Something old

Coming together in a hotel ballroom with the rebels in the cause of a women’s art/communication system, the researcher feels a tiny thrill of danger. The community is open to anyone willing to participate, but closed to anyone who might jeer, or worse, blow the whistle. A man in a ten-gallon hat approaches and wants to know what is going on. There is a gleam in his eye: he sees only women about. Not all of them are pretty – some of them are middle-aged, or overweight, or both. They all return his bravado with suspicion.

Lois, in her late forties and looking very prim, looks up from her place at the registration table and smiles the smile of PTA mothers everywhere. “It’s a meeting of a ladies’ literary society,” she answers very properly.

“Mighty nice,” the ten-gallon hat responds.

As he walks away, another voice at the table whispers: “And terrorist society.”

Beneath the grins and the giggles and the pajama party atmosphere, the ladies gathered here know they are engaged in an act of rebellion. They have stolen characters, settings, plots off the home and movie screens, fleshed them out, created new characters for them to love and given the characters permission to love each other.

– Enterprising Women (1992), by Camille Bacon-Smith

Something new

Technology and art have always existed together, with new technologies like photography (and later Photoshop) being hailed as the death of painting (and later photography), yet all of these forms continue to be used. However, generative AI introduces new questions around creative agency that fans are currently grappling with in terms of, for example, whether a story written by a large language model could be considered a valid form of fan fiction (see Cisternino and Radillo, this issue). Certainly, it is, as we have seen, quite possible to ask these models to produce derivative text that recognizably draws from media sources to transform them into a new text. Chiang (2024) suggests, however, that generative AI is not likely to become a new technological medium for artistic creation in the way that, say, photography is, because it does not allow for creative expression and choice-making as these other technologies do. He suggests that it is not the quality of the output that matters but the intent of the human originator to communicate—something that with AI exists in the prompt but is then filtered, mediated, and diluted by the normalization of the language models. A thousand works of fan fiction may have the same characters, setting, and basic plot, but the choices the author makes reveal something unique about their affective response to the material—something AI cannot do in its current form.

– * “Fans and AI: Transformations in fandom and fan studies” (2025), by Susanne R. Black and Naomi Jacobs* ** **