just saw a clip where f1nn5ter was saying how at this point, he can’t be cis, but at the same time, he doesn’t feel like he’s trans—he’s just neither. and someone in chat was like “you can’t be neither cis nor trans that’s not how it works” i love finn but why is his chat so fucking bad 😭 stop recreating binaries for the love of god, identity does not have to fall into these neat little boxes for you to police
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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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Thoughts on Kieran’s relationship with Ogerpon as a previously obsessive teenager:
(I did not proof read this. I just woke up, had the urge, and now it’s here.)
Kieran, to me, is a very relatable character. He is a shy, and quiet teenager in a small town. He lacks friendships and possibly meaningful connections with those who do spend time with him. He’s probably isolated due to the fact that he lacks a phone. Any friends he does make are likely school based only. So, Kieran latches on to anything he can to feel less alone in life. And of course he latches onto Ogerpon. Ogerpon is just like him. A sad “monster” all isolated and alone in the mountains. I’m certain that Kieran has fantasized about meeting Ogerpon and getting into wild adventures with her. I did the same thing with characters I enjoyed.
Princess Luna, for example (sorry to whiplash anyone with that), was a character I heavily related to. She was alone and isolated due to her previous actions. She struggled with fitting in and having a healthy relationship with her sister for awhile. To say I didn’t form an obsession with a character who understood my feelings would be a lie. I think Kieran is the same.
He became obsessed with Ogerpon. He become obsessed with the ideas he crafted of him and Ogerpon. In a way, that fantasy was VERY real to him. So when we come around and lie about meeting Ogerpon, and inevitably become friends with her behind his back, of course he freaks out! We stole his fantasy of him and Ogerpon! And that’s the key point here that people tend to not realize. We didn’t steal Ogerpon from Kieran, we just stole his fantasy and made it our reality.
With my obsession with princess Luna (again, whiplash), if anyone said they loved princess Luna it was a fucking attack on me. Princess Luna was my best friend, and she could only love me! Everyone else was just a jealous thief.
As an adult looking back on this mindset, it’s horribly embarrassing. It’s a mindset I carried into my real life, when I actually started making friends, that ruined so much for me. I lost friends because I was so angry that my fantasies were not reciprocated. I really do think Kieran does the same. He grows sad and frustrated over what happened with Ogerpon. His fantasy is just a fantasy, and that’s fucking with him. So naturally, he finds a new fantasy to, hopefully in his mind, make a reality. And so he chose battling and winning against you. The thing we used to “steal” Ogerpon away from him (Even though Kieran technically suggested battling for Ogerpon, I don’t doubt he used it to rationalize why she didn’t want to come with him). To him, being the best battler will solve everything. Kieran will get his revenge, he’ll finally be recognized, everyone can’t lie to him because they fear or admire him, and he’ll prove to Ogerpon he was the right choice.
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Now, I want to say something about Kieran. A detail that, for whatever reason, people don’t like to acknowledge: He’s just a kid.
I’m not saying “He’s a widdle baby. He can do no harm!” No, Kieran’s an asshole. He became a bully. I can have empathy for his emotions, but not excuse his actions. He’s a dumb and entitled teenager with issues. And, quite obviously, he doesn’t really have a way to deal with his issues in a healthy manner (seriously, his school is based solely on battling. Anyone who’s going or gone to a specialized school can understand how toxic people can get in that type of environment. And don’t even get me started on the incompetence of the adults in Kieran’s school).
Kieran is a teenage boy growing up right now. He’s got a lot to work through, and a lot of people he’s gotta confront about his behavior. He was an asshole, a bully, and genuinely a bad person for minute. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t growing past that. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve recognition for his growth. You can recognize someone has changed and not forgive them.
Kieran is a really intriguing character and holds a valuable lesson in obsession. And I really wish people would recognize that he’s not just an irredeemable prick or an innocent little guy. He’s a kid learning. He’s going to make really stupid and bad mistakes. Just like how I, and probably you reading this, did.
Anyways, hopefully we see him interact with the Area Zero buddies. I think those three have amazing lessons that Kieran can learn from. Maybe Kieran can teach them a few things too!
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actually one of the details that frustrates me the most from TSATS, relating to how much the book completely erases or absolutely bastardizes neurodivergence, is how Percy's cameo is characterized.
One of the consistent things aspects of Percy's relationship with the education system throughout the series is that Percy is smart, and he does try in school, but he has a learning disability. The only reason he gets bad grades is because he has a learning disability and the way the modern american education system is built is inherently at odds with that. In the first series we actually have explicit references to Percy doing better in school when he's in environments that actually accommodate for his disabilities! It's not that he's not trying, he's disabled.
So it is so disheartening and horrible to see Percy characterized in TSATS as just being disinterested in school, and his failing grades being made a joke about implying him ditching classes because he just doesn't care. That's the number one ableist thing ADHD/dyslexic students hear! Implying that they "just don't care" and dismissing their disabilities. It is so horrible to see that joke being made in the Percy Jackson series of all franchises. Especially when you add that on to the rest of the quite frankly ableist characterizations in TSATS and how much the book erases Nico and Will's disabilities/neurodivergence.
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