So at work I’ve been forced to learn about “AI Agentic Workflows”. But being an AO3 author, I couldn’t help but think of how this technology affects authors on AO3 (and honestly on other social media platforms too).

What I learned was this: Agentic AI workflow software makes it extremely easy to automate, and bulk-post, HIGHLY-STORY-SPECIFIC negative comments to AO3 fics.

If you’re not familiar with what an AI Agentic Workflow is, I highly recommend informing yourself. You’ll be hearing it a LOT very soon. Basically, it’s a linked linked chain of AI prompts on one/many software platforms. Each “agent” completes a task. Then it hands off the completed task to the next AI Agent in the chain, which builds on it. Then that result is handed off to another agent, etc etc, even potentially to a final agent which analyzes what worked well and what didn’t, and changes what the other agents do.

There are a ton of repercussions here.

But let’s stay focused on AO3.

With AI Agentic workflow software, a person/group who wants to silence the voice of a community can easily scrape a tag, analyze stories by the thousands, then post thousands of highly customized, story specific negative comments, all without a human being ever seeing your words.

They could even set up AI agents watching to see if you delete your story, or delete your profile, which would be a marker of success. That success marker could be shared back to the other AI agents, and the whole workflow could be changed via automation to use that more effective approach.

I’m sure the OTF is working on ways of stopping this. I’m sure most social media companies are too.

But as usual the tools to create havoc are ahead of the ones to prevent havoc.

Anyway.

TL;DR: If you get a highly-story-specific negative AO3 comment — it does NOT MEAN it was written by a HUMAN! You were probably just story 20,031 in a scraped database of 50,000 stories, all of which were being targeted because they belong to a group/topic/tag that some shitty group or agency wanted to silence because of their horrible political or social.

Don’t let them silence you. They never looked at your words to begin with.

you'll be hanging out with the sweetest person ever and they'll randomly tell you a childhood experience that would have vaporised you and you're like oh we should find your parents and murder them irl

chinese hanfu by 云诀沉沉

"B plot", "C plot"... please. If your plotting isn't sufficiently labyrinthine that I run out of Latin alphabet and have to switch to Greek, you are not realising your full potential.

The intestines of the furnace by Stéphane Gaudry, 2012

It turns out that you can become the person you’ve always envisioned but you’ll still have the person you were before inside of you and you have to treat them with as much forgiveness and love as possible

Alexander McQueen Spr/Sum 2006