We all love the “becoming the very thing you sought to destroy,” trope. but I have a growing fondness for “destroying the very thing you sought to become”
TikTok user unravel.me.now has just launch an app (lore.fm) she is calling “Audible for AO3”. It’s an app that uses AI voices to read out fics.
🚨She is requiring any authors who do not want their fics to be on this app to OPT OUT by emailing team@lore.fm 🚨 🚨She has not given an actual template or how you’re supposed to prove you’re the author or said how her team will process this or how she will keep these requests secure🚨
I do not have this app. I haven’t seen anyone use it yet. According to Reddit users, unravel.me.now’s earlier TikToks stated she envisions the app being able to create libraries stored on that app and to have version of “Spotify wrapped”. That implies that eventually data collection must happen, if it’s not happening currently.
I don’t know the actual capabilities of this app. I don’t know the legalities. I do know that it personally feels like this app is trying to turn AO3 into a content generation source and I haven’t heard of the app allowing you to leave a comment or kudos or interact with the original work.
I've seen this on tiktok and tbh I don't know what everyone is freaking out about? It's just to make the fanfic like an audiobook lol. She made it as an accessibility thing so people can listen to fics. I signed up as a beta tester to check it out, and there doesn't seem to be anything malicious. It's also not some AI scraping tool it just generates a voice to read the fic itself.
Not everything new is something scary and weird lol you guys need to calm down sometimes. and if you don't want your fics being idk read by a computers voice just opt out of it, but people are going to do it anyways with any other kind of screenreader? this is just an app that is specifically for fanfics so it's being marketed as one.
Just because you would personally have no real use for it, doesn't mean it's not something that just shouldn't exist. If it's not for you, that's totally fine, but a lot of other people are really excited about it for reasons that are conspicuously left out of this post like accessibility. (and personally I'd love to listen to my own written fics like an audio book as rereading just seems like it'd be too much work and time I don't have.)
Screenreaders are different than ai-generated audiobooks and function differently. Screenreaders also already exist in multiple forms.
Unlike screenreaders, it takes the user away from AO3 and thus treats AO3 like a content generation source instead of a community. There is no way for the users to comment/kudos/bookmark/or even give hits.
It stores the audiofile on both the users device and lore.fm's servers.
Upon closer reading of their TOS it seems there actually isn't a way for authors to even opt out without opening a whole legal can of worms. The app's legal team does not consider fanworks to fall under DMCA, and if there is a story that does (for example original fiction) they require you send in your Full Legal Name, Phone Number, and email address PLUS you have to prove your story is actually on the app and give them the exact location. Which under their current setup they display in the app store isn't actually possible. So you cannot send a DMCA under their TOS.
This isn't an AI generated audio maker though, it genuinely is just a fancy screen reader. The creator of the tool already said that too on her tiktok because people are just spreading misinformation about the app.
And yeah I suppose you could say it's bad that it stores the fics, but it would have to in order to function anyways. And as far as I'm aware this isn't some big company taking it, its a few people who are also in fandom themselves.
That’s not correct but I don’t blame you for not knowing. These people have done a lot of work to hide their actual backgrounds and make this look organic and well intentioned. Their parent company already makes an AI Storytelling app and an AI audiobook app that uses nearly an identical layout. More info in my post here.
It makes me so mad because I desperately want more TTS tools and things that can help make work accessible to more readers, but this is just unethical and screams of tech bros looking to make a cash grab on fandoms.
I already lock my works for a multitude of reasons, including solidarity with people who've been bullied into doing so. But regardless of the ethics of this particular app or opting out...
It should be transparently obvious to everyone that an app that does what this one is proposing to do is going to be backed by significant venture capital or something of the sort.
Of course it isn't just one fan doing this as a labor of love.
Shipping fictional characters isn’t representative of your moral values. It’s representative of your particular psychic damage and the themes and motifs that haunt you. Hope this helps.
sometimes people try to tell me that scientists are paragons of rationality and I have to break it to them that I have yet to work in a lab that didn’t have at least one weird secret shrine in it
In Taiwan we have a special brand of snacks named 乖乖 (literally means “well behaved” but in a casual way like when one’s compliment a child or a pet of being good) that has green package.
It has become the lucky charm in the IT industry because engineers believe it will make machine acting good (like the name of the snack) and stay in green light (like the color of the snack’s package) when a 乖乖 is put on top of a server.
It is the only food allowed in a server room and the biggest semicondoctor company in Taiwan (which is also the biggest worldwide) even commissioned the snack factory to make a customized version with blessing on the package.
This is how a server room is blessed by 乖乖. You put at least one on top of each server. It’s important that the engineers change them before the expire date because legend says the snack looses it’s power after expire date.
You’ll hear engineers swearing up and down that their server room
crushed down the one time they forgot to change the snack. Or some
newbie ate the forbidden snack put on top of their server and caused a
disastrous crush down.
The 乖乖 religion later spread to all people who want their machine to act nice. In the lab we put 乖乖 on ultra-low freezer (you really don’t want it to drop dead along with your 2 years’ worth of sample/data), mass
spectrometer etc.
When Taiwan’s about to launch the first self made satellite in 2017, the develop team even put 乖乖 around the satellite model to prey for a successful launch (it did). This shit is real.
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