so both Google and Imgur have decided to start purging content linked to inactive accounts

Google supposedly will begin with accounts that have no content for now and will slowly roll out those changes, but fuck knows how long that will last. they've listed products like YouTube on content that will be affected, and i can't even begin to imagine how barren it will be once they get past this initial stage.

Imgur is removing any and all NSFW content - porn-y and educational with no differentiation - as well as anonymously posted content, which only affects a ridiculous amount of the internet before image hosting on the sites/forums themselves became A Thing

🙃🙃🙃

needless to say, back up all your favourite media. always. all the time. even if you think it'll always be there for you.

also. ALSO. i'm so godsdamned fucking pissed at AO3 right now re: AI-generated content.

yeah, for those who missed some of what went down:

• several AIs have been trained datasets containing fanfiction hosted on ao3 through data scraping (post explaining some of this here, but this conclusion is easily reached through Common Crawl and other crawler datasets being used to train AIs such as ChatGPT and SudoWrites, which already contained scraped ao3 data)

• AI-generated fics are being currently posted on ao3 in increasingly bigger numbers

• none of this is (or was) against the terms of service of ao3

• fans kept pushing ao3/otw to make an official statement of their position on the issue, to no avail

• on 06/05/2023, otw made a post quoting an interview with the current otw legal chair (betsy rosenblatt) being very in favour of AI data scraping, including on sites like ao3 (thank you wayback machine for the receipts - original post | the interview in question, which is... oof.)

• people lashed back against it

• post was edited with no inkling of what was deleted. the first time i read it i didn't even notice they said it had been edited.

• after a few days, ao3/otw FINALLY made an official statement in regards to their stance on AI content and scraping

and the statement is...... not very encouraging. to say the least.

there's not much i can say in regards to the data scrapping, really. it's as good as can be expected.

but the fucking AI-generated works policies.

"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."

i CANNOT overstate how much machine-made works made from stolen fanworks are NOT fanworks in the slightest. just thinking of elaborating further on this makes me want to throw my computer out of the window and never write again.

and add to that this particular gem from an earlier ao3/otw post:

"In April, Legal Chair Betsy Rosenblatt participated in the first of the U.S. Copyright Office listening sessions on artificial intelligence and copyright law. This listening session was a great opportunity to provide information, help frame U.S. lawmakers’ questions about future policy decisions, and learn about technology and practice so that the OTW can make its own policy decisions about how to approach questions about AI. Legal will be doing more in this area in the coming months."

well, given her other statements, i'm fairly reticent about reading whatever she might have said (video here but no transcript yet, so i'm not touching it until there's text). i must once again reiterate that she's the legal chair of the otw.

for fuck's sake, ao3.