AI Chatbots Have Stolen Fanfiction From a Gift Culture: Most large language models are based on at least 32 billion words of fanfiction, but nobody told the writers.

it's not a new story that the ethical underpinnings of LLMs are dubious but it never occurred to me that they were exploiting fanfiction. part of me is a little amused that stories about idk ganondorf getting railed is used for the supposed next frontier in technology. but it feels bad that theyre deliberately taking advantage of stories made for free by creators for no profit or benefit, purely for the community and camaraderie of creative expression, and using it to make technological solutions designed to put people out of creative work. maybe i never really understood how the foundation of large language models is exploitative until they came for my a/b/o stories