Do you think Ben Affleck knows about fanfiction?

Or, a plea to stop trying to make AI create things that already exist

Do not mistake the headline of this post as a joke. Seriously. Do you think he does? Don’t get me wrong, I think Ben Affleck understands the concept of fanfiction. There’s no way a man who has played Batman and Daredevil, who has lived inside the world of Hollywood longer than he hasn’t at this point, and who is deeply connected to consumer entertainment and technology trends, doesn’t know what fanfiction is…but I don’t think he really gets what fanfiction does. 

In case you missed it, Ben Affleck was attending a CNBC conference where he gave an interview about the potential benefits of artificial intelligence. Now, Affleck gets so much of the answer right. I urge you to watch the three minute clip below.

It’s well worth your time if you like to think about the effect of artificial intelligence on industries powered solely by the creativeness of humans and the humanity of storytelling. But let’s start with the fanfiction bit. Affleck, one of the more business savvy Hollywood leaders who has approached filmmaking in a future-focused industry with one of the more old school approaches through his company Artists Equity, brought up the concept of reimagining fans’ favorite shows or movies…like Succession. Vulture captured the quote, as seen below:

“Eventually, AI will allow you to ask for your own episode of Succession,” Affleck told a crowd of people who, I would bet, are probably not as into Kendall/Stewy fanfiction as other parts of the internet*. “Where you can say, ‘I’ll pay $30, and can you make me a 45-minute episode where Kendall gets the company and runs off and has an affair with Stewy?’ And it’ll do it!”

The Succession example is getting a lot of attention for good reason. It’s kind of an insane case study to pull out on the fly. What’s getting less attention is, again, Affleck’s lead up to that example. As Affleck correctly notes, large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta’s LLAMA, Google Gemini, and Microsoft’s Co-Pilot are very good at producing prompts based on what already exists. Affleck compares this to someone writing in an Elizabethan style, but never replacing Shakespeare. LLMs can emulate, but they can’t create. Affleck touts this as one of the grand potential accomplishments of artificial intelligence: the ability to extend imagination with tools to turn those obsessions into tangible realities. If it exists, AI can turn art from something to experience into something to create. 

It’s a beautiful sentiment — and one that led to various factions of various internet communities to point out the obvious: you’re just talking about fanfiction, Ben. 

In my experience as someone who has read fanfiction consistently since the age of 11, men don’t like to acknowledge fanfiction as a valid art form. Fanfiction leans heavily romance and erotica heavy, as seen by data collected over the years by fandom data scientists.** The reaction, typically from men toward the idea of fanfiction, is that it’s a silly endeavor. Silliness can equate to lesser value.

This is seemingly inline with perceptions of stories by women and often for women in literature in general. Novels written by women sell for less than men on average, according to a 2018 study from Queens College. The more female a book appeared or the more female the genre a book was associated with, the lesser value was found reflected in the price. Unsurprisingly, erotica and romance sported the most female authors with the lowest average price per book. If you were to include fanfiction, the chart results would be astronomical. 

These results are totally unsurprising when you consider the ratios of salaries between men and women in other sectors. Men earn nearly 60% more than women in legal occupations; they earn about 40% more than women in natural resources and construction; more than 34% in management, and earn more than women in health care by a ratio of 1:0.72, according to Forbes. Women are devalued more than men on average, so why wouldn’t that extend to interests regarded as more female leaning? 

Like fanfiction. Except fanfiction isn’t a silly pastime for silly ol’ women (I include myself in this group). Since men like to examine success through the lens of scale, let’s provide some additional numbers. There are more than 12.5 million stories on Archive of Our Own, the go-to fanfiction website. The site itself is visited more than one billion views per month, according to SimilarWeb. That puts Archive of Our Own on par with Fandom. Yet we don’t hear too much about AO3. Let’s double click a little more. The second most-read story on AO3 is called Manacled. It’s a 350,000 word novel (about 1,175 pages making it longer than Ulysses) set in the world of Harry Potter and focused on the relationship between Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger. Manacled has had more than 9.5 million reads since it was originally published in 2018. It has been translated into more than 20 different languages — all on the free backs of free labor. 

Some more fun points. Harry Potter boasts the second highest number of stories on AO3 with 450,000, second only to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which touts around 500,000. Another Harry Potter fanfiction, All the Young Dudes, has nearly 16 million reads,and has spurred hundreds of Tiktok cosplay accounts. All of these stories have led to thousands of Etsy store owners producing merchandise — not for Harry Potter but for what Harry Potter has become over the years through communities formed around the imagination of authors and the adoration of the Harry Potter universe. 

If I may be as blatantly honest as I can for a second: more progress has occurred in the unofficial Harry Potter world than anything the official Harry Potter license holders have managed to accomplish in the last 15 years. 

But what does any of this have to do with Ben Affleck and AI? Similar to how men love to examine and analyze success through the lens of scale, men also love to highlight the potentials of new technologies that can accomplish what’s already been discovered. Affleck highlighted a theoretical service that would allow someone to approach one of these new companies running what are effectively rapid VFX machines and say ‘I’ll pay $30, and you can make me a 45-minute episode where Kendall gets the company and runs off and has an affair with Stewy?’” The problem is these exist. There are roughly 1,000 stories about KenStew (their official ‘ship name) on AO3. Some of these stories are more than 75,000 words (or about 180 pages). Some of these are podcast performances. 

I want to continue down the road of this concept as a business. His example — and I realize it was just an off-the-cuff statement instead of a pitch — doesn’t get into the copyright problem that you can rest assured Warner Bros. Discovery would implement the minute that some company started selling full edits of a Succession finale. The Fair Use Act may protect some of the work, but it’s unlikely to protect most of it. Fanfiction is free because of issues that websites including fanfiction-dot-net and Archive of Our Own experienced in the early 2000s.The stories that appear on AO3 are largely declared non-profit derivative works, meaning that authors are not making a profit from the stories and they are different enough from the original source material that they fall under the Fair Use Act. 

If a company is profiting off a work, like Succession, that is largely unchanged because fans just want a different ending, the court would have a different point of view. The courts have in the past. Just look at 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, a book that was published more than half a century after The Catcher in the Rye and, for all intents and purposes, is basically fanfiction. Although the sequel was mostly original ideas and concepts based on the author’s own imagination, the story took characters and settings from the original book. While fair use allows authors or editors to critique, analyze, or parody an original work, anything that looks to extend the legacy does not fall under fair use. This is why YouTubers are largely free to include snippets of original work in their videos — but even they will tell you that the Fair Use Act isn’t perfect. Nothing is guaranteed safe. 

Now, I understand what Affleck is getting at. I don’t want to decry a man who, again, is genuinely one of the better minds in the industry. He’s predicting a technology that will allow you to watch an episode of Succession that is completely manufactured from generative AI technology in the same format that fans of Succession are used to experiencing it in. Fans won’t have to seek out the story they’re looking for; they can just prompt one. Ben isn’t the first mind out of Hollywood or Silicon Valley to point this out, and it’s very likely we’ll get to this reality. Of all the creative AI promises being made, this area feels the most likely result. It’s not going to help with productivity, but it lends itself to obsession, and that’s increasingly important as entertainment and media fracture into hyper niches. 

Except here’s the thing, and it’s a facet that Affleck got to himself — just because a machine can does not mean that a machine can do well. The idea that you’ll pay $30 to a company that incorporates some combination of LLM and genAI technology to create the exact Succession finale you want doesn’t mean you’ll get what you actually want. Imitation doesn’t bring care; imitation doesn’t bring imagination. Imitation doesn’t focus on quality of delivery, it just focuses on delivery of a request. Since fanfiction is free, and since there are numerous authors that focus on a variety of relationships or characters that audiences want to gobble up, the potential to find a satiating conclusion or new approach to a favorite world is much higher than betting it all on one $30 purchase. 

We have got to stop trying to find creative uses for AI that puts the onus of responsibility around protecting the creativity and quality of our art on developers. There are useful cases for artificial intelligence in the entertainment industry, but these are productivity tools designed to help with behind-the-scenes work. Finding scenes faster for editors, helping to craft more effective storyboards for the first draft, etc. It’s not to take the passion, expertise, and love that fans have for a title and hand it over to a tool to create. 

Sure, AI may one day be able to write you an episode of Succession that you think is better than the finale. First of all, how are you? Second of all, how dare you. But third and most of all, those already exist. They’re on YouTube. They’re on AO3. They’re on Tumblr and TikTok. Just because AI sounds like something of the future does not mean it’s revolutionary. Nor does it mean it’ll be as good as what’s out there currently.

I’m begging everyone who wants to use these examples when talking about the power of AI to go beyond acknowledging what fanfiction is and sit with it for longer than a minute to understand what fanfiction does. Once you do, you’ll realize it’s highly unlikely that AI can ever get there, something Affleck points out himself. 

*I am a part of this faction

**how fucking cool is it that we now have fandom data scientists??