just got a second official warning for my use of "from the river to the sea, palestine will be free" on the OTW volunteer slack
people are also currently asking board to ban saying that the founding of israel was colonialism—equating this to saying racial slurs—and were complaining about my status back when it was "palestine will be free", too
suffice to say, fuck that place, don't give the OTW your money, and don't fucking volunteer there
(the second screenshot is from the warning I got a few days ago)
Arabic calligraphy of Miguel O'Hara from Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse drawn by Twitter user alex_adamantius, shaped into the spider that adorns his suit
So, I made a tool to stop AI from stealing from writers
So seeing this post really inspired me in order to make a tool that writers could use in order to make it unreadable to AI.
And it works! You can try out the online demo, and view all of the code that runs it here!
It does more than just mangle text though! It's also able to invisibly hide author and copyright info, so that you can have definitive proof that someone's stealing your works if they're doing a simple copy and paste!
[Text reads "To humans, this text looks normal, but to computers, it's unreadable!"]
Of course, this "Anti-AI" mode comes with some pretty serious accessibility issues, like breaking screen readers and other TTS software, but there's no real way to make text readable to one AI but not to another AI.
If you're okay with it, you can always have Anti-AI mode off, which will make it so that AIs can understand your text while embedding invisible characters to save your copyright information! (as long as the website you're posting on doesn't remove those characters!)
I feel like there’s a lot of stuff coming to light lately about ao3’s glacial pace at adopting transparent and actionable antiracist policies (and the fact that a longtime head of the abuse team who helped draft their abuse moderation bylaws was documentably quite racist herself). And on the one had, like what you brought up about it taking a while for the archive to address the AI issue because of organization size and slow ability to pivot, I can see why it took some time to iron out the code etc for the new block mute functions. But on the other hand, I feel like not much else has happened, and more volunteers are coming forward about it having been a kind of catty and clandestinely bullying environment. Since you’ve been active for a long time and run an (albeit much smaller) archive of your own (pun, haha), I was wondering if you had any thoughts on this. And if there’s anything unique or cool in the SWG bylaws or structure to either prevent this sort of 1) buildup of crappy user behavior and 2) insular and punitive moderator culture, or if you’ve dealt with anything similar on the site etc etc. and maybe if you have any advice for folks who want to open their own archive or who just mod a large discord etc etc.
Oh yes, anon, I have tons of thoughts and ideas, and thank you for these wonderful questions! <3
First of all ...
ao3’s glacial pace
I recently wrote about the OTW’s fumbling of the AI issue and compared change on a large organization to port-rounding the Titanic. The AI issue is an apt illustration of that. In the time it took for the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild to 1) decide we needed an AI policy, 2) write said AI policy, 3) open it for public commentary, and 4) research how to block and then implement blocks on AI scrapers to the best of our abilities (since this will never be 100% since not all scrapers follow the rules), the OTW managed to ... assure a distressed membership base that the thing they were worrying about (AI scraping) had been blocked in December. Why did it take a week just to say, “Hey guys, we actually did this months ago”? When we (with far fewer resources!) took the exact same span of time and managed to write a policy, release it, and research and implement AI bot blocks?
Part of it is that, yes, smaller orgs have the ability to be more nimble. On the SWG, there is me at the helm, three active site mods, and two Discord mods who work on policy, involving volunteers (like our inclusivity focus group) as needed. We generally go with a majority rule, and we’re not bogged down by the legal obligations of a nonprofit as far as our governance. But it also reaches a point where the size of an organization is not the only reason why it can actually get things done, and when it takes a week to offer reassurance to your membership that you have in fact done what they want, it really begs the question of whether that organization is able to effectively function at all.
Without commenting on the viability of the specific demands of @end-otw-racism, they are absolutely right that three years is too long to go without action. That's absurd, and it’s hard to see it as anything but thinking that the right words following George Floyd’s murder were all that would be required and hoping that promises of actual action would be forgotten. Actually, I’m more sympathetic to the time to implement new block/mute code than I am to the failure of the Board to take the promised action against racist harassment within the OTW: the coders are purely volunteer, not elected, and the burnout of “techno-volunteers” is a known reality (e.g., De Kosnik 2016) of running fandom sites because it is a hard job, invisible and unappreciated, and it is never done. I know that I have new features and improvements on my to-do list for the SWG for more than a year now because maintaining the current site and fixing it when it breaks takes priority and a lot of my time. So when coders take a while to get something done? Okay, fair. But the Board? Were the ones who promised action that they don’t seem to have actually intended to take. In even the most cumbersome organization, we should be seeing goals set and progress, in however small steps, being made toward those goals. In three years.
if there’s anything unique or cool in the SWG bylaws or structure to either prevent this sort of 1) buildup of crappy user behavior
I think the OTW/AO3 and the SWG begin from completely different philosophical foundations.
I’ve been in Tolkien fanfic fandom since 2004 and founded the SWG in 2005, so at the risk of being all “I was there, Gandalf” ... I was there when the OTW and AO3 were first being discussed, largely lurking but definitely following the discussions. And I was there for the content purges on LiveJournal and FanFiction.net that precipitated those discussions, and I was a part of fandom when writing adult content--especially LGBTQIA+ adult content--was risky business, both within fandom and “IRL.” From this climate (and the fear it created) came the OTW and AO3: the idea that “we own the servers and run the organization so we can accept everything that is a fanwork on our site,” and fans would no longer need to fear waking up and finding years of their work gone in a single deletion spree motivated by gratifying fans who ascribe to purity culture or advertisers or anyone.
this is an earnest and honest plea and call in especially to fandoms as i see it happen more - please don't use AI for your transformative works. by this i mean, making audios of actors who play the characters you love saying certain things, making deepfakes of actors or even animated characters' faces. playing with chatGPT to "talk" or RP with a character, or write funny fanfiction. using stable diffusion to make interesting "crossover" AI "art." i KNOW it's just for fun and it is seemingly harmless but it's not. since there is NO regulation and since some stuff is built off of stable diffusion (which uses stolen artwork and data), it is helping to create a huge and dangerous mess. when you use an AI to deepfake actors' voices to make your ship canon or whatever, you help train it so people can use it for deepfake revenge porn. or so companies can replace these actors with AI. when you RP with chatGPT you help train it to do LOTS of things that will be used to harm SO many people. (this doesn't even get into how governments will misuse and hurt people with these technologies) and yes that is not your fault and yes it is not the technology's fault it is the companies and governments that will and already have done things but PLEASE. when you use an AI snapchat or instagram or tiktok filter, when you use an AI image generator "just for fun", when you chat with your character's "bot," you are doing IRREPARABLE harm. please stop.
This is the same program that had a near 60% fatality rate among its test animals because they were using glue (medical grade but NOT brain safe) to hold the fucking chips in place.
Test animals died horrifically after having GLUE POURED IN THEIR BRAINS. Some died of infection in the head wound. Some killed themselves by ripping off their own body parts. Some died when the glue failed and the chip started causing hemorrhages. In one fucked case, they gust put the wrong chips entirely into dozens of animals by mistake, killing them.
If even a single test chimp dies in a normal program, it's halted immediately.
He killed DOZENS and now he's moving on to humans.
He does not perceive anything outside himself as alive.
Genuinely there is no benefit to having this done anyway. What are you hoping to accomplish by buying this. Google with your mind? Unskippable ads in your brain? Neurological hacks? I mean really even if it were safe (it isn’t, he just has enough money to bribe the FDA I guess) this wouldn’t be a benefit to you at all.
But yes, definitely do not sign up for the clinical study. I don’t care how much he offers to pay you. Money means little in the coffin.
Neural interfaces could have many, MANY useful applications. From being able to control sensory signals to reduce overload or pain according to a person's needs, to allowing for a person to regain motor control after nerve damage, etc. or even to simulate certain sensory signals to allow for sensations from certain synthetic materials so that a person could gain certain sensation (such as heat, or pressure) in synthetic limbs?
Yes, I have been informed this has been marketed towards disabled people.
Which is significantly more concerning.
Because if you ask yourself why the rich white man who grew up benefitting from apartheid and slave labor would be interested in implanting chips into the brains of the disabled, and you see how many trial animals died or were permanently mentally disturbed, the answer you come up with isn’t usually simple philanthropy.
I don’t trust that this is just incompetence and delusions of grandeur at this point. It feels purposeful when the victims are a severely marginalized group of people rather than his rabid fans.
We are not scientifically at a point where brain implants can be used to benefit the disabled, and even if the chips didn’t kill patients and worked as the manufacturer intended, it would open the door to far less ethical uses for that sort of technology.
Specifically, if your brain can send signals to a chip to do something for you, that won’t be a one-way street. Perhaps on the first day it will be used to give new freedoms to disabled people. By the third it will reach its natural conclusion as certain people realize you can use it to try to “cure” autism, or perhaps “cure” queerness. Not to mention how easy an interrogation would be if a person’s thoughts could be admissible in court, or if they can simply type a line of code to make a suspect feel the sensation of being on fire for twenty minutes if they don’t comply. Workers not productive enough? Just press the button that blocks all thoughts and memories irrelevant to work until their shift ends. Inhibit parts of the brain related to bond forming and rest, inhibit pain processing while you’re in there so if a worker is injured they only notice when they’re off the clock and don’t have to slow down.
I’m aware this sounds cartoonishly evil, but the USA is cartoonishly evil already. Any positive implication for this is strongly outweighed by the negatives.
“Only rich kids played with Barbie” is just an absolute insane take. Literally every family had at least one Barbie at some point. Like ok if you had like walls lined with tons of different Barbies you were probably rich but I cannot stress enough that turning “playing with Barbie” into a bourgeoisie thing is just ahistorical to the point that stupidity is the only explanation
The $5 bargain Barbie, and the even cheaper bargain store rip-offs, were absolutely a thing. Also, Barbie has been around forever, and the further back you go, the sturdier the dolls become. Could my family afford to get me brand new Barbies? No. But I had my mother's Barbies, and my aunt's Barbies, and various Barbies from garage sales and flea markets.
"Only rich kids had brand new" is a statement that can apply to anything, but I assure you, children of all socioeconomic classes had access to Barbie. Not 100% of children, but children.
Nah in '90s Indonesia only rich kids can have a wall lined up with Barbie dolls. Knock offs came after them though so now almost everyone can have barbie-like toys at home
Speaking of fanfiction.net, did you know that while it was seven years ago and therefore obviously well out of date (though given the declining traffic over the past few years, that's not the biggest issue), some insane person (positive) on archive.org managed to do the unthinkable and archive a full snapshot of the site despite its infamous unarchivability; I didn't until I went looking for if anyone had good tips on downloading from there easily and found a reddit thread from 2016. It's here. So while I continue to fret about how goddamn difficult archiving the website in full will ever be when it inevitably collapses on us randomly, at the very least we have a snapshot of it as of 2016, in fact.
I just saw perhaps the coolest art installation I have ever heard of.
This is a perfectly normal pin. On the head of it are 2.417 quintillion angels, give or take a few billion.
Joe Davis and Sarah Khan, the artist behind Baitul Ma’mur, (House of Angels) encoded the Arabic phrase “Subhan Allah” onto synthesized DNA, and then used that DNA to coat the head of a pin. According to some traditions, any time Subhan Allah is said or written, it creates an angel. With DNA being as dense an information storage medium as it is, this single pin has more created angels on it than have ever been born from human throats across all of human history.
And then in a fucking genius move, the art installation takes the form of a functional vending machine, loaded with an impossibly large quantity of angels. For $25, which goes right to the artists, you can buy a pin. I’m thinking about taking mine out of the test tube sometime and encasing it in resin to turn it into the highest % angel by volume earring ever worn, but that’s a project for the future.
There isn’t much else I can say that isn’t said by the documentation accompanying the exhibit. The photos aren’t the BEST quality but they should hopefully be mostly legible.
As of right now this installation is located at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and if you’re ever in the area you should totally check it out
Okay, this is very weird. The green leafy thing is what I’m seeing but apparently there are multiple people who can still access the site? I’m very confused right now.
I did not have access to fanfiction.net on my phone. Did have access to m.fanfiction.net. On my desktop PC, I’ve got access to both. Might be some sort of technical issue but if you have fic up there that you haven’t crossposted or saved, now is a good time to do it!
It’s somewhat difficult to download fics off fanfiction.net or even to copy-paste, so here is a link to a web-based downloader that will download fics from ff.net to your format of choice - it automatically downloads as an epub, but you can also get downloads for mobi, pdf, or zipped html. this side is also compatible with a number of other text-based fanfiction sites. this is what i’m using to archive my earliest fanfictions - 2002 and 2003!
ICYMI, there was fear that companies were scraping public AO3 fics to train their AI without the consent of AO3 or its users. That fear has been confirmed.
The Silmarillion Writers' Guild just recently opened its draft AI policy for comment, and one thing people wanted was for us, if possible, to block AI bots from scraping the SWG website. Twelve hours ago, I had no idea if it was possible! But I spent a few hours today researching the subject, and the SWG site is now much more locked down against AI bots than it was this time yesterday.
I know I am not the only person with a website or blog or portfolio online that doesn't want their content being used to train AI. So I thought I'd put together what I learned today in hopes that it might help others.
Nah you guys don’t get it. For all that Gandalf complained about Pippin, he better than anyone else knew that Pippin was absolutely crucial. Pippin accomplishes a very impressive feat: not only does he manage to see something in the palantír (most hobbits would perceive nothing, as these stones were designed for use by high elves), but he manages to close his mind against Sauron. That is a seriously impressive feat of ósanwë given Pippin’s youth and almost total inexperience.The only clue Sauron manages to glean from the meeting with Pippin is that he is in Meduseld: which Pippin probably did not even directly give to him. Pippin did not tell Sauron his name, so Sauron is led to believe that Pippin is Frodo. I remind you, in the books, the Good Guys manage to trick Sauron, by making him believe that Aragorn has claimed the One Ring. They can only do that because of Pippin’s ridiculous feat of ósanwë. Far from sabotaging the mission, he is the one who allows it to succeed (albeit, not on purpose). This is why Sauron doesn’t think anything is fishy when Aragorn wins the Battle of the Pelennor Fields by controlling ghosts: that would be consistent with the idea that he is using the One Ring. Which Sauron believes that Pippin brought to him. This is why Sauron pulls out his old “play nice and weak” card from his Númenor days. He first of all believes that Aragorn is a lot more powerful than he actually is, and secondly thinks that the Ring is beginning to affect him.
He should perhaps have remembered that Aragorn is named for Fingolfin. Fingolfin’s mother-name, Arakáno, would properly be translated to Sindarin as “Aragorn”. Most people would not show up to an enemy fortress with an army they knew was far too small, and start a battle they knew they would lose. But Fingolfin famously did exactly that.
When you read the line “fool of a Took!” It is important to understand that in the context of Gandalf calling himself a fool on several occasions. Galadriel too sees beyond the veneer of foolish naivety in Pippin. She gives him and Merry belts that almost definitely were once her brothers’. A golden flower on a gift from Galadriel can only be a golden lily, the sigil of the House of Finarfin. Galadriel, while all hell was breaking loose in Tirion, raided her brothers’ rooms and took their belts from when they were little kiddos, hauled them across the Helcaraxë, and then held onto them for three Ages before giving them to two hobbits she just met. Merry, of course, is comparable to Angrod and Aegnor: his great deed is done in a moment of beserk rage, and it is a feat of strength. This then implies that she is comparing Pippin to Finrod. That’s one hell of a complement coming from Galadriel: but as I just pointed out, entirely warranted. Pippin manages to reproduce Finrod’s feat of radio silence, in the face of torture by Sauron. Which again, is extremely impressive given that Pippin is far younger and less experienced than Finrod was.
Quick PSA, if you get one of those "Work scanned, AI use detected" comments on AO3, just mark them as spam.
Some moron apparently built a bot to annoy or prank hundreds of authors.
There is no scanning process, your work doesn't actually resemble AI writing, it's all bullshit. Mark the comment as spam (on AO3, not the email notification you got about the comment!) and don't let it get to you.
They are now also linking to a site they claim is able to scan works and tell you whether they were AI written or not, and that you should do that before reading a fic.
It should go without saying that you should not, under no circumstances, visit a site advertised in a spam comment.
In this case, I'd say there's even a chance that the "scanning" site is actually used to scrape fics and use them for future AI writing. What it definitely doesn't do is tell you whether something was AI written or not. That's a bullshit claim.
Don't use that site. Don't believe these spam comments, whether you get them on your own works or see them on someone else's.
Image Description: a screenshot of an AO3 comment by nlaoboh that says HoloAI pattern found in work. To all readers, before you read please scan the work with an AI detector like gowinston.ai and call out all AI using cheaters /end ID
a superior mirage caused by warm air resting on patches of colder air in an atmospheric duct that acts like a refracting lens. Objects on the horizon could appear to be mirrored, distorted, or float. This form of mirage could be the reason for the Flying Dutchman Legend.
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