Ah, okay, the actual statement is interesting:
Katherine: When you think about AI technology, fan works, and copyright, what excites you? And, what keeps you up at night?
Betsy: One of the things that excites me—which is probably a bit off to the side of what most people are talking about with AI and copyright—is that AIs are reading fan fiction now. For a long time, machine learning relied almost exclusively on data sources that were known to be in the copyright public domain, such as works published prior to 1927 and public records. The result of that was that machines were often learning archaic ideas—learning to associate certain professions with certain races and genders, for example. Now, machine learning is turning to broader sources from across the internet, including fan works. That means that machines will learn how to describe and express a much more contemporary, broad, inclusive, and diverse set of ideas.
I’m also intrigued by some of the expressive possibilities that AI may create. Will DALL·E or ChatGPT become characters in fan fiction? Surely they will. I want to read the fan-created stories where DALL·E and ChatGPT fall in love with each other (or don’t), get into arguments (or don’t), buy a house together (or don’t), team up to solve (or perpetrate!) crimes….
As for what keeps me up at night, I remain mostly optimistic. I think it would be a very sad turn of events if some of the newly begun litigation about data crawling and scraping ended up preventing machines from building contemporary, inclusive, broad-based data pools to draw on. I think it would be very sad if people turned to AI-created works instead of finding, exploring, and making fan works of their own. But I don’t think either of those things is very likely to happen. Fans make fan works because they love doing it. They feel compelled to tell the stories they imagine, and they want to share those with communities of other fans. They use fan work creation to build skills and find their own voices. I don’t think that the emergence of new technologies will stop them from doing that.
The first thing I’d note here is that the question is literally about what “excites” her. She didn’t just decide to say that AI is exciting because she loves it sooo much: she’s repeating the terms of the question.
I think she’s overly optimistic about fanfic teaching AI to not be a dickhead, but on the other hand, works from 1927 are so unabashedly racist, that perhaps it’s an improvement.
Honestly, my big takeaway here is that she doesn’t think AI is going to actually affect fanfic writers or AO3 all that much, so she’s not concerned about that.
She thinks the scraping itself is fair use and gives pretty good reasons for this (in the second answer, which you can see at the link above). She’s more interested in the other aspects of AI, legally and ethically, than in handwringing about AO3 itself or fanfic writers becoming obsolete or whatever. Makes sense to me.
Granted, it was maybe not the very best quote to include in an OTW post, but OTW being bad at PR means it’s a day ending in y. This all seems like a bit of a tempest in a teapot.