortar.