Hey anti-AI writers and creative people! Does anyone have advice for dealing with the knowledge that generative AI will probably be trained on any creative work you share outside of a tiny, offline community?
I used to write a lot, but I’ve been struggling to find the motivation to write anything real for a while. I start to get excited thinking about a writing project, and then I remember that whatever I share will most likely be used to build technology that I believe is actively harmful to humanity, and all my motivation drains away.
Several large chunks of my past writing have definitely been sucked into LLMs (multiple long stories about that, not getting into them here). I expect that something similar will eventually happen again if I share my writing in the future. I’ve been looking into ways to prevent LLM training on text, and as far as I can tell, there’s nothing that works well without severely limiting the reach of your writing.
I read and write partially to connect with other people. I’m not a best-selling author or trying to become one, but I want to connect with strangers and isolated people I’ll never meet in real life again, like I did with my past blogs and stories that were later sucked into LLM training. There’s something depressing about severely limiting the potential human reach of my writing (or any other kind of creative work) just to prevent nonconsensual scrapers and book scanners from getting it. That seems like another way of letting the AI industry win. I want to write and share with humans anyway, because those fuckers shouldn’t get to steal my own or anyone else’s joy, but I’m struggling to find my old motivation.
Does anyone have advice for dealing with this issue? Something that’s not just “accept that other people’s actions are out of your control” or “that just comes with the territory nowadays” or “everything in life has risks?” I love writing. I’ve really tried to come around to the “that just comes with the territory nowadays” mindset, but that hasn’t gotten rid of the demotivation. Most of the “writing motivation” advice I’ve found assumes that lack of motivation is rooted in fear of failure, setbacks, getting stuck in the middle of a project, working on the wrong project, etc. I need advice from people who understand this particular problem.
The ongoing “AI” clusterfuck is part of what’s led me to transition lately to producing physical tangible objects rather than my usual walls of text. I’m still doing the latter, of course, but more slowly since at the moment I’m finding the act of producing a thing more rewarding than writing about it. That probably won’t last forever.
If I’m getting scraped, and I’m certain I am, I’m just hoping that my minor contributions are helping to make all the LLMs snarkier, more apt to pepper their output with cuss words, and use ever more tortured metaphors. Hey, we can dream, right?
There’s no point in trying to protect your work from AI. It is or will eventually be “leagally” or illegally scrapped, and AI will mimic your style and keep stamping pieces of your works left and right. That’s a fact.
But what also is a fact is that the only thing it can do is just mimic you but never become you. So if you enjoy writing and people enjoy reading your works, keep doing it, be creative and “beat” AI shit by just being yourself.
You can’t fight AI by stopping writing and keeping all your thoughts to yourself (or a little gated community), but you can fight for your place in people’s minds and hearts to be filled by your work and not AI slop.
There’s already tons of slop filling the whole internet, but here we are, reading your post and responding to you because we consciously chose you and not AI slop :)
We all know and love Spongebob, but I have no clue who that green guy even is (I didn’t watch the full cartoon).
I have no clue who that green guy even is
That’s Poseidon. And that scene is a perfect example. Poseidon uses his magic and makes a crap ton of look-alike crabby patties. They look perfect. He spreads them to the crowd. Everybody is happy. They take a bite… and everyone spits them out, because they’re the worst tasting garbage anyone has ever tasted. SpongeBob, on the other hand, uses his love and makes one. Poseidon takes a bite, loves it so much, tears up, spits it out, and because he’s a demigod, spits it out into a perfectly reshaped crabby patty, and eats it again, because he can’t bring himself to live with not having tasted it twice.
The world desperately needs hope right now, art is the best way to build that hope. Real art, not slop.
Write the most florid, lurid, joyfully outrageous pornography you can dream up.
Worst case, future slop gets some interesting failure modes…
Write some but do not share it? Do not let your creativity die
I also struggle with this, and don’t have a good solution. I joined a tilde community, which while not impossible to raid for llm training data, might be sort of annoying to scrape at scale.
Do I make art or music now? No not really. But if i did, I’d be more likely to share it within that small community context than raw dogged on the internet.
Maybe you would be interested. Have you heard of tildes? https://tildeverse.org/
It helps to be a huge nerd, but that is NOT a requirement.
There are ways to poison your data so that it actually harms AI when it gets scraped (without changing the experience of a human enjoying your art).
I’m not sure what kind of writing you’re talking about, but it sounds like you’re writing text? I know they make fonts that poison the data for AI.
If you’re a musician, there are ways to poison your audio as well.
There might be more options for other mediums, but those are the two with which I am familiar.
What about joining the fight to poison LLMs?
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/new-font-turns-ordinary-webpages-into-nonsense-for-ai-scrapers/
This sounds like hell for screen readers.
It really sucks that an accessible web is one of the biggest casualties in the fight against slop…
Yeah, I really don’t want to contribute to the ongoing loss of accessibility. People with disabilities have enough crap to deal with. They don’t need random extra barriers on websites they’d like to read. Otherwise, I’d probably use that font.
LLMs are making everything suck, but if you stop doing what you love because of them then they are actively making your life worse in a tangible way. Don’t let them change you. If we all stop producing human content because we don’t want models to be trained on our work then the AI companies win because they become the sole producer of words and images, and that’s what they want. We can’t let them win.
I decided to put my personal website behind Cloudflare so I can use their “AI Labyrinth” as a tarpit
I hate Cloudflare as an internet user, but maybe that’s the best option right now. The AI Labyrinth looks pretty cool! That’s basically the only use of generative AI I’m ok with right now. Does it cause any accessibility issues for humans using screen readers or other assistive tech?
There’s actually some no-Cloudflare and self-hosted/self-hostable anti-AI, anti-bot and anti-scraper software, I’ll research a bit later and come back with some good options.
I really hope that all this really crazy shit dystopia of AI and data capitalism blows up sooner than later…
I’m in your exact boat right now and I’d love to know the same. Thanks for posting this, by the way! You’re not alone.
poison everything
I think we can’t allow bad people to ruin our lives, respectively fun.
It’s the same as with other things. I won’t stop doing volunteering work despite a good chance there’s 5 people who exploit the system. I’ll put Free Software out there, licensed completely freely, despite the fact there’s probably a bunch of evil people who can use it to do stuff I don’t like. I won’t become a xenophobic person, even if there’s some criminals amongst them…
I mean we have to be stronger than the evil forces, pretty much whatever the cost, don’t we? I get it, though. It’s serious debilitating effects.
I understand where you are coming from viscerally. Ultimately, do the things you love because you love doing them. If you love writing, write for yourself. As a Warhammer obsessive, I know that showing off your work can be fun, but it is a fringe benefit, not the primary source of joy. I love to paint and make my armies mine. I could post photos on CMON but people are toxic and I do not do it for them but for me.
That is the best advice I can give. Focus on what you love and just continue to do that. Do not let yourself be distracted in a way that robs you of what you love.
I’ll throw this question to people with more experience: but is LLM such a threat to copying authors as it is graphic artists and musicians? My thought it reading requires your full and sustained attention and while people will tolerate listening to AI music in the background, or scrolling past AI art, there is NOBODY who is willingly going to sit down to read slop.
Now if I were writing something technical, a step-by-step guide on how to do something, I would absolutely be furious if it got hoovered up by AI, probably butchered, and presenting on Google’s search page.
But if I were writing any kind of fiction, I would not be the least bit worried about an LLM stealing it because I’ve read LLM writing and it’s just obviously horrible, even for non-fiction. I imagine it would be infinitely worse for fiction where it has to describe a consistent reality.
Yes. There have been plenty of cases of people prompting an LLM to write “in the style of” of a specific author. There are also AI-generated books being sold on Amazon under real authors’ names, AI-generated books flooding self-publishing spaces, and plenty of other issues. Sometimes that stuff gets taken down, but most of it continues and makes it harder for real writers to gain visibility. On the technical side of things, if you want to run a “successful” blog with useful information these days, good luck. Google doesn’t send nearly as many people to actual websites today, mostly because of AI overviews, and a lot of AI-powered SEO content is outranking the human writing in SERPs. Sites like Medium are also mostly AI slop now. Human writers are getting crowded out.
Much worse, a lot of real writers have been falsely accused of using AI. This is more of an issue if you blog or write articles, but it’s happened in fiction too. People will run your work through “AI detectors” even though none of them are that reliable. I’ve run into this issue before with my past writing (some things I wrote were “detected” as 20-60% AI-generated). AI is trained off of human writing patterns, so inevitably, people who have had their work over-represented in training data end up having AI-like writing patterns when really it’s the AI that sounds like them.
I hate what AI has done to writing communities, too. People accuse writers of using AI on social media all the time. The site where I posted fiction as a teen has a lot of unlabeled AI-generated stories these days, and it’s known that a lot of older stories were scraped, so things are looking worse for the next generation of writers.
I’ve also felt a huge decline in respect for writers of all kinds since 2022. A lot of people don’t read that closely and genuinely believe a chatbot’s output is equivalent, or at least good enough. And some of the people who do read closely are more suspicious. Like I said, there are plenty of false accusations of AI use going around. It’s just a much more antagonistic environment to write in.
And those are just some of my issues with AI. I really, really hate being forced to contribute to the technology causing all this bullshit.
That is really distressing. Reading is such a great use of your brain, I can’t imagine thinking AI content is “good enough.”
My thinking, to get you back to writing, is that LLMs kind of suck, and maybe you don’t want to participate in communities any more because AI has poisoned them, but I truly don’t think all the training in the world can improve LLMs. In fact, I think its been clearly demonstrated at this point that it can’t. So, yes, you will probably be scraped by AI, but I am thinking you are contributing nothing to it improving. LLMs have already hit their limits, afaict.
You might be able to protect your text by putting your text in an image, or presenting the text with an engine that’s hard to extract text from, like Unreal Engine or Godot. If you write visual novels with such an engine, your text should be reasonably safe unless someone goes through the trouble of using OCR on every line.
fuck with OCR by using multiple columns, and varying the column count on the same page or between pages. Bonus points for reducing column gap.
How would Unreal Engine or Godot work for that purpose? I haven’t heard that idea before!
As for putting the text in an image, my understanding is that scrapers can automatically use OCR.
UE and Godot don’t have many solutions out of the box that can extract text. Those engines are definitely better for protecting the text than RPG Maker, Unity, and TyranoBuilder, which have utilities to extract the text readily available.
Without a doubt, AI will try to OCR what you wrote regardless, but sneaky color contrast and unusual fonts can make that much tougher. Significant use of cursive can help.
