Fanfiction writers are mounting organized resistance against artificial intelligence companies that harvest their stories without permission. The conflict escalated in April when a user scraped 12.6 million fanfiction stories from Archive of Our Own and uploaded them to AI platform Hugging Face.
The controversy was reported by journalist Decca Muldowney for The Verge. Writers discovered their work in the dataset through a fan-created search engine and flooded Hugging Face with complaints. The platform eventually removed the dataset after takedown notices, but the scraper reuploaded it to sites in Russia and China.
Star Wars fanfiction writer Nikki found over 70 of her stories in the scraped data. “It is theft at its core,” she told The Verge. “There’s no ethical use of something that’s built on stolen labor.” The irony particularly stung when she discovered that even an anti-AI essay she co-authored had been scraped.
Fanfiction operates as a gift economy where writers share transformative works based on existing characters for free. This community-driven approach clashes with AI companies’ commercial use of scraped content. Writers argue their creative transformation of existing works differs fundamentally from AI systems that merely recombine existing text.
The scraper, an 18-year-old Russian student, claimed the dataset served “legitimate research purposes.” However, AI research expert Alex Hanna questioned this explanation, noting that large text datasets on platforms like Hugging Face typically train language models.
Writers continue coordinating takedown efforts against what they describe as a “whack-a-mole” problem of AI companies exploiting their unpaid creative labor.