Fanfiction writers battle AI, one scrape at a time

In the online world of fanfiction writers, who pen stories inspired by their favorite movies, books, and games, and share them for free, there are unspoken codes of conduct. Among the most important: never charge money for your fanfic, and never steal other people’s work.

It makes sense then that fanfic writers were among the first creators to raise the alarm about their work being fed into learning language models powering generative AI without their knowledge or permission. But their efforts to stop the encroachment of AI into fan spaces is an uphill battle.

The latest salvo came in early April, when user nyuuzyou scraped 12.6 million fanfics from the online repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) and uploaded the dataset to Hugging Face, a company that hosts open-source AI models and software.

Nyuuzyou’s upload was quickly discovered by the Reddit community r/AO3, where hundreds of users posted furious reactions. A Tumblr account, ao3scrapesearch, built a search engine that allowed authors to search their usernames and see if their work had been scraped by Nyuuzyou.