ALT Screenshot from: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/04/13/2023-07776/ai-accountability-policy-request-for-comment “AGENCY: National Telecommunications and Information Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. ACTION: Notice, request for Comment. SUMMARY: The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) hereby requests comments on Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) system accountability measures and policies. This request focuses on self-regulatory, regulatory, and other measures and policies that are designed to provide reliable evidence to external stakeholders—that is, to provide assurance—that AI systems are legal, effective, ethical, safe, and otherwise trustworthy. NTIA will rely on these comments, along with other public engagements on this topic, to draft and issue a report on AI accountability policy development, focusing especially on the AI assurance ecosystem. DATES: Written comments must be received on or before June 12, 2023.”
ALT "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." Okay, but why though? What is your justification? What about procedurally-generated work constitutes some sort of transformative artistic thought on the part of an author or artist? These programs are making statistical guesses based off reams of data. It is not thinking. It is not making some sort of observation or commentary off the original work. It's just ... generating text. Look, I do think that in an internet that is getting continually sanded down and sanitized, the OTW's commitment to letting people post erotica Is Good Actually. Beyond that, though, you do not seem to have an ethical thought in your collective body. The training of large language models threatens jobs across the industries that feed fandom in the first place--the entertainment industry wants to institute AI writing to kill writer's rooms (and by extension,
ALT their UNION). Short fiction magazines are overrun with A.I. submissions, making it harder for new authors to break into publishing. Tor has already published a Christopher Paolini book with AI-generated cover art. Meanwhile big tech is paying workers in the global south a PITTANCE to moderate the data that goes into these programs and keep them marketable. As in, these are the people who end up watching beheading videos all day and get paid $1.50 an hour to do it. And! On top of that! The processing power requires a lot of energy *and water to keep it cool*. So you've got a program that exists to eliminate jobs--the very jobs that inspire and motivate Fandom, that thing you so wish to protect--which is in turn subsidized by nightmarish underpaid labor, that wrecks the environment in a rapidly deteriorating climate, but you step back and decide that it's no ethics just right to allow its output on the archive. Wow. Great. I'm glad you're taking such a strong stand for fandom here.
