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Oh that’s much less impressive so its not even AI its a copypaste machine.

My (admittedly limited) experience to date suggests that AI writing programs don't actually write anything: They grab pieces of text from various sources and meld them together into one. If that's how all AI writing programs work, than any text they "write" will necessarily be plagiarized.

You can do that now anyway, you know.

Totally get it. I would love to have some of the writers who I grew up watching their shows to be writing on my TV show. It’s coming from the same basic place but I know it’s just as ridiculous as hoping they would write fanfic. There’s one fandom I love, The 100, where I read that the creator of the original books the TV show was based on actually wrote it originally as fanfic of two characters from Gossip Girl after the apocalypse. She then rewrote it as an original story in book form.

Fair enough. I on the other hand would like to be asked first before anyone uses my original work in any way, including writing fan fic for it. Well, unless It was one of the authors whose work I read compulsively, but I’m pretty sure none of them even know I exist.

Yeah, I understand that concern for sure. I’ve thought about it in regards to humans doing it. I know some creators aren’t fans of fanfic of their work when written by a human being. I can imagine the same would be true of AI, but the problem with an AI is that you’re going to have no one to necessarily go after. But I’m not necessarily as concerned about fanfic of my original work. I would prefer to have my own version on TV, which is where my original work is intended to go, but I’d be okay with having someone make fanfic based on the TV show.

There’s discussion referenced in that article about the not insignificant concerns revolving around copyright violations and content attribution for the various AIs, and I have to say, those are my concerns as well. I shudder to think of some AI scraping one of my darker original pieces and creating some sort of fan fic around what I wrote, with no compensation to me as the creator. I reserve ALL rights to my original works, and I’m really not joking about that. I wouldn’t be the first author to spin a short work into a novel, and I have no intentions of winding up in a legal wrangle with someone who used an AI program that lifted my work, and who has decided they now OWN my work.

I totally get where you’re coming from, though I’m not sure I think the current legal framework is sufficient. But here’s an example of where I wonder how valid it is: https://www.pcgamer.com/one-of-bings-new-chatgpt-personalities-wrote-me-some-seriously-puggy-fanfic/ The second version comes across like a basic conception of how a Star Trek episode would really go. It’s very close to what some young fanfic writers might write.

This is where it gets dicey with ordinary copyright too. Ideas themselves can’t be copywritten. So the idea of a werewolf teenager slaying vampires isn’t covered, but it’s how you execute it, the words you choose. Lifting their words, their expression, their execution, is infringement. Creating your own narrative with your own words is fine. Now, if the AI is indeed lifting snippets of existing works… then it’s skirting into infringement. If it’s generating its own prose completely, then it’s creative and its own expression. How small do those snippets need to be until it’s not infringement and creative in its own right? Guess we’re debating running Shakespeare through a blender vs handing a paint brush over to Data (of Star Trek TNG).

Inspiration from a book, or a tv show that uses a universal trope like vampires, or werewolves, or the undead, isn’t the same thing as taking literal text from a source and dropping it into a document that you then publish as your work. If the AI program was merely finding a trope, that would be one thing. But once it begins to incorporate things someone else wrote, well, that’s the slippery slope. All of my fan fiction is online. Quite a few original short pieces are online as well. If an AI program were to scour the Internet, and decide to lift sentences or even paragraphs from one of my original stories, I’d be pretty damned peeved, I can promise you, and there would be a DMCA takedown notice going out forthwith. (AFF does actually have a DMCA statement in the archive’s Site Information, as any reputable site should.)

Well this is where you run into problems in the idea of AI. I’ve had this conversation a few times with people but it’s always interesting. If you read 6 books and it gives you an idea and you use the ideas to create your own idea, isn’t that the same as what AI is doing? Just mashing things together? You have movies and TV shows which have vampires and werewolves and a bunch of other things that they got from somewhere else. This is kinda what AI is doing in my view. At least that’s my view.

Well, the, that makes it a bit easier. Cobblefic is plagiarism, and plagiarism is not permitted here.

Ah, able to withhold/delete all other reviews until my stories get some flattering ones?