Fandom and Generative AI

For decades, fandom has been defined by passion, obsession, and the formation of communities united by their shared love for beloved stories, characters, and imagined worlds. From sci-fi to fantasy, comics to horror, fandom allows fans to immerse themselves deeper into the canonical works that spark their imaginations and find kindred spirits who share that enthusiasm.

In the music realm especially, fandom has historically taken shape through labours of love like fanzines. These self-published magazines emerged in the 70s as a grassroots "rebellion" against mainstream music press for not covering the niche genres and underserved bands that insatiable fans craved to explore. Fanzines gave those micro-communities a voice and platform to dive deeper into their hyper-niche interests through the written word.

This proud tradition of using the pen to unite fanatics around shared passions laid the foundations for fans to connect over any manner of underrepresented art, literature, television shows and films in the eras before blogs and social media. At its core, fandom has always found expression through publishing labours that foster community engagement around beloved but underserved creative works.

Perhaps the most creative outlet has been the tradition of fan-fiction, where fans craft new stories, adventures and "what if" scenarios extending the official canon into uncharted territory. Fan-fiction allows fans to flex their own creative writing muscles while engaging with the characters, settings and lore they've grown to adore. It's a way to further explore unanswered questions, imagine new crossover encounters, or envision how beloved heroes might handle different narrative circumstances.

At its best, quality fan-fiction provides a way to sustain enthusiasm for franchises between official new releases from the creators. Some works have even gone on to be adopted as official canon - the holy grail for fandom creators looking to make their mark.

Now, the rise of advanced language models and other generative AI systems is opening up vast new possibilities and narrative universes in this creative realm - as well as new challenges and tensions about authenticity, appropriateness and overwhelming signal-to-noise issues.

With the latest AI tools, fans can rapidly spin up new stories, scenes and dialogues with their favourite characters at the click of a button or a simple voice prompt. The idea of building out your own new adventure, subplot or crossover encounter is incredibly appealing and powerful...

The Potential Upside

On the more optimistic side, this "AI-augmented fan-fiction" could help sustain and even reinvigorate interest in dormant fandoms or cult-classic properties. With the ability to so easily generate new content exploring beloved characters and worlds, fans may find a renewed energy and engagement surrounding franchises that had fallen off the radar between official releases.

There have already been examples of long-cancelled shows like Firefly developing an incredible second life and renaissance online after building a passionate fan community clamouring for more adventures with the sci-fi franchise's ragtag crew of antiheroes. If a similar revival could be spurred by AI tools making it easy to proliferate new Firefly tales and scenarios, it's possible that content creators and rights holders may take notice of smouldering fandom being restored.

A surge of AI-generated Firefly content going viral could theoretically alert executives to potential untapped interest and demand, leading them to green-light professional revivals, reboots or new additions to that story universe. The same could happen for any number of other properties that still maintain a loyal but niche fanbase.

Veteran comic writers have spoken about being inspired for new official storylines after encountering clever fan theories or speculative scenarios birthed online. Perhaps the most creative AI-generated works could provide a similar wellspring of inspiration for writers seeking to tap into the wellspring of fan passion.

Furthermore, AI storytelling abilities could democratise forms of fan expression. While skilled writing remains a barrier for many fans to engage in traditional fan fiction, AI tools could allow anyone to engage with their favourite properties through the spoken word. Fans could use voice prompts to easily generate new stories exploring their beloved fictional realms.

For content creators and rights holders, this could provide a vast new arena for building engagement and absorbing valuable feedback about what resonates with fans. AI-enabled fan creations could offer a fertile listening sphere for tapping into the interests of passionate communities in ways that directly inform official franchise direction.

So while certainly not without risks, the AI-augmentation of fandom could potentially lead to reinvigorated fan engagement, a revitalised flow of creativity between creators and audiences, and lower barriers to entry for more fans to engage with beloved fictional worlds.

The Dark Side

However, this new frontier of AI-generated fandom content doesn't come without substantial risks and the potential for incredibly toxic side effects that could overwhelm and corrupt healthy fan communities.

The prime danger is the looming signal-to-noise nightmare. While the ability to rapidly ideate "what if" storylines and new canonical adventures is intriguing, it also opens the floodgates to an infinite torrent of computer-generated filler. For every clever, creative AI-spawned work, there could be a million uninspired mashups and rehashes spewed out by language models cluelessly remixing patterns from their training data.

This overwhelming effluence of AI-generated mediocrity and detritus risks drowning out and invalidating the thoughtful, intentional fan-created works that emerge from genuine passion projects and devoted creative efforts. The labours of love that sustain fandoms and spark connection could become utterly diluted in an impenetrable sludge of algorithmic regurgitations.

Beyond the noise issue, there are fears this generative AI capability could become a powerful new vector for toxic, divisive and abusive behaviour to fester in fan communities. Online fandoms have already proven fertile ground for bad-faith actors to exploit the hyper-passionate engagement of fans in destructive ways - from harassing creators over creative decisions to flooding purposely inflammatory "takes" across social platforms.

Now, malicious users may be able to weaponise AI language tools to effortlessly proliferate offensive, deceptive, or radicalising narratives at a speed and scale that makes constructive moderation utterly unsustainable. It opens a Pandora's box of harassment potential by making the creation of targeted, vile content easier than ever before.

Even in less severe cases, the mere deluge of works generated without authorial intent or quality filter could sow rampant confusion about what even constitutes "real" canonical fan fiction versus plagiarised derivative works. Lines could become hopelessly blurred; especially as more advanced language models make it harder to identify AI-authored texts.

This muddying of authorial signals and provenance introduces the seismic risk of fandoms fracturing into ideology-driven camps centred around fundamentally different visions of creative "truth." Acrimonious factions could quickly arise - AI-content purists squaring off against pragmatists, or anti-AI originalists battling a vanguard of tech-utopians.

Feverish debates may erupt about whether any AI-augmented fan work has creative legitimacy, and any shared reality could disintegrate into centrifugal forces pulling fandoms apart over irreconcilable divisions on this technological intrusion into a once bespoke human creative arena.

The seemingly positive prospect of more fan-created works gets twisted into a scorched-earth scenario where franchises have their very fandoms ripped asunder from within by runaway cultural fragmentation. Long-treasured franchises and all the stories & joy they've imparted risk becoming collateral damage to the social shockwaves of disruptive technological change.

Content creators should make no mistake - injecting generative AI into the intimate spaces of fervent fandom alone is an unpredictable experiment in advanced fan service. Without deft guidance and robust guard-rails, they would be unleashing a kind of creative anarchy with profoundly chaotic and toxic potential. The zeal that makes fandoms so powerful could easily make them profoundly destructive to their source ethos.

What to do? What to do?

For content creators and IP owners, the rise of AI-augmented fandoms presents a delicate tightrope to walk - one strung between embracing engaged communities pursuing creative expression through new technological means, and desperately trying to maintain control over the sanctity of their canonical works.

On one side, the sheer scale and velocity of AI language models generating new fan content creates a potential copyright enforcement nightmare. Attempting to wage the perpetual "whack-a-mole" of issuing takedowns and legal threats could prove futile against the overwhelming tide of new composite fan works being created every minute.

The content firehouse is simply too vast for legacy moderation practices. And pursuing litigious constraints could inflame hostilities with fans who see AI-enabled creation as a liberating new format for personal expression and fandom connectivity.

Additionally, there's the "Streisand Effect" risk that any draconian crackdown on generative AI fan-works could inadvertently amplify interest and air the perception of creators as out-of-touch overlords disrespecting devoted fan communities.

So for many IP holders, a more prudent strategy may be the pathway of CONTROLLED embrace - establishing sanctioned platforms and guidelines for how fans can engage their properties through AI storytelling in approved ways. This could keep fandom energy productively channelled while still maintaining some degree of oversight.

Prominent creators have spoken about this potential future of "canonising" certain fan-driven AI creations that excel in upholding the spirit and quality of the original work. Why not harness fan imagination as a first-phase R&D process for ideating new canonical story directions?

The runaway success of AI image generators has already demonstrated how unleashing creative tools into fandom ecosystems can catalyse a surge of novel, brand-amplifying content. Responsible stewardship could allow IP owners to directly absorb grass-roots enthusiasm while mitigating toxicity risks.

On the other hand, any shifts towards institutionalising AI fan works could exacerbate the schisms of fandom over cultural authenticity. Content creators would need to walk a finer line to avoid enraging staunchly anti-AI factions who could mobilise to disrupt these new sanctioned practices.

There are no easy answers, as generative AI forces content creators to wrestle with existential questions of authorial provenance - what story creativity means in a world of machine co-authorship. Do they double-down on defending their curated, bespoke canonical universe? Or lean into a future of mass democratised, community-enmeshed storyline ideation?

One path protects legacy philosophies of artisanal storytelling in controlled studio environments. The other embraces an ethos of rapid, decentralised iteration in collaboration with fan bases - a perpetual, infinitely-forking, AI-augmented narrative cyclone.

Franchises able to carefully straddle this divergence may cultivate richer, broader fandoms. But staking an extreme ideological territory could prove either freeing or disastrous as culture wars over AI's role in fan expression intensify.

The frontier of AI-powered fan content is uncharted territory. Traversing it will require the deft navigation of equal parts technological, commercial and cultural minefields.

Credits:

Jon 70% (I did a talk on this subject first)

Claude 30% (then mushed it back together into an article)

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