living in wattpad: ai fanfic and the end of art as we know it

okay hear me out- the ethics of ai generated fanfiction and whether we're all just living inside wattpad now

so i've been thinking about this a lot, yeah? ai fanfic is literally just code + FEELS, right? like, if some selfish script kiddie can have dean crying better than i ever will at 3am, what does that mean for my existence? am i the main character or just a supporting role in someone else's wattpad universe?? (spoiler: it's both, and that's okay)

mood for this post: warm. like a fuzzy blanket or a bad decision at 2am. but also: the ethics of all this is wild, because who gets to decide what counts as "art" anymore?? i saw a fic about sam and dean fighting a giant mech on tiktok and honestly? it's better than most published novels these days. we're living inside wattpad but the wattpad is THE METAVERSE now, and no one asked for this level of interdimensional fanfiction

like... google's just learning how to put ketchup on hot dogs and meanwhile ai is writing 700k words about kirby vs. sonic in space??? and we accept this as normal??? the ethics of it are complicated tho, yeah? like, should we be worried about copyright? about consent? about the war crimes of writing fanfic faster than humans can sleep???

but also: what even is AI doing? it's just reading all my late-night drafts and crying in binary while i scream into the void. the machines don't have feels, they have my feels (and also patrick bateman quotes, don't ask). so if we're all just living in wattpad now, i guess the question is: what stories need telling, and who gets to tell 'em?

honestly tho, there's kinda a beaut moment in this convo—like, isn't this what fanfiction has been about from the start? subverting copyright, making space for marginalized voices, catharsis through adaptation? the only difference now is the machine part, and frankly that's not even the weirdest bit. the weirdest bit is that i probably wrote this same blog three years ago about living inside social media and no one listened

so yeah: the ethics of ai fanfic is basically just playing in the litter box of human creativity while the cats stare unimpressed. we're all wattpad characters in different genres anyway, and the real question is if we wanna be protagonists or just background noise in our own story. either way, it's gonna be wild (and probably 100% powered by screencaps of sam and dean crying).