Fanfiction site shut down after author backlash

A site that scraped Archive of Our Own (AO3) fanfiction works and charged for audiobook versions is down after receiving over 2,000 takedown requests from authors in a single day. The site, ao3.life, was created by Ganesh, who used “a swarm of AI Agents controlling 40 virtual machines” to scrape the internet for works.

The site went down on Monday evening following widespread backlash from readers and authors on social media. Before it went down, the ao3.life homepage claimed to offer works as EPUBs for reading on e-readers, and as AI-generated audiobooks, with authors supposedly receiving 91% of the profits.

The original AO3 site went down on Thursday following a security incident, according to the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), which owns the repository. The site is expected to be down for as long as four weeks, with no data lost. AO3 hosts nearly 18.5 million works, and readers and authors are generally distraught at being unable to access the site.

Ao3.life claimed that authors could request their works be removed from the site by emailing [email protected]. However, this process required authors to leave a note on their AO3 profile, which was not possible while AO3 was down. Many authors used the legal complaints email, with Ganesh receiving over 2,000 takedown requests in a single day.

Ganesh apologized for the site, stating that it was never their intention to hurt authors. They explained that they charged for AI-generated audiobooks to cover server costs, but only sold 11 audiobooks. The site had 126,592 unique users within 24 hours of going up, and used terabytes of bandwidth.

Fanfiction has become a target of AI scraping, repackaging, and reselling in recent years. With AO3 down, some people have started sharing links to Google Drives on Reddit and Discord of works they’d downloaded from the site previously, alarming and angering many writers. Authors on AO3 are prohibited from monetizing their works or linking to payment platforms, and selling fanfiction can potentially lead to lawsuits from intellectual property owners.

Ganesh signed off their apology note as “a 17 year old from India that thought they were doing something good.” The site’s takedown has raised concerns about the ownership and distribution of fanfiction works, and the use of AI in scraping and repackaging online content. As of now, ao3.life is no longer accessible, and Ganesh has taken down the site in response to the overwhelming number of takedown requests, with the site’s homepage now displaying a message stating that it has been taken down, and Ganesh has stopped all operations.

However, the outage has left many readers and authors without access to the site, leading to a surge in sharing of downloaded works on other platforms.