The Fanfic Sex Trope That Caught a Plundering AI Red-Handed
wired.com
wired.com
I’m like 99% certain that the concept of knots in the furry fandom predates it’s use in the omegaverse - people have been wanting to be fucked by werewolves long before the Supernatural fandom ever got started.
People like, for instance, Anita Blake, a book series which also predates the omegaverse, and includes the concept of biological and psychic linkages resulting in mating (with monsters.)
In summary, I am not impressed with Wired here.
It seems like TFA's author wanted to write an article about the ethics of training AIs on open sources without permission, and included a bunch of stuff about kink fandom just to be salacious.
[0] It went somewhat viral a few years ago when several of its authors, having gotten popular enough to publish paper books, started suing each other for plagiarism and lots of media coverage ensued.
I think this article was written for people who aren’t familiar with any fandoms: https://xkcd.com/2501/
Oh no! ... anyway.
Certainly. Or, perhaps, the idea that an author should have any say over what the rest of the world does to copies of the work which they originated – i.e. copyright – is the flawed idea. But one of them has got to give. We can either have large language models trained on everything, or we can have strict copyrights. But not both.
A book for sale is copyright. I can’t make a duplicate of it and sell it. But I can read it and learn, and use that knowledge for life.
Why can’t an AI model be fed a paid book and learn from it? Say feed it an entire library of books.
You cannot “steal” information. Me attaining that knowledge does not deprive others of it. You could make an argument for copyright infringement, but honestly, who cares? Me asking an AI does not deprive others of say a book sale, because inherently I am unlikely to be interested in a book on that topic if I just want the magic black box to give me a possibly hallucinated answer instead.
I don't really get it though. While this may be a specific trope, the internet is highly memetic and like anything else it did not stay contained within a very specific community. How do I know this? Well, for one thing, there's a Jezebel article about it from 2014.
I'm all for critiquing AI but this is just completely pointless shit, at least from what I'm able to read of the article bypassing the paywall prompt. I used to have a subscription to Wired and I'm increasingly embarrassed about it.