Kinktober. Whumptober. Kisstober. Flufftober. Goretober. October is a bacchanal of fan fiction, from romantic one-shots about unconventional character pairings to delicious smut that’ll make you reconsider your own sense of morality — all inspired by the month’s countless themed writing challenges. It’s an especially busy time for the fan fiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3).
But this year’s monthlong prompt festival may seem quieter to the casual AO3 reader, with popular writers’ work seemingly wiped from the site altogether. In most cases, the stories still exist, but they aren’t publicly viewable anymore.
In an effort to prevent their writing from being scraped and used to train AI models, many AO3 writers are locking their work, restricting it to readers who have registered AO3 accounts. Though it may curb bot commenters, it also limits traffic from guest users, which can be a blow for newer and less popular writers. Whether it’s effective is questionable, but in the AI paranoia, AO3 writers are taking any measures they can to protect their work. At the time of reporting, over 966,000 of the roughly 11.7 million works on AO3 were accessible only for registered users. It’s just a fraction of AO3’s vast library of content, but it’s worth noting that many authors are only locking new work, since existing fics were likely already scraped. Some readers took to Tumblr and Twitter to ask their favorite fan fiction authors if they had taken down their writing. One asked AO3 writer takearisk to unrestrict their work so they could read it on Tumblr, where many use RSS feeds to keep up with new chapters.
“thanks so much for reading!! but no,” takearisk responded on Tumblr last week. “i had some ai bot comments a few months back that really freaked me out and i also found one of my older marvel fics posted to another site without my permission. it’s something that i never wanted to have to do, but i put way too much effort into my fics to be okay with them being stolen. so i am going to keep my account locked for the foreseeable future.”
The push to lock down AO3 began as early as last December, when ChatGPT and other generative AI tools began gaining popularity. It started when a Reddit user and AO3 writer found Omegaverse references in content generated by the controversial AI writing app Sudowrite. The Omegaverse is a speculative erotic fiction genre popular in fandom circles that revolves around wolflike mating dynamics between “alphas” (who impregnate others) and “omegas” (who are impregnated). The dynamic transcends assigned sex and gender; Omegaverse content often portrays male pregnancy (known as mpreg) and same-sex relationships. Breeding is performed through an act known as “knotting.”
At the time, Sudowrite used GPT-3 to generate fiction content. Like many AI models, the program was trained using data scraped from the swaths of information available online. As the writer pointed out in a Reddit post, AO3 is one of the “largest and most accessible text archives” on the internet. Sudowrite, the writer posted, generated passages that not only mentioned Omegaverse terminology, but also demonstrated an understanding of the trope’s dynamics.
Fan fiction writers later trolled AI generators by participating in a weeklong Omegaverse-themed writing marathon called Knot in my Name. Many writers with locked accounts still keep their Omegaverse content public in hopes of skewing future datasets with breeding references.
