Here we go again.

[hindsightseeing]

A bit late on this one, I think, but for those who may not have heard about it:
The spambots messing around with AO3 are, once again, upping their game.

The longer this goes on, the more grateful I am that, when I went scorched earth on my old AO3 account and made my new one, the default comment settings was 'Archive Users Only' and I never bothered to change it. I suspect this is probably why I've thus far remained spam-free.

I keep thinking I should probably bite the bullet and lock down all my stuff like most others are doing... but I'd like to avoid that for as long as possible. When you're basically the only one still writing for a thing, you want to keep as much of the joy for that thing as public as possible, you know?

Comments

[kitarella_imagines]

Ugh, it's such a pain isn't it! I locked my fics to AO3 only ages ago but I still get those 'comic artist' spammers trying to get money out of me.

I locked my fics down to avoid them being scraped by AI and/or people because there were a few 'entrepreneurs' trying to steal fics from AO3 and sell them for money/use them to train AI.

No thank you very much! I write fanfics as a fun hobby for myself and other fans, not for random people to steal and make money out of things I've spent hours carefully crafting.

Just my personal view, I don't like others profiting from my work.

[hindsightseeing]

Yep, yep, yep, to all of this.

I deleted over a decade's worth of work, in no small part because of the AI-scraping nonsense when it first happened, and it's taken a very long time to crawl back to the mindset of "to hell with them, I'm not going to let them take this away from me".

Fanworks are not "content" to be farmed or sold or fed into machines, they're the manifestation of our love for the things that bring us joy, and the sole purpose of places like AO3 is to share them with other people who also derive joy from those things.

I really wish there was a better solution... but I guess, right now, the biggest act of resistance we have in the face of a seemingly endless army of bots is to just keep doing the work and sharing the love and being as unapologetically human as we possibly can.

[kitarella_imagines]

Oh gosh I'm really sorry you felt you had to delete all your work because of the stupid AI scraping! I hope you kept copies of them?

That is the perfect summary of what fanworks are! Exactly. They are not 'content.'

This is the best resistance indeed. Keep trying to be human and connecting with other humans and fight off the bots and heartlessness.

😊

[tellshannon815]

While I haven't wanted to lock mine down, I've been getting enough bot comments recently to have started considering it.

[hindsightseeing]

Ugh, that sucks.

Would restricting comments to users-only help at all? As I understand it, there are already a few logged-in bots sneaking around, but if it can reduce the influx even a little, might be worth a shot?

[mossy_bench]

When you're basically the only one still writing for a thing, you want to keep as much of the joy for that thing as public as possible, you know? This is how I feel, too. I've gotten spam comments from both guest and logged-in accounts, so locking down would be an imperfect solution anyway.

As for concerns about scraping for gen AI, my perspective is that it's a bit of a moot point. My works were probably already scraped years ago. Perhaps archive-locking stops the most lazy scraping attempts, but I think people miss that it's still 100% possible (and pretty easy) to scrape archive-locked works. I understand why people might lock their works or put an anti-AI statement in their profile to discourage individuals from feeding their writing into a gen AI tool—but when it comes to large-scale scraping, the only way you can prevent people from getting at your works is by not posting them to AO3 in the first place.

In the end, I'd rather that people in my tiny fandom be able to see my fics even if they don't have an AO3 account. So, unlocked they remain.

Sorry, this got long! Just my two cents.

[hindsightseeing]

Yea, this is pretty much exactly where I've landed too. It's taken me a few years to get to this point, but ultimately, I think you're right -- scrapers are going to find a way to scrape anything and everything they can get their hands on... so, short of just never posting anything anywhere ever again, all we can do is just try not to let it affect us too much.

I may reassess the need to lock down at a future date, but at least for now, I'm content to just keep feeding my tiny little fandom as loudly and passionately as possible, come what may.