AI project feeding off AO3

[marycrawford]

I got a comment on my single Dutch language fanfic on AO3, from a university research assistant working in the Netherlands. They don't speak Dutch. They want to feed my work to a "computational model" (that means AI, in case you were wondering).

The project is meant to "train computational models to explore what readers value in a story".

"For his research, Pianzola will use artificial intelligence to analyze millions of stories and their responses, from sites in five different languages -, English, Spanish, Italian, Korean and Indonesian - collected from countries on all continents. That analysis provides a wealth of information about the characters in a story, the genre, what a story is about, how a story is constructed, what themes are covered, as well as what readers from different countries and cultures find important in a story."

This project got more than a million euro from the EU. It's called GOLEM.

You can't make this shit up, at least not if you're an AI.

I'm so mad. Fuck off and leave us to write our stories in peace, can you?

Comments

[trobadora]

GOLEM. Seriously. *headdesk*

This is so frustrating. I hope you told them to fuck off with their AI fuckery!

*hugs*

[marycrawford]

GOLEM. Seriously. *headdesk*

Right??

And yes I did, and I hope it sticks but I doubt they will ever read any comments they get.

[dorinda]

AAAAAAUGH.

I want them to go away and cannibalize their own selves and leave us THE FUCK ALONE.

Does this mean I need to archive lock everything? Or would that even help at this point? They could get golem (ugh wtf) its own damn account I guess...

[marycrawford]

I don't know, man. Probably the barn isn't lockable at this point. I don't archive lock myself, because I feel like user access is more important and I remember not being able to read archive locked stories on my previous ereader, but I did add a "No permission to use work in AI" line to my AO3 profile.

[sakana17]

YUUUUCCCCCKKKK! How awful! It's so very "tell me you're a techie who doesn't understand & doesn't value creativity without telling me." I wish this AI snake oil scam would end yesterday already.

[marycrawford]

And the sad thing is that these are academics, rather than outright for-profit tech bros, you'd think they would have more of an understanding of fandom. I wish the same!

[gwyn]

UGH SO GROSS. I hate these people so much. Golem, what the fuck.

[marycrawford]

Seeeeeeeeriously. Someone named it that and thought they were being clever. Vom.

[klia]

Wow, what an appropriate name (modern usage). I loathe all of that shitty, plagiarist software so much and wish some hacker group would upload data destruction software into every single server.

[marycrawford]

I agree with all my heart. The hackers who are currently blowing up Twitter can come play, I'll bake them cookies.

[mekare]

Oh noooooo. I did archive-lock my stuff after the first information about data scraping came out, to prevent future scrapes, or at least to make them a little harder to do. I wonder if anyone has reported his project to the OTW yet? If it is "official" maybe they can do something?

[marycrawford]

I think the project is probably okay as far as the OTW are concerned - there's a guest post by the main researcher on the Transformative Works site that's part of the OTW. I get too annoyed by all the academic blather and I don't have the energy to dig into it, I admit. I suspect that since they did ask the users for permission first, the OTW doesn't have a bone to pick here, what with all the scrapers and malicious users who just spam us.