This Week in Fandom, from a Small Site Owner’s Perspective
This past week has offered an interesting example of synchronicity in fandom history. On 5 May, a comment on the Silmarillion Writers’ Guild Discord about “AI fanart” prompted the mods to collectively make a uncomfortable noise like, “ummmm …” and swiftly open discussion on whether AI-generated “fanworks” were actually fanworks. (We decided no.) The next day, 6 May, the OTW Signal highlighted the interview with legal chair Betsy Rosenblatt, where she expressed excitement for inclusion of fanworks in AI training and pissed off a bunch of fans. By this point, I’d mostly written the SWG’s AI policy but was giving my comods the weekend for further research and discussion on the issue before turning the document over to them for comments and edits.
As a small archive owner, it is interesting to undergo this process, first with my comods and now with SWG members, at the same time as the OTW/AO3 is wrestling through theirs. Yesterday, my afternoon was spent researching and implementing, with the help of my co-admin Russandol, strategies to block as much AI scraping of the SWG as we can. In the aftermath of that work, I wrote this post about a small archive owner’s perspective on the issue and how it has unfolded on the SWG vs. AO3.
Then, in a second instance of synchronicity, while I was writing this post, AO3 was clarifying their stance on AI. First, as a PSA to anyone reading this, AO3 does block AI scrapers and has since December 2022 (though I’ll be petty and note that it doesn’t seem that they’ve gone as far as the SWG in the tools they’re using, at least based on this post). But AI-generated “fanworks” are allowed: “If fans are using AI to generate fanworks, then our current position is that this is also a type of work that is within our mandate to preserve.” This is what I predicted in my [synchronous] post, and I was right.
Two big points emerge from my consideration so far of this issue and how it has been handled on a small site (mine) and AO3:
Born under the full wax of the Morrslieb, Jerren was blessed with mesmerising jade eyes but also cursed with a crown of horns that never stopped growing.
Before his fourth year, it was clear to the parents that the horns will never stop growing, no matter how much they filed it down to the skull. And there was no doubt to them that the mere existence of the child will eventually bring ruin and shame upon their family. So, on one moonless night, they abandoned the child in the deep forest.
Left alone and in the dark, the child could do nothing but whimper as the musty trees around him began filling with whispers of soft low chanting. But as the chanting grew louder and louder, instead of filling the child with fear, it somehow calmed him. And the child fell asleep as the chanting continued and faded by the dawn’s light.
And in the morning, an elderly hunter, out early to check her rabbit snares, chanced upon the child in the middle of a clearing. Child was sound asleep with no clue to his origins, only with curious bits of bones and pelt scattered around him.
The hunter came to be convinced that the child was a gift from the forest. A gift from Taal himself. Her generous god showing his mercy to a devout but lonely childless widow such as herself. Even the child’s bloodied and scarred horn buds, while those would have to be hidden from the superstitious townsfolk, were clearly just a sign of blessing from Taal.
Bringing the child to her hut at the edge of the forest, the hunter decided to name him after the strange droning chanting she heard the night before, from which she could only make out just the one word “ghyran”.
—————————————– Warhammer OC. that i dont really have anything to use him in. i just made it. for no reason
