Stop Using Me And My Work For AI

My stance against generative AI has always been clear and I didn’t think I would need to make such a big post reminding people of it until several people this week informed me of AI chatbots that others have made of myself, my original characters, and my voice being used on characterai/cai.

A lot of people who use characterai seem to think people are upset with them for being lonely or ‘cringe’ and if someone is bullying you like that for using it they shouldn’t, especially as a lot of its users are minors. However, you are doing wrong by using characterai because you are contributing to theft.

Generative AI can generate text, images, voices and more by being trained off other people’s work. In almost all cases the work used is not from consenting artists. AI ‘art’ generators take thousands of artists work that it chews up and spits back out and these artists did not consent. Chatbots and generative writing AI like characterai or ChatGPT does the same thing but with writing. I’ve heard too many people be against AI ‘art’ but use characterai (which has built in AI ‘art’ generation features) because they don’t seem to understand that writing can be and is stolen too. It’s taking from any writing that’s online from fanfics to blogs to articles to tweets. And these writers did not consent to have their work taken and then spat back out by a chatbot. Every time chatbots like these write to you, it is doing so by using stolen work. Even if you got the consent of a creator to put their characters on there, the chats generated are still trained on stolen content. Even if you upload your own characters on there, the chats generated are still trained on stolen content. None of that even touches upon the bad environmental impacts of generating anything with generative AI.

And with this situation on characterai, not only have my original characters been made into chatbots without my consent, not only has some of my art of Arden and Ambrose been reposted on there without credit (I don’t allow reposting with credit either) or consent, but my voice has also been taken and used to train two separate AI voices on there, and someone has made a chatbot of me, a real person. None of this was done with my consent or permission.

I feel violated. I don’t know how else to describe it. I feel sick, I’m shaking, I’ve been having panic attacks over this, I feel so deeply distressed. I thought it was bad enough just seeing people taking Ambrose and Arden and putting them on there, but today I found out there’s a chatbot of me. I’m a real person. Just because you listen to my audios or streams doesn’t mean you know me, because you don’t. I’m sorry to be blunt, but this is so uncomfortable parasocial. And then for two people on there to take my voice to make AI voice replicas of me (again without my consent). I don’t think I can put into words how sick and violated that makes me feel, to have my voice stolen.

As of writing this I have 346 videos up here on my Youtube channel and post videos 3 times a week, you are not starved for my voice or my work. I allow for people to make their own fanworks of my characters including fanfiction. I allow for people to commission others to make art of my characters including fanfiction. You have options that aren’t generating AI content. Reader insert fics exist. Your imagination exists. RP communities exist. You know what I did as a kid when stuff like this didn’t exist? I would copy and paste fanfics into Microsoft Word, find and replace the names with my own/my ocs/other characters and then wow you have a fic about anyone you want (obviously I did not post these online, these were just silly edits I made for myself when I was a minor).

Do not contact, send hate, or harass any of the people on characterai who’ve uploaded my characters or myself onto there (or anyone in general using characterai or generative AI). I don’t want this to be a callout post against characterai users. This post is for any of my followers who do use characterai to please learn about the harm generative AI does to creators, raise awareness, and hopefully get these chabots and voices deleted (especially the chabot of myself and the voices). And if anyone who made any characters or voices of myself or my original characters on characterai sees this: please delete them. Please, please delete them. You are not wrong for being lonely, you’re not pathetic or cringe for using characterai, but you are contributing to the theft of people’s works. Some of you have literally stolen my voice.

If you do go and do research into characterai please be careful as recent lawsuits against them to include trigger topics and these will inevitably appear when you search around. That raises a whole other problem with characterai and it’s popularity with minors as there’s nothing that makes it impossible for the chatbot to be hateful, bigoted, harass you, send sexual messages, etc. I know characterai is implementing safeguards, but even they admit they can’t make it impossible for these messages to be sent.

I am not the only creator this has happened too. When browsing characterai to see how many of my characters were on there I found over 50 of YuuriVoice’s characters, and multiple of other creators like Cardlin and Dark And Twisted Whispers. Including not just the characters, but chatbots of themselves.

It’s 3am here and I’m sorry if there’s any typos in this, I did proof read it I promise, I’m just really tired. I was getting into bed and clearing notifications off my phone when I saw the reply on Tumblr telling me my voice was on characterai. Thank you to those of you who made me aware of this, hopefully at least I can get the AI voices of myself taken down as it is against characterai’s TOS to make voices of real people without their consent. It’s also against their TOS for anything on their site to be impersonating real people. Thank you guys as always for supporting me, I’m sorry for such an agitated post I’m just really upset about all of this. Be safe out there.