It’s not uncommon for fanfiction writers like me to mention my hobby and get the reaction of a nose wrinkled in disgust. I’m aware that fanfiction isn’t something to boast about writing. It’s something to keep secret and clear from your browsing history.

“It’s something to keep secret and clear from your browsing history.”

But why is fanfiction, and fandom, seen as shameful or even gross? And, in the age of online data harvesting for AI, does it need protection?

Many people unfamiliar with the genre mistakenly believe it is solely erotica, and that it isn’t “real writing” because the authors are usually unpublished. It’s associated with screaming teenage fangirls who are completely obsessed.

But people in the fanfiction community know that the vast majority of writers and readers fall into at least one marginalized category. Women and queer people are disproportionately represented in online fandom communities, with a smaller but powerful subsection being people of color.

Fanfiction exists because popular media, such as TV shows, movies, and books, generally lack the representation many need to feel seen. Cisgender straight white men aren’t commonly found in fanfiction communities because they’ve got plenty of media that appeals directly to them.

“Fanfiction exists because popular media…generally lacks the representation many need to feel seen.”

But if you’re pansexual or Latinx or non-binary, for example, you’re probably not seeing much of yourself in the media you consume. And that’s invalidating and disheartening.

In the hypersexualized movie industry, the straight main character meets someone early in the film that the audience instantly knows will end up being kissed by the end. Plenty of viewers are fed up with this classic plot, and many read completely platonic ‘fics, which also cater to asexual and aromantic readers.

While some stories go with canonical evidence or subtext as the basis for their decisions, others change things that weren’t explicitly mentioned. For example, Black Hermione (Harry Potter), transgender Din Djarin (The Mandalorian), and bisexual Raya (Raya and the Last Dragon) were not directly contradicted by their original source texts.

Last year, with the public release of ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that can write nearly anything, the whole internet was buzzing about the newest tech.

But soon after the initial uproar, people started asking questions: How does it know things? What does it get wrong? What data was it trained on?

Visual artists were among the most vocal when they discovered that similar AI models could create art in their style – meaning that it must have seen their art in its dataset.

If you’ve posted on Reddit, written something in a Google Doc, or commented on a YouTube video, chances are your words went into the gaping maw of ChatGPT. After chewing on them, it rearranges the words into common patterns and regurgitates them in response to your prompt. Online novels, articles, newspapers, and even fanfiction were scraped from every corner of the Internet so that an AI could do your history homework.

And in the middle of this whole mess sit fanfiction writers, looking at their safe, fun community from a new perspective. The uncertainty of how the technology works has sparked a back-and-forth of writers unlocking and locking their fics – or putting them behind a log in screen – in an effort to prevent data crawlers from reading their work.

Some readers have expressed frustration with the inaccessibility of these stories, as sites like AO3 have a waitlist to get an account. Writers are just as unhappy with what they see as being forced to take this measure.

But some have decided that it’s too late to protect their fics, which have likely already been scraped, and have opened them back up to universal viewing. Even so, this feels like admitting defeat: it shouldn’t be on writers to keep their work from being stolen or used without their consent.

We need to protect fanfiction from companies like OpenAI trying to monetize us. A lot more people are in favor of protecting published novels, news articles, and the work of actors than protecting fanfiction. After all, if it’s all erotica written by amateurs and it doesn’t count as “real writing”, what is there to protect?

But it’s so much more than that. It’s people’s livelihoods, friends, chosen families, safe spaces, hobbies, life’s work.

Fanfiction deserves protection just as much as anything else. We can and should protest big tech companies stealing writing published informally by marginalized groups just as much as we do for famous published authors.

“It’s people’s livelihoods, friends, chosen families, safe spaces…”

Writing with large public followings like those of comedian Sarah Sherman or the many posts hosted on Reddit are trying to gain legal protection against AI companies through lawsuits. When those cases are settled, the results should protect many forms of creative expression – and fanfiction is no exception.