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Website Selling ‘AI Slop Audiobooks’ Shuts Down Following Fierce Backlash From Authors

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Website Selling ‘AI Slop Audiobooks’ Shuts Down Following Fierce Backlash From Authors

Last week, fan fiction aficionados around the world were dismayed to discover that the popular website Archive of Our Own (AO3), which hosts just shy of nineteen million fanfic works, had gone dark. In a statement, the Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit which runs AO3, said the site had to be pulled offline due to a “security incident” and that it could remain down for up to a month.

Then AI swooped in and saved the day. And by “save the day” we mean made everything a whole lot worse.

On Sunday, a copycat site going by the domain name AO3.life popped up online. It was very quickly taken down, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment, but while it was live its homepage framed the site as the saving grace of AO3 readers lamenting the loss of their favorite fanfic archive. “Relax. It’s all here,” the homepage says in a screenshot shared on social media. “The Archive of Our Own, saved before it can slip away.” The site was built by a teenage developer in India who used AI agents to scrape original content from A03 so they could sell AI-generated audiobooks based on those materials. Needless to say, many fanfic authors were not psyched about the nonconsensual scraping and monetization of their work.

“Huge violation of trust, consent, and u just fed a BUNCH of authors actual hard work and art to an IP eating, copyright destroying machine,” one Redditor wrote about the copycat site in the AO3 subreddit.


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