To all of my wonderful readers out there, your writers are under attack. For those of you who have ever used ChatGPT or some other AI program to write your own story, you should know that the writing is stolen. AI is using AO3 to scrape data and use our original, hard work to train the AI models. When you use these AI tools for writing, please understand that the work is stolen, the words are stolen, the style is stolen, the concepts are stolen.
If you have been wondering why so many writers now have their work locked or restrcted to registered users only on AO3, this post above explains why. The details are in the article but basically AO3 has been the victim of yet another scraping attack by AI. The only way to protect our work is to lock it down. Unfortunately, AI started training their models before Watpad and AO3 knew what was happening. Many of us older writers had our work stolen before AO3 was able to put up defenses. This is one of the main reasons that I have stopped posting to AO3 as frequently as I used to. Most of my stories are kept here on my own private site under lock and key.
Until the legal system catches up, there is not much we can do to protect our work. But I would like to beg you - all of you - please don't feed original work into AI. Please don't use tools like Grok and ChatGPT to write stories for you. Please, please stay true to the real writers out there who are working tirelessly to bring you original content created by humans.
Writing is my life. I love it so much and it brings me so much joy. It has saved me from depression, boredom and anxiety. Writing has been my connection to all of you. We have shared one heart because of the words that bonded us. Words based on my experiences and my knowledge and my opinions. I have used writing as a tool since I was eight years old. The thought that someone could steal my work and eventually replace me by using my own writing style is very demotivating and frankly devastating for me. I adore writing for you, but if I lose you because you have chosen AI, then I will lose great purpose in my life. Please give the humans a chance and give your time and energy to real work made by real people. I am writing something brand new for you and I cannot wait to share it with you. Thank you for being here and thank you for supporting me (one of the humans)
I love youuuuuuu, now say it back.
