April 3, 2026 • 51 mins
A lot is happening right now in terms of internet censorship and AI, and the fanfiction world is paying attention. We share some updates on this means for all of us, what to look out for, as well as some personal updates from the fanfic space. Kudos to all for listening!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Sanny and smitha and ofcome stuff. Will
never told you production, but I heard you. And today,
as Samantha's voice is still on the.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Mend, getting better, getting a little.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Better, getting a little better. But on the mend, we
are postponing our concluding question Mark episode on Ice that
was scheduled for the day. This is coming out and
doing something where I get to do most of the
talking instead. And that is because we are talking about
(00:45):
fan fiction, one of my very favorite things, and there
is a lot going on in not only the fan
fiction space, but the online space. And so what I'm
going to be talking about is largely about fan fiction,
but a lot of it does impact a lot more
outside of fan fiction, and a lot of it could
(01:09):
be used specifically to target queer people. So I've said
it before, I'll say it again. The fanfit community is
a very gay space. Honestly, I'm surprised when people tell
me they read straight fan fiction. I'm like, where did
you find that? Certainly it is dominated by women, non
(01:31):
binary and trans folks. Now, for this we are going
to be doing an overview of some of the proposed
legislations that folks are watching some official stances on AI
and some stuff that I've witnessed personally as an avid
reader and writer of fan fiction, and some updates of
(01:52):
my own. Disclaimer, I am going to be largely pulling
from archive of our own, which is called AO three
for short, a nonprofit fan fiction site that is primarily
what I use, and I feel like what a lot
of people in my age group use. Younger people too.
(02:13):
I think it's probably one of the biggest ones. Watpat
is generally that one skew's younger, and I've never touched
that one. I don't know what it's like. I feel
like it's more mobile based, mobile phone based. But I
used to be an oldfanfic dot net girl old days,
but now I'm AO no yes, and it's still around.
(02:34):
It's still there. Also, I feel like fan fiction has
gone way more mainstream since the last time we talked
about it. People are advertising their fan fiction on social media.
That's a whole thing now. I remember when it was
a shameful thing you hid, and now people are like,
(02:57):
go to my TikTok to get excerpts. Good for you, guys,
good for everybody, so you can see our past episodes
we did with Joey about Kosa. You could also see
the one that I did with Bridget on Fosta Sesta,
which was about sex workers and how they advertise on
(03:19):
the online space, and the Monday many I did about
the history of AO three specifically, also several more fan
fiction episodes, but related to this, it's been AO three
has been kicking around since two thousand and eight, and
it was created after Tumblr and a couple of other
platforms started removing content without warning, in this case fan
(03:44):
fiction related content and specifically LGBTQ plus contents, which was
more likely to be targeted for being too sexual, and
that is still true, which we're going to talk about.
That is still the case. Queer relationships were seen as
inherently more sexual as opposed to straight ones, so that
(04:05):
kind of content required a higher rating or it was
just simply taken off. And so people made archive of
our own, and a huge shout out to the volunteers
running the sites and compiling this information, because a lot
of what I'm going to be talking about I pulled
from them. So it's these volunteers who are looking at
(04:28):
these issues and making sure we're updated, keeping us informed.
So shout out to the volunteers. Thank you, thank you,
thank you. Also, this is just to reiterate an overview.
I did look into the laws we're going to be
talking about, but a lot of them are in kind
of legislative limbo, like maybe it passed the Senate, but
(04:50):
nothing's happened since then. It's been two years or something
like that. But certainly we could come back and do
a bigger episode on age raification and what's going on
with that. I'm going to mention it in here, but
a lot of moving pieces there. So today is April second,
(05:12):
twenty twenty six. Just want to put that out there
because there are a lot of moving pieces. And before
we get into this, I do want to mention that
AO three has their own policies around the age at
which people can use their site. It's thirteen unless the
user lives in certain countries in Europe where it's sixteen.
(05:33):
And this has to do with laws around children and
data collection. Because AO three is a nonprofit, this is voluntary,
but also because probably because they're a nonprofit, they do
not want to store certain information. For instance, in some
countries you can get a written permission from a parent
(05:54):
for certain sites that have you're like, Okay, yes they're
under sixteen, but I give my permission, but AO three
does not allow that. In November of twenty twenty five,
AO three posted an update highlighting some legal issues they
were keeping an eye on. Not all of them are
strictly fan fiction based, but they do. Slash would impact
(06:17):
the ecosystem that fan fiction exists in, and could. It's
a very all of this is a very slippery slope
kind of situation. So here are a handful. Over four months,
in twenty twenty five, at least thirty authors of Boys
Love Fiction or Done My were arrested in China under
(06:38):
their obscenity laws. Nearly all were young women. Some were jailed,
some were questioned. One of the arrested writers later described
the experience on social media, quote, I'll never forget it
being escorted to the car in full view and enduring
the humiliation of stripping it naked for examination in front
of strangers, putting on a vest for photos in the chair,
(07:00):
shaking with fear, my heart pounding. Another wrote, I'm only
twenty so young, and I've already ruined my life so early.
This news story went viral before it was largely censored.
So nobody could really see that much about it. The
targeting of don my authors is not new, but isn't
(07:21):
this is a marked escalation. Officials have cited the quote
negative impact on teenagers, which, as we're going to get into,
is an argument that comes up a lot. They've also
pointed to it as a reason for the declining birth rate,
which we've also discussed. And while heterosexual erotica is sometimes
(07:44):
targeted as well, it is much much more likely for
gay content to be targeted. And just to say, some
of this don my has been really successful, like made
into TV shows and stuff. So anyway, age ravication laws
this has obviously been a huge conversation recently. As of now,
(08:08):
AO three has no intention of introducing age verification for
its site, but multiple countries, states, and businesses have adopted
these laws, and in some cases are trying to pass
extreme forms of them. AO three, along with Wikimedia and
other organizations, have jointly filed amicust briefs against some stricter
(08:31):
proposed age verification laws in Utah and Mississippi. Both laws
were of course framed as protecting the children, but also
would severely hinder the distribution of free information and in
February of twenty twenty six, Discord announced the Phase four
(08:53):
rollout of their age ravocation program. It was pretty intense.
It called for things like video selfies to verify your
age group or submitting a form of ID, and this
was to guarantee under age users got quote teen appropriate
experiences that filtered and restricted content. The backlash was immediate.
(09:16):
Many pointed out a data breach Discord had had only
months prior that exposed thousands of users government IDs. So
Discord backtracked, claiming that they won't require a facial skin
or photo ID and that ninety percent of users won't
have to verify their age at all. From what I read,
they are still planning to push Phase four out though,
(09:40):
and I'm very interested about this ten percent.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
That needs to right.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
From what I read, there being kind of vague about it,
so something to keep an eye on as well. The
UK and Canada also have some age verification that could
put people's security at risk or just bar them from
a huge chunk of the Internet. Essentially, if you don't
upload your ID for if you're worried about security, then
(10:12):
that's just too bad. You can't access all of this stuff.
So from I checked where both of those laws were,
and from what I could tell, they are still slow moving.
But nothing's really happened with them. But if any listeners
from either of these countries, if you want to write
in and say, if you know what's going on better
(10:34):
than I do, then we have Russia's LGBT ban. So
in twenty thirteen, Russia enacted a law originally geared towards Quote,
protecting minors from queer content. But a decade later, the
Russian Supreme Court named the Quote international LGBT movement as extremists,
(10:58):
and this has made engaging in anything in the queer
community illegal. So obviously that's terrible, but it clearly it
would impact something like fiction, although interestingly I see a
lot of fan fiction written by it's in Russian. I
(11:19):
don't know, maybe they're not in Russia, but it's in Russian.
One thing that they didn't really get two and two
on this AO three post, but they did mention was
the social media bands that some countries are doing, just
because that is related and how this could play out.
(11:40):
And so we know, like Australia is the big the
big one right now, and we'll kind of see what
goes down there, and I mean the youths are advertising
their their fan fiction on social media. So here's a
(12:06):
quick update on COOSA. But yeah, see the episode Joey
did about COOSA are the Kids Online Safety Act, But
it's still kicking around and is now associated with the
Kids Internet and Digital Safety Are Kids Act, first proposed
in twenty twenty five. As it is, this would only
impact for profit companies, but as I said, a lot
(12:29):
of these are very slippery slope kind of situations. There
is a pretty wide range of people and platforms supporting it,
but also very many against it. Like you would be
shocked at how many people on different sides of the
aisle are that they're in alignment, and you're like, what
(12:49):
The problem here is largely that if it's implemented, it
could restrict access to information, particularly focused on marginalized communities
like racism, abortion, transition, use, LGBTQ plus issues. It is
extremely vague about what constitutes harmful contents, and it's that
makes it rife for abuse. We've already seen politicians do this,
(13:14):
so that's the concern. A lot of these things are
framed in a way where like on surface level, you're like, oh, yeah, cool,
but then when you think about it, like, no, that
could be really really bad. Yeah, there's something I hadn't
heard of. This one, the nonprofit Killer. This is a
bill proposed in late twenty twenty five, and here's a
(13:38):
quote from AO three about it. Section four of HR
nine four nine five would give the US Secretary of
the Treasury unilateral power to revoke the five OHO one
C three status of any nonprofit with minimal due process
simply by claiming it is affiliated with terrorism. The bill
allows the Secretary to limit the disclosure of evidence against
(14:00):
an accused nonprofit and places the burden of proving its
innocence on that nonprofit, meaning a nonprofit could be forced
to defend itself without being told why it has been
accused in the first place. Yeah, that's troubling.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
There was a lot of nonprofits obviously that are specifically
working with trans kids as well as specifically trans kids
and reproductive rights that knew that were very vocal about this.
I think mutual aid programs were also really concerned with
this conversation as well, because obviously right now people anybody
(14:36):
is being called terrorists. If you're helping a trans a
person that is considered a terrorists if you're helping, if
you're protesting things like Black Lives Matter, if you're in
that product protest, that is being seen as terrorist act.
If of course, Antifa was declared a terrorist act and
Antifa does not exist, but yet they can say this
(14:59):
organization is an antifault organization. So, which is what was
recently talked about in Texas with them going after a
group of people for their zines saying that they were
publishing terrorist propaganda because it was anti fascist. So yes,
it's a big, like all interconnected, scary scary scary thing.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Yeah, because I mean, ultimately, what we're talking about here
is censorship and who controls who gets access to what information.
Some of the examples I didn't even get to are
like larger platforms. I think gaming services like Steam, we're
(15:43):
being pressured to remove certain games because they use vendors
like Visa, and as we've discussed before, these payment processors
are very inconsistent and who they target and what type
of content they target, but a lot of it is
(16:06):
usually queer, and so they will push platforms to remove
that content, and you then that's a form of censorship
that that's you're not getting access to the content you
might not even note exists. It's not there anymore. Yeah.
Also just a note, a personal note from me. Uh.
(16:27):
With the whole FCC and like paramount deal thing, this
is all impacting what gets made, what gets canceled, and
what we see and a lot of queer content is
getting mixed or acted. And I believe this is why
(16:49):
I's queerbited. I have learned recently I can blame Trump
for that. Well, yeah, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure.
I'm like ninety percent sure. As I said, this is
just a handful of things that are going on. It's
like they also break it down state by state, and
(17:10):
that scared me. I was like, oh my gosh, every
state almost has something that they're trying to pass, especially
in the like age verification arena, and some of them
are really intense. I think the one Utah, which whoa.
I was taken aback by how intense it was. And
(17:34):
so we are going to have to come back to
this in a non fan fiction kind of way one day,
but for now, that's a brief overview of some of
the big ones. I did want to talk about AI
and fan fiction because I did bring it up in
our recent episode with Bridget I can't help myself. I
brought it up several times, but I didn't get to
(17:57):
go into some of the things. I don't want to
make it the whole when bridge it comes on the
whole Annian or fan fiction thoughts episode. So I found
this on kind of their AO three's terms of service
and it's presented as a very FAQ situation. So this
is a question answer. So here is the quote about AI.
(18:21):
Do you have a policy on bots are scraping? These
are ways of extracting information from or indexing websites. The
use of bots are scraping for spam, commercial promotion, are
other purposes that violate our policies is forbidden. This includes
scraping AO three for the purposes of obtaining material for
commercial generative AI are creating an app that host our
(18:42):
paywalls AO three content. The use of bots are scraping
for purposes that do not violate our policies is generally allowed. However,
we reserve the right to implement robots dot txt or
other protocols limiting what bots can do, or to notify
you and ask you to discontent If a bot or
scraping program is causing problems for the site. As for discretion,
(19:06):
we may also ban specific bots or other programs from
accessing an three. So in the episode we did with
Bridget that was about the whole thing with Shy Girl
and kind of this anxiety we have about content being
created by AI, I had it. I had a thing
in there where I said, you know, now, on a
(19:27):
lot of fan fiction spaces they're saying, don't use Google
Docs because it'll it'll scrape your Google Docs. But I
should have also said I am not convinced at all
that it won't just scrape your fiction, like right, but
like people and I love, I feel, I feel for you,
and they'll put little notes and they're like, please don't
(19:49):
I do not give permission for you to scrape this
for AI, and I'm like, HEYI does not care, my friend,
I was gonna take it. I get it. And it's
a lot of things change in the fan fiction space
when AI became more prominent. One of them was again,
(20:12):
I don't think this will really help, but maybe it does.
But a lot of people made their accounts private, so
that means that you can't if I wasn't logged in,
and you have to get an invitation to get on
AO three. By the way, to have an account, you
can go. But if you just go and you don't
have an account, you can't read anybody who's made their
(20:33):
account private. So a lot of fewel made their accounts
private after AI became a really big thing. I have
not done that yet. I did talk about how I
had experienced what I believed were AI reviews, but now
(20:54):
I probably should specify. I don't know if it was
AI or bots. I just know it wasn't a person. Hmm,
there's no way a person wrote that, because I got
the same review on multiple.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
What's the difference between AI and bots?
Speaker 1 (21:09):
I think AI, like ABOD is a more simplistic like
it has a more simplistic this is your whole thing.
Your whole thing is you go in, you respond and
with this one comment, whereas AI is kind of isn't
it that the thing is like it's learning. Maybe I'm
(21:29):
totally wrong, but I just felt.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Like I just didn't think about that.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
I mean, they are we obviously have two terms for them,
and there are two different things. So I just didn't
think about this. But because bots you use AI, I
know that.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Yeah, I mean maybe they were one and the same.
I feel like maybe they're one and the same now.
I feel like at one time there was a pretty
big distinction in them. Yeah, but anyway, And I also
said I had been accused of being a and I
didn't like that. But what how do you? I don't
think I do the AI things. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
If you use Google and you have any kind of autogorright,
it'll assume its AI.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
I don't.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
I told you, Oh yeah, you don't use Google. Do
you use it on your word?
Speaker 1 (22:17):
My spell check doesn't work? Oh yeah, this listeners. This
is actually a long running problem, and it's all so
many issues for me. My spell check does not work.
(22:39):
Here's my honest opinion. I think sometimes if somebody doesn't
like something, they're just going to say it's AI. I
think that's the stage we've reached where accusations will come
out of like, oh, it's AI because they don't like
(23:01):
what he wrote. I don't think that's the majority of
what's happening at all. I think it's a minority. But
I do think it happens. Like we were talking about
with Bridget I have no idea in the case of
Shy Girl, but I guarantee you. Some people probably just
didn't like it and were like, it's Ai. Some people
legitimately are like, no, I think it's Ai. But some
(23:23):
people just no, I don't like it must be Ai.
You're lazy. Yeah, but it is a bit. It's a
hot but an issue in the fan fiction space. People
go out of their way to prove it's not Ai.
I've said before in AO three, there's a lot of
(23:43):
tags that you can click on and kind of see
what the story is about. Now there are a lot
of tags that people put in and that are like,
it's not Ai. I like M dashes, it's not Ai.
Non native English speaker, it's not Ai. Like. People really
go out of their way. Usually there's a note about
(24:04):
it at the top, like I just like M dashes,
I promise you. But that was I didn't even know
about that, but only because of fan fiction I realized
it was a thing.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Mine autocorrects is for me because when I will use
a dash and not realizing it's supposed to be an
M dash and then it'll auto cray, I'm like, oh, that's.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Cool, hmm interesting, Like.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Oh, okay, that's what I'm supposed to be. No not
my bad.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
I don't think I use M dashes correctly.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Anyway, obviously I don't.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Occasionally I will say this, most people go out of
their way to prove they don't use AI. Some people
will be really upfront and say, I used it for grammar,
or I used it for bring Storming. So some people
will say that, and I usually don't read those stories,
(25:06):
not because I'm a like offended or anything, but because
they're usually pretty short, and I don't like it, like
six hundred words. I don't know. You gotta give me
more than that. I've got standards, I got deep plots.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
I needed to get to know the characters. I need that.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Stormy got little six hundred words. I've got my specifics. Okay,
you do. I like it, yes, but I have seen that.
But it's an ongoing conversation. And also, I don't typically
look at fan art, but people post fan art too
(25:50):
on on AO three and other fan fiction sites. But
I feel like the rules are stricter actually around fan art.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
I find that interesting again because I'm so into the
Korean world right now, with like everything and webtoons. It's
that huge obviously, and webtoons is basically comics. But novel comics,
I guess, and I don't think they're necessarily a fan fiction,
but they definitely ride that line.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Yeah, yeah, I from what I was reading, it felt
like a lot the images were much more there were
a lot more rules around them.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
But there was also a law in Tennessee called the
Elvis Law, and it was supposed to be it was
it was again a very vague law, but I guess
the overarching thing was it was supposed to be you
can't reproduce a person, an actor or singer, their image
(27:00):
as it passed their likeness. Yes, and that obviously, you know,
because then the concern is does that mean if you're
describing you're kind of describing a character, but an actor
who played that character, Like how far does that go?
But there's a lot more specific things around images that
(27:20):
have been legalized in the US. So that's sort of
what's going on with AI on AO three. I love
other listeners who use like wapad or something to write
in I've never stepped foot over there. I don't know
what would happened to me if I went over there.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Get your friend really into it?
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (27:44):
I never who talked about what pad? Pretty like detailed
at one point. It's been a minute, but.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
I feel like I have some friends who are who
were at one time. Like I said, it's kind of
a younger space, and not that there are plenty of people.
When I'm reading AO three, I'm like, you are young.
I can tell. And in fact, when we were talking
about how do you pick up? What do you think? AI?
(28:13):
Is one of the things I'm I'm kind of wondering,
is is it some of this? I wonder if it's
just younger people write more differently than I'm accustomed to.
There are some phrases I see all the time now
that I'm like, is that just a like lands differently?
Is that a young person thing? It's all over the place,
(28:36):
like all over some version of that.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
But watpad is especially like it's like mostly younger young people. Yes,
in my experience that could have changed. That was many
years ago, but I did have some friends who kind
of were there, and now they've moved to AO three. Oh.
Another thing I want to mention before we move on
from the AI bit. Something else that has changed is
(29:00):
that authors have become really preemptive about proving, not only
proving they're not AI but they're also more likely to
cite inspirations like I was inspired by this tweet, I
was inspired by this story, I was inspired by this
TikTok or whatever it is that's new, like that's that
wasn't that way when I first started reading fan fiction,
(29:22):
And I think that's a good thing. I'm not mad
about that. But people are much more likely to say, no,
it was this, here's the inspiration. And when you use
AO three you can there's a there's a like function
where you can say inspired by. But yeah, okay, so
back to we're kind of moving into my personal more
(29:47):
of my personal experiences now, but back to that whole
thing about images. So one thing I've seen playing out
right now is a huge fight about underage under age sex.
So a quick reminder here. We've talked about it in
(30:11):
past episodes, but as of now, AO three has archive
warning tags that you're supposed to use if your work
includes any of those topics. Otherwise you can be reported
unless you say, like chose not to warn. But I'll
get into that in a second. They are rape, slash,
non con major character death, underage sex which is under
(30:34):
eighteen in this case, or graphic depictions of violence. There
is also no archive warnings apply, and creator chose not
to use archive warnings. I find people usually use that
one to avoid major character death spoilers, or if they're
not quite sure where it's going. So you would say,
(30:56):
you know, when you see no archive warnings, supply she's like, Okay,
somebody either dies or they haven't finished writing this story.
But yeah, yeah, those are like the big things. On
top of that, there is a rating system similar to
movies or TV, but I have never used it and
(31:17):
I've never paid attention to it once in my life,
except when I was younger and the default was not
to include works rated MA unless you change the setting.
Then I paid attention because I'd change it. People also
use chapter specific warnings and author's notes and will often
ask what folks think they should tag if they miss something.
(31:40):
So I talked about this when we did our book
club on Dubcon. But usually in my experience, people are
very careful about that stuff. They do care about the
reader having a good experience. They don't want somebody to
report them, they don't want you to feel miserable. And
(32:03):
sometimes people will say, I think you should add in
this tag, and people will do it usually if somebody wrote,
if somebody left a comment online and I was like,
I really think you should add this I and I agreed,
like it wasn't just completely out of left field, I
would add it. So sometimes the author's notes serve as that,
(32:28):
especially if it's like not a big part of the story,
but anyway, those are kind of the main things. So
when it comes to this underage thing that I'm seeing
playing out, Here's what AO three has to say about
what content they allow. AO three was designed to be
(32:49):
a permanent home for all transformative fan works. We will
not remove content from AO three solely because it contains explicit, offensive,
or upsetting material, as long as it doesn't violate any
other part of the content policy, such as the harassment
policy or the non fan work policy. We allow content
of any rating and all kinds of fictional topics. Users
are responsible for reading and heating the ratings and warnings
(33:11):
provided by the creator. If there's a type of content
that you don't want to encounter, you should avoid opening
any work tagged or rated to indicate that it may
contain such content. Risk averse users should keep in mind
that not all content will carry full warnings if you
want to know more about a particular fan work, you
may also want to consult the bookmarks that people other
(33:34):
than the creator have used to categorize it. I didn't
know this was a thing. This is news to me,
and I'm too scared to look. But apparently when people
bookmark your story, they can write a little note like, oh,
this story is where this cute thing happens. But I
(33:54):
guess some people are really mean in there, which I'm like,
why would you bookmark a story that you don't want
can leave a really mean note? But anyway, I didn't
know that was the thing. I'm too scared to look.
But people are into it. I've seen a lot of
people commenting about I love going through the bookmarks and
reading what people around. Yes, maybe I'll get the courage someday.
(34:21):
This has always been an issue, this whole thing, because
as long as images slash photorealistic images of children aren't
being used in any way, it is legal in the
United States to depict children in sexual situations and CSA,
so it's legal on AO three and a big policy
(34:41):
on any fan fiction side is don't like to read
and as I said, tagging things appropriately. If you don't.
Someone can report you, but otherwise it is legal. In
my experience, people, as I said, they take it pretty
seriously and they air on the side of caution. Of
what I'm seeing this play out is they're they're like seventeen,
(35:07):
Like it's not like young young kids, but they're under eighteen,
and so it can get caught up in that, especially
if there's a shipping war involved. Oh my goodness. But yeah,
that's mostly what I'm playing out, but it is, it's
really big right now. I just wanted to include the
(35:30):
scope of what AO three is dealing with here, though,
because this is from their terms of service. What about robots,
computer simulations, elves, aliens, vampires who are three hundred years
old but who were turned into vampires at age twelve, etc.
The answer. The primary use of the underage sex warning
(35:52):
is to identify fan works depicting sexual activity involving humans
under the age of eighteen as measured in Earth years.
Please use your judgment for other situations. If the fan
work does not include a depiction of sexual activity with
a human under eighteen years old, then we will not
generally consider it underage sex, though creators may use the
(36:14):
archive warning if they feel it accurately represents their intent.
As always, we encourage creators and bookmarkers to be more
specific in tags or summaries where this would be useful
to potential audiences. I love that. I never even considered
this funny.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Earth years, Earth Years, you got to.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
It's true, though, There's all kinds of stuff being written.
I mean, I just was not expecting to read this
when I was researching yesterday. I know, you got to.
You got to. They have a lot more that that
was like the in my opinion, the funniest one, but
(36:58):
they have a lot more. Goes into detail about robots
and aliens, if you would like to look it up.
Another thing I want to mention, I'm not going to
go into detail here, but they have a lot of
things you're not supposed to do, things that can get
you reported, things that are violations. And one of them
(37:21):
that I read and was like, oh, that's not getting
reported because I see that all the time is violations
of the violent joke tag. So that's basically like, oh,
I'm just kidding, it's just a joke, but it's very violent.
I see that all the time, as far as the
eye could see. I see it and the thing is
(37:41):
like in less somebody reports them, then it's largely based
on who reports so, and maybe they did get reported.
I don't know. A lot of times I see it
and I'm like, whoa, you need to go outside, I think,
but I don't for it, but maybe somebody else did.
(38:04):
Maybe somebody else did. But I just when I was
reading through their terms, I was like, oh, that one
I see all the time, the commercial, Like you're not
supposed to do anything commercial on AO three either. For
a while I was seeing that all the time too,
where people would like leave a review and be like
I love if your work, it's great, you should pay
(38:25):
me to make a comic for it, or something like that.
And that's not a lout. Okay. So just to round
this out, these are some of my personal updates. First
(38:47):
of all, everybody's yelling at me. I've gotten several angry
comments because I have not updated since November. As listeners know,
I went into it to p and then a hypervexation
soon after. So yes, I have not updated. I am
(39:08):
not going to abandon it. I have like five stories
there they're going to be finished. But I do know
what it's like. I know the pain when you have
a story you really love and you're just desperately hoping, oh, oh,
they haven't gone away. It's kind of funny because there's
(39:29):
like two sides of this coin. Where As the author,
sometimes they'll say something and I've never personally liked this,
but sometimes they'll do something where they're like, unless I
get I don't know, five reviews, I'm not going to
post another one. And now you know, as the reader,
(39:51):
sometimes there's like, I'm going to abandon this story if
you don't update it within this amount of time, some
kind of like blackmailing stuff going on. Yeah, I do
feel bad, and one of the it's already half written.
I just have to finish. I just have to finish it.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Didn't you have a story where someone you've like, I
think they might have passed away?
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Yes, yes, I'll talk about this. Okay. So when I
was reading, I don't know that they did. But when
I was reading the terms service for this for this episode,
I learned that AO three has something called the Fanish
next of kin, and this is someone you can name
(40:38):
as the person that if you die, has access to
your account and they can't update your stories or anything.
They can't do anything like that, but they can post
like hey, sorry she's dead. Yes I'm thinking about doing it.
You worry about illness, death or hyperfixation, which I didn't
(41:04):
talk about, but it's true. You lose, You lose your
authors to some other fandom you go into like see
what they're reading, and they're like no, yes. And it's
called the AO three curse because usually a lot of people,
you get really excited at the beginning and you're like,
I have all these ideas post chapter, and then something happens,
(41:26):
or you get tired, you no more chapters written, and
you're like, oh, well now I got to sit down
and actually write some stuff. So the AO three curse
is real. AO three curse is real. But whoa, I
got a lot of angry comments. I got one today.
I haven't read it yet, but I could tell by
the subject line it was not happy. So I'm gonna
(41:49):
have to deal with that. One Another thing. I've said
this before, especially in light of all of what I've
just been talking about. Download the pdf. I'm a big
believe because they might. I don't know when it's going
to go away, maybe it won't, but if you have
the PDF, I've lost a lot of fan fiction actually recently,
(42:13):
because I was in another fandom and it's a lot
younger people, and they'll post something and delete it like
the next day.
Speaker 3 (42:19):
It's not fanfic. But it did take Stephanie Meyer's book,
which I think like has just was a published in
the last five years. We talked about it, but where
it was from Edward's perspective, it was ten years before then.
I found it and I'll printed it off at work,
hundreds of pages.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
I don't know how I got away with that, but
I did good for you. You knew.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
You knew.
Speaker 3 (42:47):
I was like, I gotta get it and I know
it's going to disappear because it was being like people
were erasing it because it was her property. So you know,
it is what it is when I found it, don't
worry about me. I try to have a copy of it.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
We're here the future book CLI perhaps yeah, I can.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Commit to that again. The movie is the one thing,
but the books that I don't know.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
I'm curious if people can tell when they when you
download their PDF because AO three actually has a lot
of like ways you can track stats. Yeah, in some
ways that creep me out. Not in uh, I mean,
it's like normal stuff. It's like how many people have
clicked on it, how many people have bookmarked it, how
(43:38):
many people have done that. But I guess what creeps
me out about it is some authors are so focused
on it that they'll like comment on it, and that
kind of creeps me out that they're paying so much attention.
But you know they're doing this for free until some
of them, until they get a book deal. But which
(44:00):
is another thing, And that's why I think the social
media aspect has become so huge. I've never seen it.
I've tried to figure it out. I don't think people
can tell when you download the PDF, but listeners right
in if I'm wrong, because I'm a that's what I do. Like.
If I like a story, I'm downloading it. I'm not
gonna let that get deleted and I'll never be able
(44:22):
to read it again. Something else. I did join a
fan fiction discord. Unfortunately, actually I went through all of
these steps to get in. Not only do I not
really understand how discord works, but that's when I went
into my depression and hyperfixation. So I haven't really been
back in. But I will so proud because you were,
(44:45):
like I know, I know the timing was terrible, but
I did get a mysterious message from the discord server yesterday.
I didn't read it because I thought it might be
an April Fool's Day prank. And I'm very suspicious of
April fl Day everybody, so I like, Nope, don't contact
me on April first. Okay, that's not Gooday.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
I realized it yesterday.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
You won't get me, Samantha.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
I won't get me either, because again I didn't know
what day was. I'm fine a bunch.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
I got several text messions to yesterday from people where
it was like, you know, it's April Fool's Day, right,
That is not true and everybody clearly forgot about April
Fool's Day. Uh, just all right. Another thing. I I'm
not going to get into this right now, but I
(45:37):
did want to just mention I have seen what I
considered a pretty troubling trope of Imagine you have two
characters of the same sex, one is straight and one
is gay. One loves the other one. The gay one
loves the other one, I mean, in my opinion, the
(46:02):
straight and loves the other one too. But anyway, in
these stories, somehow the straight person is able to like
wish that the gay person is the opposite gender so
they can be together, and I just it makes me
really uncomfortable. I've seen it in a lot of places.
(46:25):
Sometimes the point of the story is the straight person
realizes they're not so straight after all, and they don't
need them to be the opposite sex. But sometimes it
feels very like wishing away somebody's a part of somebody's
identity against their will. And to be clear, this is
(46:45):
not like trans like the gay person in question didn't
want this. Some kind of like ruminating on that and
what that might mean and what to say about that.
But that is one trope I've seen that I hadn't
seen a lot of until recently. I was like, ooh,
I don't I don't know how I feel about that.
(47:06):
I don't like that. I'm one one last thing podfic.
So this is when somebody takes your fan fiction mixup
podcast of it and you have to ask for permission
because technically you are the copyright holder with fan fiction.
(47:27):
At this we didn't get into copyright laws. That's something
that else that AO three and other fan fiction sites.
Our fantish sites are very active and monitoring. But technically
I own the copyrights on my stories, so you have
to get permission from me. But somebody, somebody has made
(47:51):
a podfick of three of my fan fictions. Really yep?
Do you know they ask me or if I don't
give them permission, they can't do it. I haven't listened
to them, but they're pretty popular, so I trust that
they're not like terrible. But maybe maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
What's it good? What's it called?
Speaker 1 (48:15):
No? Never? Never get it out of me? I know
some listeners have figured it out, but no. Okay. So
in conclusion, I understand that a lot of what we
talked about is really messy. I think it's hard to
police what kids see on the Internet, and a lot
(48:35):
of adults don't know how to or don't know the dangers.
But at the same time, I think a lot of
these things that we talked about are masquerading as protecting
the children, and they're not about that at all. They're
instead restricting access to information, to queer content, to anything
those in power don't want people to have access to.
(48:57):
And even if the person who is in now you
agree with, you don't know who's going to be empowered next.
And I know that yes, we're talking about fan fiction
right now, but really we're talking about so much more.
This does impact all of us. This impacts what we
can access, This impacts our internet landscape, and it's frightening
(49:20):
to see what is proposed and what could happen. And
I don't know. I just think that there are so
many big organizations that are against these laws, and when
you read why, it makes sense. So if you have questions,
(49:41):
you can look that up online. Thanks again to the
volunteers that run AO three. If you want more information
our ways to speak up against these acts, they have
links on their site. They also discuss a lot of
legal issues around copyright, like I said, so if you're
interested in that, and they did provide a lot of
(50:02):
the information for this episode, so shout out to them.
All the kudos to them. That's what it's called when
you leave a heart on a fan fiction on a review.
But yeah, listeners, we would love to hear from you.
If you know anything about any of these laws, anything
we missed, anything in the fan fiction world you'd like
(50:23):
us to talk about. Please let us know. You can
email us at Hello at stuff iever told you dot com.
You can find us on Blue Sky at mom Stuff
podcast or on Instagram and TikTok at stuff I've Never
Told You for us on YouTube. We have some merchandise
at comp Bureau and we have a beck you can
get wherever you get your books. Thanks as always to
our super just Christina or Executive for U, to my
and your contributor Joey, thank you, and thanks to you
who're listening Stuff I Never Told You question of my
(50:45):
Heart Radio. For more podcast from my Heart Radio, you
can check out the heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Hey, this is Sanny and smitha and ofcome stuff. Will
never told you production, but I heard you. And today,
as Samantha's voice is still on the.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Mend, getting better, getting a little.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Better, getting a little better. But on the mend, we
are postponing our concluding question Mark episode on Ice that
was scheduled for the day. This is coming out and
doing something where I get to do most of the
talking instead. And that is because we are talking about
(00:45):
fan fiction, one of my very favorite things, and there
is a lot going on in not only the fan
fiction space, but the online space. And so what I'm
going to be talking about is largely about fan fiction,
but a lot of it does impact a lot more
outside of fan fiction, and a lot of it could
(01:09):
be used specifically to target queer people. So I've said
it before, I'll say it again. The fanfit community is
a very gay space. Honestly, I'm surprised when people tell
me they read straight fan fiction. I'm like, where did
you find that? Certainly it is dominated by women, non
(01:31):
binary and trans folks. Now, for this we are going
to be doing an overview of some of the proposed
legislations that folks are watching some official stances on AI
and some stuff that I've witnessed personally as an avid
reader and writer of fan fiction, and some updates of
(01:52):
my own. Disclaimer, I am going to be largely pulling
from archive of our own, which is called AO three
for short, a nonprofit fan fiction site that is primarily
what I use, and I feel like what a lot
of people in my age group use. Younger people too.
(02:13):
I think it's probably one of the biggest ones. Watpat
is generally that one skew's younger, and I've never touched
that one. I don't know what it's like. I feel
like it's more mobile based, mobile phone based. But I
used to be an oldfanfic dot net girl old days,
but now I'm AO no yes, and it's still around.
(02:34):
It's still there. Also, I feel like fan fiction has
gone way more mainstream since the last time we talked
about it. People are advertising their fan fiction on social media.
That's a whole thing now. I remember when it was
a shameful thing you hid, and now people are like,
(02:57):
go to my TikTok to get excerpts. Good for you, guys,
good for everybody, so you can see our past episodes
we did with Joey about Kosa. You could also see
the one that I did with Bridget on Fosta Sesta,
which was about sex workers and how they advertise on
(03:19):
the online space, and the Monday many I did about
the history of AO three specifically, also several more fan
fiction episodes, but related to this, it's been AO three
has been kicking around since two thousand and eight, and
it was created after Tumblr and a couple of other
platforms started removing content without warning, in this case fan
(03:44):
fiction related content and specifically LGBTQ plus contents, which was
more likely to be targeted for being too sexual, and
that is still true, which we're going to talk about.
That is still the case. Queer relationships were seen as
inherently more sexual as opposed to straight ones, so that
(04:05):
kind of content required a higher rating or it was
just simply taken off. And so people made archive of
our own, and a huge shout out to the volunteers
running the sites and compiling this information, because a lot
of what I'm going to be talking about I pulled
from them. So it's these volunteers who are looking at
(04:28):
these issues and making sure we're updated, keeping us informed.
So shout out to the volunteers. Thank you, thank you,
thank you. Also, this is just to reiterate an overview.
I did look into the laws we're going to be
talking about, but a lot of them are in kind
of legislative limbo, like maybe it passed the Senate, but
(04:50):
nothing's happened since then. It's been two years or something
like that. But certainly we could come back and do
a bigger episode on age raification and what's going on
with that. I'm going to mention it in here, but
a lot of moving pieces there. So today is April second,
(05:12):
twenty twenty six. Just want to put that out there
because there are a lot of moving pieces. And before
we get into this, I do want to mention that
AO three has their own policies around the age at
which people can use their site. It's thirteen unless the
user lives in certain countries in Europe where it's sixteen.
(05:33):
And this has to do with laws around children and
data collection. Because AO three is a nonprofit, this is voluntary,
but also because probably because they're a nonprofit, they do
not want to store certain information. For instance, in some
countries you can get a written permission from a parent
(05:54):
for certain sites that have you're like, Okay, yes they're
under sixteen, but I give my permission, but AO three
does not allow that. In November of twenty twenty five,
AO three posted an update highlighting some legal issues they
were keeping an eye on. Not all of them are
strictly fan fiction based, but they do. Slash would impact
(06:17):
the ecosystem that fan fiction exists in, and could. It's
a very all of this is a very slippery slope
kind of situation. So here are a handful. Over four months,
in twenty twenty five, at least thirty authors of Boys
Love Fiction or Done My were arrested in China under
(06:38):
their obscenity laws. Nearly all were young women. Some were jailed,
some were questioned. One of the arrested writers later described
the experience on social media, quote, I'll never forget it
being escorted to the car in full view and enduring
the humiliation of stripping it naked for examination in front
of strangers, putting on a vest for photos in the chair,
(07:00):
shaking with fear, my heart pounding. Another wrote, I'm only
twenty so young, and I've already ruined my life so early.
This news story went viral before it was largely censored.
So nobody could really see that much about it. The
targeting of don my authors is not new, but isn't
(07:21):
this is a marked escalation. Officials have cited the quote
negative impact on teenagers, which, as we're going to get into,
is an argument that comes up a lot. They've also
pointed to it as a reason for the declining birth rate,
which we've also discussed. And while heterosexual erotica is sometimes
(07:44):
targeted as well, it is much much more likely for
gay content to be targeted. And just to say, some
of this don my has been really successful, like made
into TV shows and stuff. So anyway, age ravication laws
this has obviously been a huge conversation recently. As of now,
(08:08):
AO three has no intention of introducing age verification for
its site, but multiple countries, states, and businesses have adopted
these laws, and in some cases are trying to pass
extreme forms of them. AO three, along with Wikimedia and
other organizations, have jointly filed amicust briefs against some stricter
(08:31):
proposed age verification laws in Utah and Mississippi. Both laws
were of course framed as protecting the children, but also
would severely hinder the distribution of free information and in
February of twenty twenty six, Discord announced the Phase four
(08:53):
rollout of their age ravocation program. It was pretty intense.
It called for things like video selfies to verify your
age group or submitting a form of ID, and this
was to guarantee under age users got quote teen appropriate
experiences that filtered and restricted content. The backlash was immediate.
(09:16):
Many pointed out a data breach Discord had had only
months prior that exposed thousands of users government IDs. So
Discord backtracked, claiming that they won't require a facial skin
or photo ID and that ninety percent of users won't
have to verify their age at all. From what I read,
they are still planning to push Phase four out though,
(09:40):
and I'm very interested about this ten percent.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
That needs to right.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
From what I read, there being kind of vague about it,
so something to keep an eye on as well. The
UK and Canada also have some age verification that could
put people's security at risk or just bar them from
a huge chunk of the Internet. Essentially, if you don't
upload your ID for if you're worried about security, then
(10:12):
that's just too bad. You can't access all of this stuff.
So from I checked where both of those laws were,
and from what I could tell, they are still slow moving.
But nothing's really happened with them. But if any listeners
from either of these countries, if you want to write
in and say, if you know what's going on better
(10:34):
than I do, then we have Russia's LGBT ban. So
in twenty thirteen, Russia enacted a law originally geared towards Quote,
protecting minors from queer content. But a decade later, the
Russian Supreme Court named the Quote international LGBT movement as extremists,
(10:58):
and this has made engaging in anything in the queer
community illegal. So obviously that's terrible, but it clearly it
would impact something like fiction, although interestingly I see a
lot of fan fiction written by it's in Russian. I
(11:19):
don't know, maybe they're not in Russia, but it's in Russian.
One thing that they didn't really get two and two
on this AO three post, but they did mention was
the social media bands that some countries are doing, just
because that is related and how this could play out.
(11:40):
And so we know, like Australia is the big the
big one right now, and we'll kind of see what
goes down there, and I mean the youths are advertising
their their fan fiction on social media. So here's a
(12:06):
quick update on COOSA. But yeah, see the episode Joey
did about COOSA are the Kids Online Safety Act, But
it's still kicking around and is now associated with the
Kids Internet and Digital Safety Are Kids Act, first proposed
in twenty twenty five. As it is, this would only
impact for profit companies, but as I said, a lot
(12:29):
of these are very slippery slope kind of situations. There
is a pretty wide range of people and platforms supporting it,
but also very many against it. Like you would be
shocked at how many people on different sides of the
aisle are that they're in alignment, and you're like, what
(12:49):
The problem here is largely that if it's implemented, it
could restrict access to information, particularly focused on marginalized communities
like racism, abortion, transition, use, LGBTQ plus issues. It is
extremely vague about what constitutes harmful contents, and it's that
makes it rife for abuse. We've already seen politicians do this,
(13:14):
so that's the concern. A lot of these things are
framed in a way where like on surface level, you're like, oh, yeah, cool,
but then when you think about it, like, no, that
could be really really bad. Yeah, there's something I hadn't
heard of. This one, the nonprofit Killer. This is a
bill proposed in late twenty twenty five, and here's a
(13:38):
quote from AO three about it. Section four of HR
nine four nine five would give the US Secretary of
the Treasury unilateral power to revoke the five OHO one
C three status of any nonprofit with minimal due process
simply by claiming it is affiliated with terrorism. The bill
allows the Secretary to limit the disclosure of evidence against
(14:00):
an accused nonprofit and places the burden of proving its
innocence on that nonprofit, meaning a nonprofit could be forced
to defend itself without being told why it has been
accused in the first place. Yeah, that's troubling.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
There was a lot of nonprofits obviously that are specifically
working with trans kids as well as specifically trans kids
and reproductive rights that knew that were very vocal about this.
I think mutual aid programs were also really concerned with
this conversation as well, because obviously right now people anybody
(14:36):
is being called terrorists. If you're helping a trans a
person that is considered a terrorists if you're helping, if
you're protesting things like Black Lives Matter, if you're in
that product protest, that is being seen as terrorist act.
If of course, Antifa was declared a terrorist act and
Antifa does not exist, but yet they can say this
(14:59):
organization is an antifault organization. So, which is what was
recently talked about in Texas with them going after a
group of people for their zines saying that they were
publishing terrorist propaganda because it was anti fascist. So yes,
it's a big, like all interconnected, scary scary scary thing.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Yeah, because I mean, ultimately, what we're talking about here
is censorship and who controls who gets access to what information.
Some of the examples I didn't even get to are
like larger platforms. I think gaming services like Steam, we're
(15:43):
being pressured to remove certain games because they use vendors
like Visa, and as we've discussed before, these payment processors
are very inconsistent and who they target and what type
of content they target, but a lot of it is
(16:06):
usually queer, and so they will push platforms to remove
that content, and you then that's a form of censorship
that that's you're not getting access to the content you
might not even note exists. It's not there anymore. Yeah.
Also just a note, a personal note from me. Uh.
(16:27):
With the whole FCC and like paramount deal thing, this
is all impacting what gets made, what gets canceled, and
what we see and a lot of queer content is
getting mixed or acted. And I believe this is why
(16:49):
I's queerbited. I have learned recently I can blame Trump
for that. Well, yeah, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure.
I'm like ninety percent sure. As I said, this is
just a handful of things that are going on. It's
like they also break it down state by state, and
(17:10):
that scared me. I was like, oh my gosh, every
state almost has something that they're trying to pass, especially
in the like age verification arena, and some of them
are really intense. I think the one Utah, which whoa.
I was taken aback by how intense it was. And
(17:34):
so we are going to have to come back to
this in a non fan fiction kind of way one day,
but for now, that's a brief overview of some of
the big ones. I did want to talk about AI
and fan fiction because I did bring it up in
our recent episode with Bridget I can't help myself. I
brought it up several times, but I didn't get to
(17:57):
go into some of the things. I don't want to
make it the whole when bridge it comes on the
whole Annian or fan fiction thoughts episode. So I found
this on kind of their AO three's terms of service
and it's presented as a very FAQ situation. So this
is a question answer. So here is the quote about AI.
(18:21):
Do you have a policy on bots are scraping? These
are ways of extracting information from or indexing websites. The
use of bots are scraping for spam, commercial promotion, are
other purposes that violate our policies is forbidden. This includes
scraping AO three for the purposes of obtaining material for
commercial generative AI are creating an app that host our
(18:42):
paywalls AO three content. The use of bots are scraping
for purposes that do not violate our policies is generally allowed. However,
we reserve the right to implement robots dot txt or
other protocols limiting what bots can do, or to notify
you and ask you to discontent If a bot or
scraping program is causing problems for the site. As for discretion,
(19:06):
we may also ban specific bots or other programs from
accessing an three. So in the episode we did with
Bridget that was about the whole thing with Shy Girl
and kind of this anxiety we have about content being
created by AI, I had it. I had a thing
in there where I said, you know, now, on a
(19:27):
lot of fan fiction spaces they're saying, don't use Google
Docs because it'll it'll scrape your Google Docs. But I
should have also said I am not convinced at all
that it won't just scrape your fiction, like right, but
like people and I love, I feel, I feel for you,
and they'll put little notes and they're like, please don't
(19:49):
I do not give permission for you to scrape this
for AI, and I'm like, HEYI does not care, my friend,
I was gonna take it. I get it. And it's
a lot of things change in the fan fiction space
when AI became more prominent. One of them was again,
(20:12):
I don't think this will really help, but maybe it does.
But a lot of people made their accounts private, so
that means that you can't if I wasn't logged in,
and you have to get an invitation to get on
AO three. By the way, to have an account, you
can go. But if you just go and you don't
have an account, you can't read anybody who's made their
(20:33):
account private. So a lot of fewel made their accounts
private after AI became a really big thing. I have
not done that yet. I did talk about how I
had experienced what I believed were AI reviews, but now
(20:54):
I probably should specify. I don't know if it was
AI or bots. I just know it wasn't a person. Hmm,
there's no way a person wrote that, because I got
the same review on multiple.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
What's the difference between AI and bots?
Speaker 1 (21:09):
I think AI, like ABOD is a more simplistic like
it has a more simplistic this is your whole thing.
Your whole thing is you go in, you respond and
with this one comment, whereas AI is kind of isn't
it that the thing is like it's learning. Maybe I'm
(21:29):
totally wrong, but I just felt.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Like I just didn't think about that.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
I mean, they are we obviously have two terms for them,
and there are two different things. So I just didn't
think about this. But because bots you use AI, I
know that.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Yeah, I mean maybe they were one and the same.
I feel like maybe they're one and the same now.
I feel like at one time there was a pretty
big distinction in them. Yeah, but anyway, And I also
said I had been accused of being a and I
didn't like that. But what how do you? I don't
think I do the AI things. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
If you use Google and you have any kind of autogorright,
it'll assume its AI.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
I don't.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
I told you, Oh yeah, you don't use Google. Do
you use it on your word?
Speaker 1 (22:17):
My spell check doesn't work? Oh yeah, this listeners. This
is actually a long running problem, and it's all so
many issues for me. My spell check does not work.
(22:39):
Here's my honest opinion. I think sometimes if somebody doesn't
like something, they're just going to say it's AI. I
think that's the stage we've reached where accusations will come
out of like, oh, it's AI because they don't like
(23:01):
what he wrote. I don't think that's the majority of
what's happening at all. I think it's a minority. But
I do think it happens. Like we were talking about
with Bridget I have no idea in the case of
Shy Girl, but I guarantee you. Some people probably just
didn't like it and were like, it's Ai. Some people
legitimately are like, no, I think it's Ai. But some
(23:23):
people just no, I don't like it must be Ai.
You're lazy. Yeah, but it is a bit. It's a
hot but an issue in the fan fiction space. People
go out of their way to prove it's not Ai.
I've said before in AO three, there's a lot of
(23:43):
tags that you can click on and kind of see
what the story is about. Now there are a lot
of tags that people put in and that are like,
it's not Ai. I like M dashes, it's not Ai.
Non native English speaker, it's not Ai. Like. People really
go out of their way. Usually there's a note about
(24:04):
it at the top, like I just like M dashes,
I promise you. But that was I didn't even know
about that, but only because of fan fiction I realized
it was a thing.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Mine autocorrects is for me because when I will use
a dash and not realizing it's supposed to be an
M dash and then it'll auto cray, I'm like, oh, that's.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Cool, hmm interesting, Like.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Oh, okay, that's what I'm supposed to be. No not
my bad.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
I don't think I use M dashes correctly.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Anyway, obviously I don't.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Occasionally I will say this, most people go out of
their way to prove they don't use AI. Some people
will be really upfront and say, I used it for grammar,
or I used it for bring Storming. So some people
will say that, and I usually don't read those stories,
(25:06):
not because I'm a like offended or anything, but because
they're usually pretty short, and I don't like it, like
six hundred words. I don't know. You gotta give me
more than that. I've got standards, I got deep plots.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
I needed to get to know the characters. I need that.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Stormy got little six hundred words. I've got my specifics. Okay,
you do. I like it, yes, but I have seen that.
But it's an ongoing conversation. And also, I don't typically
look at fan art, but people post fan art too
(25:50):
on on AO three and other fan fiction sites. But
I feel like the rules are stricter actually around fan art.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
I find that interesting again because I'm so into the
Korean world right now, with like everything and webtoons. It's
that huge obviously, and webtoons is basically comics. But novel comics,
I guess, and I don't think they're necessarily a fan fiction,
but they definitely ride that line.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Yeah, yeah, I from what I was reading, it felt
like a lot the images were much more there were
a lot more rules around them.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
But there was also a law in Tennessee called the
Elvis Law, and it was supposed to be it was
it was again a very vague law, but I guess
the overarching thing was it was supposed to be you
can't reproduce a person, an actor or singer, their image
(27:00):
as it passed their likeness. Yes, and that obviously, you know,
because then the concern is does that mean if you're
describing you're kind of describing a character, but an actor
who played that character, Like how far does that go?
But there's a lot more specific things around images that
(27:20):
have been legalized in the US. So that's sort of
what's going on with AI on AO three. I love
other listeners who use like wapad or something to write
in I've never stepped foot over there. I don't know
what would happened to me if I went over there.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Get your friend really into it?
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (27:44):
I never who talked about what pad? Pretty like detailed
at one point. It's been a minute, but.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
I feel like I have some friends who are who
were at one time. Like I said, it's kind of
a younger space, and not that there are plenty of people.
When I'm reading AO three, I'm like, you are young.
I can tell. And in fact, when we were talking
about how do you pick up? What do you think? AI?
(28:13):
Is one of the things I'm I'm kind of wondering,
is is it some of this? I wonder if it's
just younger people write more differently than I'm accustomed to.
There are some phrases I see all the time now
that I'm like, is that just a like lands differently?
Is that a young person thing? It's all over the place,
(28:36):
like all over some version of that.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
But watpad is especially like it's like mostly younger young people. Yes,
in my experience that could have changed. That was many
years ago, but I did have some friends who kind
of were there, and now they've moved to AO three. Oh.
Another thing I want to mention before we move on
from the AI bit. Something else that has changed is
(29:00):
that authors have become really preemptive about proving, not only
proving they're not AI but they're also more likely to
cite inspirations like I was inspired by this tweet, I
was inspired by this story, I was inspired by this
TikTok or whatever it is that's new, like that's that
wasn't that way when I first started reading fan fiction,
(29:22):
And I think that's a good thing. I'm not mad
about that. But people are much more likely to say, no,
it was this, here's the inspiration. And when you use
AO three you can there's a there's a like function
where you can say inspired by. But yeah, okay, so
back to we're kind of moving into my personal more
(29:47):
of my personal experiences now, but back to that whole
thing about images. So one thing I've seen playing out
right now is a huge fight about underage under age sex.
So a quick reminder here. We've talked about it in
(30:11):
past episodes, but as of now, AO three has archive
warning tags that you're supposed to use if your work
includes any of those topics. Otherwise you can be reported
unless you say, like chose not to warn. But I'll
get into that in a second. They are rape, slash,
non con major character death, underage sex which is under
(30:34):
eighteen in this case, or graphic depictions of violence. There
is also no archive warnings apply, and creator chose not
to use archive warnings. I find people usually use that
one to avoid major character death spoilers, or if they're
not quite sure where it's going. So you would say,
(30:56):
you know, when you see no archive warnings, supply she's like, Okay,
somebody either dies or they haven't finished writing this story.
But yeah, yeah, those are like the big things. On
top of that, there is a rating system similar to
movies or TV, but I have never used it and
(31:17):
I've never paid attention to it once in my life,
except when I was younger and the default was not
to include works rated MA unless you change the setting.
Then I paid attention because I'd change it. People also
use chapter specific warnings and author's notes and will often
ask what folks think they should tag if they miss something.
(31:40):
So I talked about this when we did our book
club on Dubcon. But usually in my experience, people are
very careful about that stuff. They do care about the
reader having a good experience. They don't want somebody to
report them, they don't want you to feel miserable. And
(32:03):
sometimes people will say, I think you should add in
this tag, and people will do it usually if somebody wrote,
if somebody left a comment online and I was like,
I really think you should add this I and I agreed,
like it wasn't just completely out of left field, I
would add it. So sometimes the author's notes serve as that,
(32:28):
especially if it's like not a big part of the story,
but anyway, those are kind of the main things. So
when it comes to this underage thing that I'm seeing
playing out, Here's what AO three has to say about
what content they allow. AO three was designed to be
(32:49):
a permanent home for all transformative fan works. We will
not remove content from AO three solely because it contains explicit, offensive,
or upsetting material, as long as it doesn't violate any
other part of the content policy, such as the harassment
policy or the non fan work policy. We allow content
of any rating and all kinds of fictional topics. Users
are responsible for reading and heating the ratings and warnings
(33:11):
provided by the creator. If there's a type of content
that you don't want to encounter, you should avoid opening
any work tagged or rated to indicate that it may
contain such content. Risk averse users should keep in mind
that not all content will carry full warnings if you
want to know more about a particular fan work, you
may also want to consult the bookmarks that people other
(33:34):
than the creator have used to categorize it. I didn't
know this was a thing. This is news to me,
and I'm too scared to look. But apparently when people
bookmark your story, they can write a little note like, oh,
this story is where this cute thing happens. But I
(33:54):
guess some people are really mean in there, which I'm like,
why would you bookmark a story that you don't want
can leave a really mean note? But anyway, I didn't
know that was the thing. I'm too scared to look.
But people are into it. I've seen a lot of
people commenting about I love going through the bookmarks and
reading what people around. Yes, maybe I'll get the courage someday.
(34:21):
This has always been an issue, this whole thing, because
as long as images slash photorealistic images of children aren't
being used in any way, it is legal in the
United States to depict children in sexual situations and CSA,
so it's legal on AO three and a big policy
(34:41):
on any fan fiction side is don't like to read
and as I said, tagging things appropriately. If you don't.
Someone can report you, but otherwise it is legal. In
my experience, people, as I said, they take it pretty
seriously and they air on the side of caution. Of
what I'm seeing this play out is they're they're like seventeen,
(35:07):
Like it's not like young young kids, but they're under eighteen,
and so it can get caught up in that, especially
if there's a shipping war involved. Oh my goodness. But yeah,
that's mostly what I'm playing out, but it is, it's
really big right now. I just wanted to include the
(35:30):
scope of what AO three is dealing with here, though,
because this is from their terms of service. What about robots,
computer simulations, elves, aliens, vampires who are three hundred years
old but who were turned into vampires at age twelve, etc.
The answer. The primary use of the underage sex warning
(35:52):
is to identify fan works depicting sexual activity involving humans
under the age of eighteen as measured in Earth years.
Please use your judgment for other situations. If the fan
work does not include a depiction of sexual activity with
a human under eighteen years old, then we will not
generally consider it underage sex, though creators may use the
(36:14):
archive warning if they feel it accurately represents their intent.
As always, we encourage creators and bookmarkers to be more
specific in tags or summaries where this would be useful
to potential audiences. I love that. I never even considered
this funny.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Earth years, Earth Years, you got to.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
It's true, though, There's all kinds of stuff being written.
I mean, I just was not expecting to read this
when I was researching yesterday. I know, you got to.
You got to. They have a lot more that that
was like the in my opinion, the funniest one, but
(36:58):
they have a lot more. Goes into detail about robots
and aliens, if you would like to look it up.
Another thing I want to mention, I'm not going to
go into detail here, but they have a lot of
things you're not supposed to do, things that can get
you reported, things that are violations. And one of them
(37:21):
that I read and was like, oh, that's not getting
reported because I see that all the time is violations
of the violent joke tag. So that's basically like, oh,
I'm just kidding, it's just a joke, but it's very violent.
I see that all the time, as far as the
eye could see. I see it and the thing is
(37:41):
like in less somebody reports them, then it's largely based
on who reports so, and maybe they did get reported.
I don't know. A lot of times I see it
and I'm like, whoa, you need to go outside, I think,
but I don't for it, but maybe somebody else did.
(38:04):
Maybe somebody else did. But I just when I was
reading through their terms, I was like, oh, that one
I see all the time, the commercial, Like you're not
supposed to do anything commercial on AO three either. For
a while I was seeing that all the time too,
where people would like leave a review and be like
I love if your work, it's great, you should pay
(38:25):
me to make a comic for it, or something like that.
And that's not a lout. Okay. So just to round
this out, these are some of my personal updates. First
(38:47):
of all, everybody's yelling at me. I've gotten several angry
comments because I have not updated since November. As listeners know,
I went into it to p and then a hypervexation
soon after. So yes, I have not updated. I am
(39:08):
not going to abandon it. I have like five stories
there they're going to be finished. But I do know
what it's like. I know the pain when you have
a story you really love and you're just desperately hoping, oh, oh,
they haven't gone away. It's kind of funny because there's
(39:29):
like two sides of this coin. Where As the author,
sometimes they'll say something and I've never personally liked this,
but sometimes they'll do something where they're like, unless I
get I don't know, five reviews, I'm not going to
post another one. And now you know, as the reader,
(39:51):
sometimes there's like, I'm going to abandon this story if
you don't update it within this amount of time, some
kind of like blackmailing stuff going on. Yeah, I do
feel bad, and one of the it's already half written.
I just have to finish. I just have to finish it.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Didn't you have a story where someone you've like, I
think they might have passed away?
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Yes, yes, I'll talk about this. Okay. So when I
was reading, I don't know that they did. But when
I was reading the terms service for this for this episode,
I learned that AO three has something called the Fanish
next of kin, and this is someone you can name
(40:38):
as the person that if you die, has access to
your account and they can't update your stories or anything.
They can't do anything like that, but they can post
like hey, sorry she's dead. Yes I'm thinking about doing it.
You worry about illness, death or hyperfixation, which I didn't
(41:04):
talk about, but it's true. You lose, You lose your
authors to some other fandom you go into like see
what they're reading, and they're like no, yes. And it's
called the AO three curse because usually a lot of people,
you get really excited at the beginning and you're like,
I have all these ideas post chapter, and then something happens,
(41:26):
or you get tired, you no more chapters written, and
you're like, oh, well now I got to sit down
and actually write some stuff. So the AO three curse
is real. AO three curse is real. But whoa, I
got a lot of angry comments. I got one today.
I haven't read it yet, but I could tell by
the subject line it was not happy. So I'm gonna
(41:49):
have to deal with that. One Another thing. I've said
this before, especially in light of all of what I've
just been talking about. Download the pdf. I'm a big
believe because they might. I don't know when it's going
to go away, maybe it won't, but if you have
the PDF, I've lost a lot of fan fiction actually recently,
(42:13):
because I was in another fandom and it's a lot
younger people, and they'll post something and delete it like
the next day.
Speaker 3 (42:19):
It's not fanfic. But it did take Stephanie Meyer's book,
which I think like has just was a published in
the last five years. We talked about it, but where
it was from Edward's perspective, it was ten years before then.
I found it and I'll printed it off at work,
hundreds of pages.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
I don't know how I got away with that, but
I did good for you. You knew.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
You knew.
Speaker 3 (42:47):
I was like, I gotta get it and I know
it's going to disappear because it was being like people
were erasing it because it was her property. So you know,
it is what it is when I found it, don't
worry about me. I try to have a copy of it.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
We're here the future book CLI perhaps yeah, I can.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Commit to that again. The movie is the one thing,
but the books that I don't know.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
I'm curious if people can tell when they when you
download their PDF because AO three actually has a lot
of like ways you can track stats. Yeah, in some
ways that creep me out. Not in uh, I mean,
it's like normal stuff. It's like how many people have
clicked on it, how many people have bookmarked it, how
(43:38):
many people have done that. But I guess what creeps
me out about it is some authors are so focused
on it that they'll like comment on it, and that
kind of creeps me out that they're paying so much attention.
But you know they're doing this for free until some
of them, until they get a book deal. But which
(44:00):
is another thing, And that's why I think the social
media aspect has become so huge. I've never seen it.
I've tried to figure it out. I don't think people
can tell when you download the PDF, but listeners right
in if I'm wrong, because I'm a that's what I do. Like.
If I like a story, I'm downloading it. I'm not
gonna let that get deleted and I'll never be able
(44:22):
to read it again. Something else. I did join a
fan fiction discord. Unfortunately, actually I went through all of
these steps to get in. Not only do I not
really understand how discord works, but that's when I went
into my depression and hyperfixation. So I haven't really been
back in. But I will so proud because you were,
(44:45):
like I know, I know the timing was terrible, but
I did get a mysterious message from the discord server yesterday.
I didn't read it because I thought it might be
an April Fool's Day prank. And I'm very suspicious of
April fl Day everybody, so I like, Nope, don't contact
me on April first. Okay, that's not Gooday.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
I realized it yesterday.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
You won't get me, Samantha.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
I won't get me either, because again I didn't know
what day was. I'm fine a bunch.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
I got several text messions to yesterday from people where
it was like, you know, it's April Fool's Day, right,
That is not true and everybody clearly forgot about April
Fool's Day. Uh, just all right. Another thing. I I'm
not going to get into this right now, but I
(45:37):
did want to just mention I have seen what I
considered a pretty troubling trope of Imagine you have two
characters of the same sex, one is straight and one
is gay. One loves the other one. The gay one
loves the other one, I mean, in my opinion, the
(46:02):
straight and loves the other one too. But anyway, in
these stories, somehow the straight person is able to like
wish that the gay person is the opposite gender so
they can be together, and I just it makes me
really uncomfortable. I've seen it in a lot of places.
(46:25):
Sometimes the point of the story is the straight person
realizes they're not so straight after all, and they don't
need them to be the opposite sex. But sometimes it
feels very like wishing away somebody's a part of somebody's
identity against their will. And to be clear, this is
(46:45):
not like trans like the gay person in question didn't
want this. Some kind of like ruminating on that and
what that might mean and what to say about that.
But that is one trope I've seen that I hadn't
seen a lot of until recently. I was like, ooh,
I don't I don't know how I feel about that.
(47:06):
I don't like that. I'm one one last thing podfic.
So this is when somebody takes your fan fiction mixup
podcast of it and you have to ask for permission
because technically you are the copyright holder with fan fiction.
(47:27):
At this we didn't get into copyright laws. That's something
that else that AO three and other fan fiction sites.
Our fantish sites are very active and monitoring. But technically
I own the copyrights on my stories, so you have
to get permission from me. But somebody, somebody has made
(47:51):
a podfick of three of my fan fictions. Really yep?
Do you know they ask me or if I don't
give them permission, they can't do it. I haven't listened
to them, but they're pretty popular, so I trust that
they're not like terrible. But maybe maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
What's it good? What's it called?
Speaker 1 (48:15):
No? Never? Never get it out of me? I know
some listeners have figured it out, but no. Okay. So
in conclusion, I understand that a lot of what we
talked about is really messy. I think it's hard to
police what kids see on the Internet, and a lot
(48:35):
of adults don't know how to or don't know the dangers.
But at the same time, I think a lot of
these things that we talked about are masquerading as protecting
the children, and they're not about that at all. They're
instead restricting access to information, to queer content, to anything
those in power don't want people to have access to.
(48:57):
And even if the person who is in now you
agree with, you don't know who's going to be empowered next.
And I know that yes, we're talking about fan fiction
right now, but really we're talking about so much more.
This does impact all of us. This impacts what we
can access, This impacts our internet landscape, and it's frightening
(49:20):
to see what is proposed and what could happen. And
I don't know. I just think that there are so
many big organizations that are against these laws, and when
you read why, it makes sense. So if you have questions,
(49:41):
you can look that up online. Thanks again to the
volunteers that run AO three. If you want more information
our ways to speak up against these acts, they have
links on their site. They also discuss a lot of
legal issues around copyright, like I said, so if you're
interested in that, and they did provide a lot of
(50:02):
the information for this episode, so shout out to them.
All the kudos to them. That's what it's called when
you leave a heart on a fan fiction on a review.
But yeah, listeners, we would love to hear from you.
If you know anything about any of these laws, anything
we missed, anything in the fan fiction world you'd like
(50:23):
us to talk about. Please let us know. You can
email us at Hello at stuff iever told you dot com.
You can find us on Blue Sky at mom Stuff
podcast or on Instagram and TikTok at stuff I've Never
Told You for us on YouTube. We have some merchandise
at comp Bureau and we have a beck you can
get wherever you get your books. Thanks as always to
our super just Christina or Executive for U, to my
and your contributor Joey, thank you, and thanks to you
who're listening Stuff I Never Told You question of my
(50:45):
Heart Radio. For more podcast from my Heart Radio, you
can check out the heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows
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