Fan Fiction Writers Cry To The Media That Generative AI Is Stealing Work They Already Don't Own

AI is hitting the writing world in a place people might not have expected—fan fiction. Multiple fan fiction writers have taken to the media to complain about their work getting “stolen,” when they don’t have any legal rights to their books to begin with.

Fan fiction has been a time-honored tradition that was popularized with Star Trek in the 1970s, where fans would write continuations of their favorite characters from TV Shows, books, and more. With the internet, the concept exploded with whole websites dedicated to people posting their fan fiction of different properties. Many companies in the 1980s and 1990s actually adopted official fan fiction policies to tell fans what they would allow or not.

And it was within the company’s rights to some degree. Fan fiction, by its nature, is someone taking an intellectual property they don’t own, “stealing it,” and building stories off of it. Everything done in a fan fiction, a writer doesn’t have the rights to, doesn’t own, and that’s part of the game of the current copyright system.