I'm seeing some frustration over fandom creatives expressing anger or distress over people feeding their work into ChatGPT. I'm not responding to OP directly because I don't want to derail their post (their intent was to provide perspective on how these models actually work, and reduce undue panic, which is all coming from a good place!), but reassurances that the addition of our work will have a negligible impact on the model (which is true at this point) does kind of miss the point? Speaking for myself, my distress is less about the practical ramifications of feeding my fic into ChatGPT, and more about the principle of someone taking my work and deliberately adding it to the dataset.
Like, I fully realize that my work is a drop in the bucket of ChatGPT's several-billion-token training set! It will not make a demonstrable practical difference in the output of the model! That doesn't change the fact that I do not want my work to be part of the set of data that the ChatGPT devs use for training.
According to their FAQ, ChatGPT can and will use user input to train itself. The terms and conditions explicitly state that they save your chats to help train and improve their models. (You can opt-out, but sharing is the default.) So if you're feeding a fic into ChatGPT, unless you've explicitly opted out, you are handing it to the ChatGPT team and giving them permission to use it for training, whether or not that was your intent.
Now, will one fic make a demonstrable difference in the output of the model? No! But as the person who spent a year and a handful of months laboring over my fic, it makes a difference to me whether my fic, specifically, is being used in the dataset. If authors are allowed to have a problem with the ChatGPT devs for scraping millions of fics without permission, they're also allowed to have a problem with folks handing their individual fics over via the chat interface.
I do want to add that if you've done this to a fic, please don't take this as me being upset with you personally! Folks are still learning new information and puzzling out what "good" vs. "bad" use is, from an ethical standpoint. (Heck, my own perspective on this is deeply based on my own subjective feelings!) And we certainly shouldn't act like one person feeding a fic into ChatGPT has the same practical negative impact, on a broad societal scale, as a team using a web crawler to scrape five billion pieces of artwork for Stable Diffusion.
The point is that fundamentally, an ethical dataset should be obtained with the consent of those providing the data. Just because it's normalized for our data to be scraped without consent doesn't make it ethical, and this is why ChatGPT gives users the option to not share data— there is actually a standardized way (robots.txt) for website servers to set policies for how bots/crawlers can interact with them, for exactly this reason— and I think fandom artists and authors are well within their rights to express a desire for opting out to be the socially-respected default within the fandom community.
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Ghost Hunter Au Part 1/2
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This is my entry for the Malevolent “write in your style event”, @malevolent-monthly!
I wasn’t initially planning on participating since this is a writing event and not an illustration one, but the prompt immediately inspired me so I got the go ahead to make a little comic! Part two out soon.
ID in Alt text provided by @shadow0haven
If you like what I do and want to see more, consider donating to my ko-fi!
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Baby Stats
With permababy skins confirmed to be on the horizon and templates already available, I wanted to quickly gather the stats on the popularity of each breed under the eternally youthful effect. You'd have a hard time selling a skin for a permababy when there's only a few hundred of that breed's babies in the game, after all. The stats are interesting! I've bolded top 5 most popular, and italicized the top 5 least.
All: 73,089
Abberation: 4384
Aether: 2347
Auraboa: 540
Banescale: 2139
Bogsneak: 1452
Coatl: 9366
Dusthide: 124
Fae: 1696
Gaoler: 7459
Guardian: 1811
Imperial: 4492
Mirror: 2740
Nocturne: 6131
Obelisk: 3616
Pearlcatcher 2038
Ridgeback: 865
Sandsurge: 496
Skydancer: 2868
Snapper: 5000
Spiral: 6185
Tundra: 1776
Undertide: 1787
Veilspun: 2510
Wildclaw: 1268
Coatls are winning by a LANDSLIDE here. Not surprisingly, they're widely accepted as Very Cute. Not surprising to see dusthide and auraboas so low considering they're both still very new, particularly dusthides. Little surprising to see surges are that low, but most of all I was shocked to see wildclaws make bottom 5!
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I've been thinking about Astarion's lack of reflection combined with the, "Lol how can this idiot think he's hiding his vampire status his bite marks are RIGHT THERE" reaction from the fandom. Crazy thought but what if Astarion just... doesn't know? It's not like he can see the marks for himself. Would anyone ever mention that to him? Does every vampire scar so deeply? (I personally didn't catch any on his siblings.) Can he feel them? I have scars that look very raised but don't feel significantly different from the surrounding skin. Or at least, I may not have realized what I was feeling was a scar without having seen it first.
Really, I think it's difficult for those of us with sight to conceptualize just how much we take our appearance for granted—how often we see it throughout the day and how much subconscious info we glean from it. Does Astarion know how high a collar needs to be to hide potential scars? How wide he can open his mouth before his fangs show? That the white of his hair looks significantly different from someone who has aged? Sure, he'll pick up on some things from being around his siblings (oh look, everyone has glowy eyes. I must have those too) but even among the spawn there's a lot of diversity. It's not like seeing them truly gives Astarion a sense of what he looks like. Now, toss in the fact that he was enslaved within a community that likely wasn't offering up a lot of insight purely out of the goodness of their hearts (here, let me sketch you) and the fact that Astarion's job was seduction (obviously I still look 'normal' enough that people will trust/sleep with me) and I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that he doesn't quite Get™ how vamapire-y he looks.
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Unironically one of the most annoying things to me is when people say Tim is their favorite Robin then quote The New Batman Adventures for it because. That’s just Jason. We know it’s Jason. The creators of the show have admitted that he’s just Jason with a thin coat of paint on.
But a bunch of people have grown up knowing him as Tim. The worst part is just can’t even really be mad at them for it.
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