im gonna start a fight; and, at the same time, i need you to take this in the most good-faith way possible, but:
videos that involve body-checking and intentionally (and uncritically) show a mealplan of an unhealthy number of calories are just a revamped version of pro-ana food diaries.
and yeah, i know there's arguments. i address some of them under the cut. but at the end of the day, we're just coming back to romanticizing mental illness; we've just found a better platform for it.
this is already something we've done. we knew it was wrong and tried to stop it. and tbh. it just wasn't enough.
there are people who argue "well, what if you have an eating disorder, you can't help it if you don't eat!" except that as someone with an ED; we are not infants. we know what we're doing. part of having an ED is that you are like, maybe too self-aware. even if we can't help our own food choices, we don't need to fucking romanticize the disorder - something we've been warning you about since 2013. there are hours of setup, filming, and editing that go into these videos. they do not happen to fall into place randomly. there is a reason they are pieced together to be beautiful, bright, inspiring.
there's this woman who pretty much only posts daily plans under a normal amount of calories, and everyone defends her saying but it's better than nothing! and i'm like. except she opens those with images of her showing off her body and provides no context in the video or caption that suggests that she believes what she's doing is unhealthy. she has hundreds of thousands of followers on a platform designed for young kids and teens. i refuse to believe that by accident her content just happens to be cheery advice on "healthy" versions of starving.
for any other symptom of mental illness, we would be incredibly enraged by this kind of placid acceptance of a "tips and tricks" fast-start guide. imagine if people posted pink & pretty videos saying "best places to cut yourself" as if it was a fucking storytime. we, as a society, are so fucking fatphobic that we would rather accept blatantly harmful displays of self harm than admit that we are obsessed with a hyper-thin body type.
i am not suggesting someone never talks about their disorder. i talk about mine. actually, it's a plot point in my book.
here's the difference: i recognize it's a fucking mental illness. i am very careful to never mention a specific weight, eating pattern, or calorie plan. i always make sure to position it as something that ruined my fucking life. i do not put cheery music in the background and hearts and sparkles over my worst moments. i do not film it in bright light. i do not start each passage with an image of a thin body followed by "here's how to look like her."
eating disorders should not be framed as aspirational. and the problem is that society worships the "after" image, so long as you don't get too sick. there is a reason so many people who quit being "influencers" will later admit - i wasn't eating well that whole time; an obsession with food was completely destroying my life.
we let any uncredited, uncertified person write the most backwards, fucked up shit about how to get the body you desire! because the underlying, secret belief is: well, at least they're thin! and the real thing that fucking gets me each time - they make fucking money off of it. their irresponsibility and societal harm literally pays off for them.
"why do you care so much." "don't like it don't look." "so what if people experiment with new ways of thinking of food?"
thank you for asking. we're about to get extremely personal. it's because when i was 18 i discovered "thinspiration"/"thinspo." and it absolutely influenced, shaped, and codified my pre-existing eating disorder. i went from having some troubling habits and traits to being incredibly unwell within what felt like a matter of days. there were actual pages designed to train me on how to have an ED correctly. it was all so suddenly easy. i was sick; and the nature of the illness meant - i wanted to be sicker.
it takes an average of 7 years for a person to fully recover. i know this personally - even now, 10 years from the worst of it, i still fucking struggle. i am so much happier now and i eat what i want and i literally don't think about food at all (19 year old me would shudder) and yet - i still fucking know the calories of plain toast with butter.
an eating disorder is one of the deadliest types of mental illness. over 1 in 4 people with an ED will attempt suicide.
and i'm sorry. i just do not see the exchange rate of "high rate of engagement" versus "the value of a human life."
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disclaimer: I am a volunteer for the OTW. I am speaking for myself, not on behalf of the organization, anything expressed here is my own. I may be wrong about some things, I'm very much not involved in any of this as part of my work. Additionally, I haven't run this by anyone else in the org, so take that as you will. I'm just a person, hoping to reassure other people, fans like myself.
A few people have come to me asking questions about this, and asking clarification already, so I just.... Want to reassure everyone. A lot of people follow me and know I volunteer, even if I don't talk about it much.
No, Ao3/OTW is not endorsing AI. Scraping is not being allowed or encouraged (you can, in fact, see here in this link, the code of Ao3 disallowing scraping). There is only so much the organization can do to prevent this. If you set your works to logged-in users only, it does somewhat give more protections. Data miners are very proactive, and prevention measures can only do so much. After the data is harvested, with or without consent, it is that much harder to pry back and out of those hands.
Many, MANY people are panicking. They saw an excerpt of an interview in this week's OTW Signal news roundup. This interview was from someone on the legal team of the OTW. She was speaking not for the organization, but as someone with credentials in the fields being discussed. Much of this has been misinterpreted and relayed second-hand. It was a conversation primarily about trademarks and AI.
I don't know the course the OTW is going to take regarding AI with the law, myself. That's not my field whatsoever. I can say, how would we even have the TIME or ABILITY to "develop an AI to be integrated with AO3" as some people speculate? It took our volunteer coders years to work out a block/mute function and get it from idea through testing to implementation.
The OTW does not want to just feed everyone's fanfic into AI. The organization may end up taking a middle-ground stance on the legality of AI and AI-generated creations. I don't think that Disney would care much for the distinction between "This is an AI generated item infringing on our trademark, remove it" versus "This is a fan-made item infringing on our trademark, remove it." The legality of AI versus fan creations is a very tricky topic, and from my understanding, that was the focus of the interview and what was being discussed (along with some other ideas).
Protecting the right to fanfiction and fan creations existing is the primary goal, and navigating new, emerging technologies that could find similar arguments, whether or not people at the org agree with them, means they may end up protecting them somewhat. This is not a betrayal of fandom. Every volunteer is an individual, and opinions within the org are all over the place, but we are all fans as well, and we don't want random bots just lifting all our fics and creations without any say-so either.
The topic of AI is a landmine right now, and I do think it was insensitive and ignorant of the current fandom/political sphere to highlight something like that interview, especially in the way it was done. It immediately led to panic, distrust in the org, and people spinning off numerous infeasible ideas because they simply do not have information, and hear rumors or don't parse a conversation about legalese well (I know I had trouble with it! A lot of my understanding comes from reading discussion about it myself). Nuance is important, as is the fact that nothing is ever published or discussed in a vacuum.
I don't blame anyone for having misinformation, I get it. It can be hard to find correct info. Transparency is something the org is not always great at (it's being worked on! Everyone is aware it's an issue! We are just very,,,,, very slow at implementing changes, as a volunteer-run organization). Time is the OTW's most valuable resource, and we are constantly, constantly in demand and in need of more time and manpower. It can make communications difficult, and very stressing.
The OTW is a non-profit, it is not selling any data. It does not want to sell your data. The money it makes is solely from donations. There is not going to be any selling to AI, there is not going to be any attempt to implement AI for the OTW itself.
Honestly, beyond that, I'm super not qualified to talk about the legal aspects of everything in the article/interview. I don't know all the inner workings of the org, I don't know all the thoughts and opinions and legal stances. I don't even know all the nuances of AI legal issues myself. I just know that I don't think it can replace creativity, and that it could be a fascinating tool in a better world (but I do not trust how it could be used here and now).
I hope this helps anyone who sees it. I hope that this is a reassurance, and that maybe it will help people feel better. I know panic is a powerful force, and I know there is a great distrust in any organization even mentioning AI (usually for valid reasons!). I know information can be hard to find, and legal discussions hard to read, I've been there with the org myself.
But the OTW is a group of people trying their best to make sure that fandom has protections. There are like, a thousand of us or something. Not all of us are going to agree on everything, but we all agree fans deserve a space to create and have those creations protected. One of the inciting incidents of its founding was a hatred of the idea of some company trying to profit off of fanworks with complete disregard for the fans themselves.
The OTW was founded to prevent fans from being taken advantage of, and to protect fandom's right to exist. It is never going to betray that core tenet. Partially because we're all fans ourselves and have a vested interest in keeping it that way, but additionally: This organization is nothing without its volunteers, and if someone high up on the board or something genuinely tried, we would know and we would make ourselves known.
(Just look into the Board Election of 2015!)
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HELLO.... SEEMS WE HAVE A FISHY ANON GOING AROUND.
Was told this was going on behind my back secondhand. Some pretty horrible shit....? I suppose being in a fandom has its drawbacks.
PLEASE IGNORE THEM.
Update: It was found out it seems like the person was using a VPN to hide their identity... Very telling info about what kind of personality they are.
He's also made an edit of my art, just letting y'all know, if that gets out of hand!
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i’m so done with this shit. i don’t want to get political but
why do people (namely in the sp community) insist on censoring israel and not palestine? like here’s the deal. i support the free palestine movements. i acknowledge everything that is going on in palestine
but you also have to acknowledge october 7th. you have to acknowledge what went down in its entirety. yes. i support free palestine. but here’s how it’s gonna be for me. if you wanna talk to me about not wanting matt and trey to make an episode revolving around israel and palestine, you either censor one or censor neither. i would be saying the same exact thing if people were censoring palestine and not israel. i don’t care if you ‘don’t want the pro israel people to find my post’, i don’t want either side to find my posts. i’m not fully educated on the issue and i don’t feel like getting into political discourse.
so that’s my rule. if you wanna send an ask in, you either censor both of you censor none. and yes. i get that this doesn’t directly affect me since i don’t belong to either religious/ethnic group. but it does affect people of those groups when you turn an entire group into what you view those involved in the war is. it may not affect me but it affects others. and i don’t stand with that. i don’t care which side you take in this conflict but i am not into the discourse that’s been going on in my inbox. i’m not fucking dealing with it. if it has the potential to hurt someone it’s not going on my blog and it will be deleted. i don’t care.
anyway. end of story. either censor both or neither. up to you. or don’t engage at all.
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