I Hope This Doesnt Need To Be Said But Just In Case

i hope this doesn’t need to be said but just in case

you might have seen people talking about sudowrite and/or their tool storyengine recently

and just like… don’t. don’t do it. don’t try it out just to see what it’s about.

for two main reasons:

1) never feed anything proprietary into a large language model (LLM, eg ChatGPT, google bard, etc.).

this means don’t give it private company information when you’re at work, but also don’t give it your original writing. that’s your work.

because of the way these language models work, anything you feed into it is part of it now. and yeah, the FAQ says they “don’t claim ownership” over anything and yeah, they give you that reassuring bullshit about how unlikely it is that the exact same sentence will be reconstructed—

but that’s not the point.

do you have an unusual way of constructing sentences? a metaphor you like to use? a writing tic that sets you apart from the rest? anything that gives you a unique writing voice?

feed your writing into an LLM, and the model has your voice now. the model can generate text that sounds like it was written by you and someone else can claim it’s theirs because they gave the model a prompt.

don’t feed the model.

2) the other reason is that sudowrite scraped a bunch of omegaverse fic without consent to build their model and that’s a really shitty thing to do, because it means people weren’t given the chance to choose whether or not to feed the model.

don’t feed the model.

I know this is probably a wild generalization, but I don’t know if I can be in a community if they’re gonna say it’s okay for an adult in their 20s to write erotic fanfiction about a REAL 16 year old and a 20 year old. I understand fictional characters, because they’re not real, but RPF of minors seems like another thing completely.

I'm personally not invested in or interested in RPF of minors, but frankly the literal core value of proshipping is simply not inserting yourself into what other people do in terms of fiction, so.

You can disagree with it all you like, it doesn't necessarily make you 'not proship' as long as you're not sending people hate or trying to tell them they can't do it. There are plenty of people who are proship who draw a personal line at RPF involving minors. I know people who enjoy RPF of all ages but draw the line at topics like non-con when it pertains to those people/ships.

If it makes you feel any better, the anti community also, in a wild generalization, weaponizes rape videos and literal child pornography, believes in doxxing and stalking, supports suicide baiting and hounding.... Really, on each side there's the bad and ugly. Being proship doesn't strictly mean you enjoy or even condone or are invested in common themes and subjects under the 'protection' of the label. You're not a more morally clean or good person for being on either side.

Being proship simply means you know they're going to do it, you at least somewhat respect their right to do it, and you're not going to tell them to kill themselves over it.

Which honestly, feel like pretty basic requirements of critical thinking and human decency. As I said, I'm not invested in RPF about minors, but I simply curate my online space so I don't see it.

(Also, RPF is fictional still. Its quite literally in the name. Real person fiction.)

Minor rant, but I recently found your blog and think you may find this amusing (of course ignore as well if i misjudged! 💕)

I got into a baffling conversation with someone I share a server with, and it reminded me again that “antis” just… don’t think. Ever. And I knew that, but getting hit in the head with the reality always throws me for a loop no matter how many times it happens.

In my current fandom, I tend to only write character studies, longer plotty fics, slice of life, and that type of thing. It’s simply what currently has my attention. I do have content on my AO3 antis would drop dead at, but for a different fandom than is for the above server, so I don’t think this person (or others) realise that. Shows that they do know how AO3 filters work, as they’ve said they filter for this ship/fandom on my page, but that’s a different issue all together

Anyway, this person was *stunned* when I said I ship and let ship, and am 100% proship, full stop, no matter what. She seemed convinced that all proshippers write and like “evil (her words) content”. I of course mentioned that I’ve written all of AO3’s content warning, read it in fic, published books, and said content is 100% in the book I’ve been slowly writing, and that i support it. But I digress.

Where the conversation truly lost the plot was when she brought up that I don’t like certain themes, and am admittedly picky af with what I read??? And yes, I am. As are a lot of people. She could not comprehend this. She (and a few others who jumped in) seemed to think that, aside from proship meaning problematic ship, it also means someone who is proship has nothing they don’t like. I just. Okay. Maybe I’ve curated my fandom and online presence too well, but I’ve thankfully avoided this line of thinking before. I’d say I hope it’s not common, but I feel like it probably is 🙃

I have so many boundaries and things i hate. I am, at my core, a hater. My dms with small friend groups are full of me hating on tropes, ships, etc, I hate. But I could not give a flying fuck if others like them, and wow she could NOT get this. I have writers on AO3 I’ve blocked because I don’t like how they write certain things, or just don’t like how often they appear in the tag. I have no issue with them as people, I just know how to curate my fandom experience.

One of the people who was contributing to the conversation reached out afterwards in DMs and seems to (hopefully) be rethinking things, and realising that they’re very much proship. Picky with what they like, but proship. Small and unexpected victories!

Every day I grow more concerned for society as a whole.

The 'proship means problematic thinking' thing I can vaguely understand because its been an anti-propaganda tagline for so long, and they're very effective at being loud enough to be convincing.

But the rest?

Lordy.

The way some of you will just blindly scream "that's illegal!!" at anything without actually fact-checking yourself beforehand 🥴

I saw your post on no politics in fandom spaces and I let out a long sigh. Because I agree. We really need spaces that are free from real world politics. Like sure, art has politics, but don't debate it there. Or like, tag it. I donno. I just really want a fandom space that has 0 current politics. Because it's tiring and ruins fandoms when it becomes peppered with political landmines.

There are thousands of people on that post who are int he same boat as you, anon. The world is burning and we're all breathing in the smoke and a lot of us just want a breath of fresh air.

Its why I highly recommend taking the time and effort to really, really curate your online space and find spaces which fit what you need and want. Scour Discord servers. Trawl blogs until you find ones that fit what you want to see. Make friends who share the same needs and wants.

Its a lot of effort in the beginning, but it gets easier as you get better at learning how to find and identify what you want and curate your space so its more accessible to you. And it really, really pays off in the long run.

With RPF isn’t it taking away the whole “profiction” thing away since it’s real people and not fiction anymore? (Genuine question, this isn’t hate btw)

The thing about RPF is that whatever you create with it is still fictional.

You can fantasise all you want about Henry Cavill crushing your head with his thighs, but its still a fantasy. Even if you turn that fantasy into a story, its still fictional. There's a reason its called real person fiction.

When we create stories and art about real people, we're basically just using that person as a blueprint base for a character we're creating and controlling. While we like to think we know everything about a celebrity, we don't. We see what they allow us to see by a vast majority, and a lot of the time famous people also create public personas. We make them think and act in ways which are conducive to our plots and intentions.

It can definitely be confusing to try and parse, but generally I think of it this way:

I'm using the real person as a pre-made character.

Although what I'm creating is fictional, I'm still using a real person's life and likeness to create it.

It can be discomforting to read about "yourself" doing certain things, so for the comfort of all involved, its simply best not to deliberately try to expose the real people to what I've created.

I wholly respect people who don't create RPF out of consideration for the real people involved, but at the end of the day I will still defend RPF's categorisation, proper conduct and right to exist.