erinptah | Hopefully the last AI fic-theft scandal of 2024

So! Some idiot AI bro, but I repeat myself, mass-scraped a bunch of fics off AO3 and put them on his text-to-speech “audiobook” website. Along with a bunch of public-domain works, which he presumably scraped off of Wikisource and/or Project Gutenberg.

Good news: within about 24 hours of fandom catching wind of this and blowing it up, he de-listed the whole “fanfiction” section. Full timeline here on Tumblr, and original fandom-alerting post on Reddit.

Bad news: it happened so fast that I didn’t get to rubberneck all the bot-generated covers/summaries it came up with for my fic.

I only know any of it was there because a reader pinged me on Discord. At least they sent a couple examples. Here’s the cover art for Reveals by Knight:

Vaguely Batman-looking superhero, captioned Revlals Briey 2014 Knight

That definitely tracks with my own efforts to get a bot to draw Moon Knight.

Anyway, now this guy is only left with public-domain books, accented with totally fine and flawless covers, like…uh:

Sepia-toned person wearing red flowers, captioned The Sarlet Pimpreenel the Scarlet ape Carlet Pimpernel

Yeah.

Also! The cover-drawing bots are oblivious to details like “the original text for Peter Pan is public-domain, but the visual design for Disney’s Peter Pan is not.” So maybe he’ll still get in trouble. We can only hope.