I LOVE discourse on Cohost so I'm posting this in response to boodoo in response to Naomi Clark in response to Frank Lantz. If any of you see this hi.
There's a lot about the algorithmic generation I refuse to call AI we should be annoyed about, but I'm less worried about its encroachment on fandom than anything else. I realize that 'fandom' has different associations for different people, but when I think of fandom I think primarily of people who are completely fucking insane (complementary) and for those people fandom is means not to satisfy some kind of solipsistic fantasy but is a personal obsession for personal expression whose meaning to its creator might be so intense as to genuinely frighten us. There's not much "AI" can do for this person; they are not in the fandom to consume, they're in the fandom to create, and many would do so if they were the only person on earth who cared about it.
There is a certain kind of person whose only interaction with fandom is saving as many pictures of 2B's ass to their desktop as humanly possible, and it is possible algorithmic content will be satisfying to that person. Certain niche and specific fetishes are sought out by people with a desire for quantity over quality that can border on the maniacal, so maybe this person could be at least temporarily satisfied, though I'm not so sure. I would not really call these people part of a 'fandom' as a whole at any rate, because they are entirely consumptive rather than creative. Fandom is community, even when the interactions are hostile and bullying, and creation of any kind (not just art or writing, but posting personal obsessions and theories) is, consciously or not, part of a desire to prove or say or process something that is completely internal to the creator and has nothing at all to do (truly) with the canon or reality of the text. There are certainly a great number of fans who think of their work as grounded in and expressive of the canon (often a truer, more real fandom to them than the actual text) but obviously fans are not actually making the work itself—they are engaging in their own expression for the sake of their own obsession. Canon( adhering to it or arguing over it) is a way to make one's own personal experience feel more REAL, more believable, to oneself and/or others.
I doubt any amount of mainstream AI will make these creators stop their output, unless you're counting the people who make monthly commissions of the flavor of the month anime babe wearing no pants at the grocery store. Even then, you'd have to assume that someone is drawing 2B with a fat dick only because they wanted to see 2B with a fat dick, and not because at some point the artist thought "I'd really like to draw 2B with a fat dick." There is a desire to create there, not just a desire to consume. Even if an algorithm can produce the content instantly, that doesn't satisfy the desire to create it. After saying "process is more important than product" one trillion times in my career as a teacher, I would say that it actually does apply to real life too. Every company making things worse and shittier in order to pay us less I'm worried about, but not this.
