So I Made A Poll Asking Whether People Were Planning To Lock Their Fics To Help Prevent Them From Getting

So I made a poll asking whether people were planning to lock their fics to help prevent them from getting scraped by AI, and I’ve come away with two takeaways so far.

First, a lot of people think fics are getting chosen and uploaded individually to data sets, and think because they only write short works, or write for a small fandom that means their works are unlikely to be picked. That’s not what we mean when we say AI bots have been scraping AO3. We mean that bots are trawling AO3 and pulling any and all data from the site possible. It’s looking at all 11 million works, not just the ones individuals like/think are quality. AO3 has done what it can to prevent it, but says locking fics might help. Hence why many people are locking.

Second, damn. Y’all need to value your writing more highly. The number of tags I’ve seen on that poll saying things like “my work isn’t good, the sets don’t want it” or “I hope my bad writing poisons the sets” or “I only write porny shit anyway” is ridiculously high. It doesn’t matter if you’re not confident in your writing! It doesn’t matter if you feel like you’re just writing nonsense! It’s still work you did! It is still a genuine expression of your creativity. It’s important because you spent time on it, you put something into the world that wasn’t there before. You took your love for something and created more from that.

I know it’s often a defense mechanism for vulnerability. If you get out in front of the criticism and shit on what you did, then it hurts less when someone is a jackass about it. But don’t let that convince you your work is without value or worth. You put time, effort, and heart into it. AI shouldn’t get to profit off your hard work and vulnerability. Stop selling yourselves short.

If nothing else, value your labor.