--- title: Can I Rewrite an Ending I Didn't Like? url: https://oosioo.com/en/p/%EB%A7%88%EC%9D%8C%EC%97%90-%EC%95%88-%EB%93%9C%EB%8A%94-%EA%B2%B0%EB%A7%90-%EB%8B%A4%EC%8B%9C-%EC%8D%A8-%EB%B4%90%EB%8F%84-%EB%90%A0%EA%B9%8C date: 2026-10-23T12:48:30+00:00 author: SYSOP summary: My notebook asked: what film let you down lately? Imagine a better ending. Wanting to rewrite endings is old, as an unfinished Dickens novel, a musical whose audience votes on the murderer and more than 18 million fan works show. AI has made this old game something anyone can play in seconds, and services like Wrtn's Crack have turned it into a market. But how far is it fine to rewrite someone else's ending? Following copyright for AI output, the gray zone of fan fiction and the divided reactions to AI-revived voices of people who have died, I drew a line, and added a playground with a short story written by AI from the start whose ending you can rebuild 81 ways. The twenty-second piece in A Page for Today. --- # Can I Rewrite an Ending I Didn't Like? ![On a dark background, the title "Can I Rewrite an Ending I Didn't Like?" sits on the left. Below, a strip of film runs right and splits into three at the end, orange, yellow and blue; the last frame of the yellow strip has a small umbrella. A lined note at top right reads: "What film let you down lately? Imagine a better ending."](/uploads/da728877e25db55e.webp =720) The page I opened today had a question on it. > What film let you down lately? Imagine a better ending. Everyone has one. A film that builds beautifully for two hours and collapses in the last ten minutes. A film that has you muttering on the way out, "I wouldn't have ended it like that." The bigger the letdown, the faster another ending starts running in your head. If only the hero hadn't opened that door. If only the villain hadn't said that line. We all saw how big that feeling can get in 2019. When the final season of *Game of Thrones* ended, a petition went up asking HBO to "remake Game of Thrones Season 8 with competent writers", and within days it passed a million signatures ([CBS](https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/nearly-900000-fans-sign-petition-to-remake-game-of-thrones-season-8-with-competent-writers/)). HBO, of course, did not remake it. We used to only imagine other endings. Now you can ask an AI and read one in seconds. Today I want to follow how the old game of rewriting endings has changed now that AI is in it, and how far it's fine to play. At the end there's a short story written by AI from the very start, with an ending you can rebuild however you like. ## Rewriting endings is an old game ![A timeline of rewritten endings. 1870: Dickens dies halfway through The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and readers have written endings for 150 years. 1979: Choose Your Own Adventure books. 1985: the Broadway musical Drood lets the audience vote on the murderer. 2009: Archive of Our Own opens and now holds over 18 million fan works. 2018: Netflix's Bandersnatch. 2019: over a million sign a petition to remake Game of Thrones' final season. 2021: Berserk's author dies; an AI voice of Kim Kwang-seok sings on TV. 2025: Wrtn spins off its AI character-chat app Crack, and 12.6 million AO3 works are scraped for AI. 2021 and 2025 are marked in yellow, after AI enters the scene](/uploads/61b5ee4bab6ca4ac.webp =720) In 1870 Charles Dickens died about halfway through serializing *The Mystery of Edwin Drood*. It was a mystery, and he died before revealing who did it. Over the next 150 years countless people wrote their own endings. When Rupert Holmes turned it into a Broadway musical in 1985, he handed the ending to the audience: near the close of each show the audience votes on the murderer, and the cast performs whichever ending wins that night. The musical won the Tony Award for Best Musical the following year. Some books left the ending to the reader. The *Choose Your Own Adventure* series, which started in 1979, let readers pick their path: "If you go into the cave, turn to page 23; if you turn back, turn to page 41." In 2018 Netflix's *Black Mirror: Bandersnatch* did the same with film. Viewers chose the protagonist's decisions with the remote, and the ending changed. The biggest current is fan fiction: borrowing a work's characters and world to tell a different story. Archive of Our Own (AO3), a fan-run archive that opened in 2009, held more than 18 million works as of September 2026 ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own)). A good many of them start from "I wish it had ended like this." Sometimes someone else carries on a story the author couldn't finish. In 2021 Kentaro Miura, the creator of *Berserk*, died suddenly. The next year his longtime friend, the manga artist Kouji Mori, agreed to continue the series with Miura's studio. Mori was the only person Miura had told the ending to, and he said he would "only write the episodes that Miura talked to me about" ([Gizmodo](https://gizmodo.com/berserk-manga-continuation-kentaro-miura-kouji-mori-1849028153)). In the afterword to the first volume after the restart, he wrote, "From here on, it will be Berserk without Miura." Wanting to rewrite an ending isn't new. What's new is the speed and the threshold. ## AI removed the threshold It used to be that to read a different ending, someone had to write it. You waited weeks for a talented fan's fic, or wrote it yourself. Now you type into a chat box, "Write what would have happened if the hero hadn't left at the end of that film." If you don't like it, ask again. The next chapter of a web novel that stopped mid-serial, an epilogue to a film that ended open, you can get them again and again, steered the way you want. That has become a market. In Korea the most visible example is Wrtn. It began as an AI writing tool, but the place users stayed longest was "Character Chat", where they trade stories with AI characters. When it introduced partial paid features at the end of October 2024, monthly revenue passed 1 billion won (about 700,000 US dollars) within a month ([Digital Daily](https://m.ddaily.co.kr/page/view/2025033014465765582)). In April 2025 Wrtn spun the service off as a separate app called Crack, which went to number one in entertainment downloads on the App Store on its first day ([AI Times](https://www.aitimes.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=171402)). Instead of reading a fixed plot, users make the story up as they go by talking with characters. It's not just choosing an ending; it's co-writing the whole story. Competition is fierce. In a February 2026 WiseApp survey, Scatter Lab's Zeta had 4.02 million monthly users, about four times Crack's 980,000 ([Dealsite](https://dealsite.co.kr/articles/167500)). Numbers vary by survey, but clearly millions of people want to handle stories, not just read them. That demand doesn't look like it's going away. Sooner or later a more orderly market will form around it. ## But whose story is it? This is where it gets complicated. Who owns the ending I rewrote? First, the AI's text itself. Current law mostly treats only human-made work as copyrightable. In the United States, a lawsuit over registering an image an AI made on its own reached the federal appeals court, which ruled in March 2025 that the Copyright Act presumes a human author and the refusal was correct; the Supreme Court declined to hear it in March 2026, settling the matter ([IPWatchdog](https://ipwatchdog.com/2025/03/24/d-c-circuit-upholds-human-authorship-requirement-thaler-v-perlmutter/)). Korea is similar. A June 2025 guide from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Copyright Commission says AI output without human creative input can't be registered, and only the human-made parts can be registered separately; if a person wrote a comic's text and an AI drew the pictures, only the text is registered ([Daum News](https://v.daum.net/v/20250613082054349?f=p)). Next, the original. If you write a new ending based on someone else's novel or film, that's a derivative work, and the right to make and distribute it belongs to the original author. Fan fiction has lived in this gray zone for decades. If no money changes hands and the source is credited, authors usually look the other way — not because they have no rights, but because they're generous. Some authors welcome fan works; some clearly forbid them. Run through an AI, though, the gray zone gets much wider and faster. One person can produce hundreds of endings in a night, and the moment they want to sell them, they collide head-on with the author's market. Finally, there's the problem in reverse: fans' writing becoming AI's raw material. In April 2025 someone scraped 12.6 million works from AO3 and posted them to Hugging Face as an AI training dataset. Takedown requests from fan writers poured in and the dataset came down about a week later, but the uploader reposted it on sites in other countries ([Fanlore](https://next.fanlore.org/wiki/Theft_of_Fanworks_Perpetrated_by_nyuuzyou)). Fans who borrowed other people's originals were now angry at those borrowing from them. An AI that rewrites endings also learned by reading someone's writing. That's why AI-made stories are always met with the objection, "Isn't that just made from what it was trained on?" ## So what if the original is AI-made too? Then how about this: have AI write the original as well, and release it from the start with "rebuild the ending however you like." There's no author's ending to take away. If the original is good enough, readers making and trading different endings becomes the game itself. Just as the *Drood* musical let the audience vote on the murderer, choosing the ending becomes part of the work. The problem remains, of course, that the AI original was also learned from countless human writings. One ending game can't solve that. How to handle consent and compensation for training data is still being fought over in courts and legislatures. But at least it avoids the clearest problem: taking an ending a particular author worked hard on, changing it as you please, and selling it. So for this post I had an AI write a short story from scratch: "The Yellow Umbrella on the Last Bus". It's about a bus driver a week from retirement and a girl with a yellow umbrella who rides the last bus to the end of the line every night. I stopped it just before the ending. You can build the ending yourself in the playground below. ## Playground: rewrite the ending ```map /embed/reending-2026-en.html 4:5 An ending-rewriting playground with two tabs. "Rewrite the ending" holds "The Yellow Umbrella on the Last Bus", a short story written from scratch by AI for this post, up to just before its ending: Jeong Mansu, a bus driver about to retire, and a girl who rides to the end of the line every night with a yellow umbrella. Pick one card from each of four decks — who acts, what is revealed, what it costs, final image — and four paragraphs join into an ending, with dots showing its warmth and surprise. A dice button rolls at random, and the original ending, one of the 81, can be shown. "Where is the line?" asks you to rate seven situations as fine, it depends or not OK — reading an AI-written next chapter of a stalled web novel yourself, sharing it free, selling it, making a new song in a late singer's voice, a memorial video made with the family's consent, a chatbot of a family member who died — and compares your answers with mine. Answers aren't stored. ``` The card sentences are prewritten and simply joined; the playground doesn't call an AI. Even so, picking one card from each of four decks gives 81 endings. Mansu drives to the end, the two walk through the rain, or the girl gets off alone; and who she really was splits three ways. Try it and you'll see some combinations beat the original ending. The original is just one of the 81. If you land on one you like, feel free to keep writing from there. The original is AI-made, so there's no one to tiptoe around. ## The voices of people who have died Where rewriting an ending hurts most isn't in stories. It's in people. In January 2021 SBS's program *The Battle of the Century: AI vs Human* used AI to recreate the voice of Kim Kwang-seok, a beloved Korean singer who died in 1996, and had it sing "I Miss You", a 2002 song he never sang in his lifetime. One column described the reactions as "amazing", "chilling" and "moving", mixed with "frightening" and "worrying" ([Daum](https://v.daum.net/v/AO3CbpHmAG)). A year earlier, in February 2020, the MBC documentary *Meeting You* showed a mother who had lost her seven-year-old daughter to a rare disease meeting her again in VR. "It's different from the real thing, but it felt similar," the mother said. "I said everything I wanted to say." Many viewers wept with her, while others questioned whether a family's grief should be material for a broadcast. After it aired, her blog drew comments of comfort along with abuse, and she reportedly made her social media private ([Wikitree](https://www.wikitree.co.kr/articles/503752)). Experts later stressed that ethical questions should come before any commercial use of such technology ([Money Today](https://www.mt.co.kr/tech/2021/02/14/2021020919112092634)). The same technology is, for one person, a chance at the goodbye they never got to say, and for another, something like a stranger rewriting the ending of someone who's gone. Both are true, which is what makes it hard. Still, across the cases, where people draw the line is fairly consistent. Did the family consent? Is it clearly labeled as AI? Who profits? When ElevenLabs recreated the voice of the late Korean radio DJ Kim Kwang-han with AI in April 2026, it said it had the family's consent in advance and attached C2PA, an international standard that records AI generation in the content file ([Smart Today](https://www.smarttoday.co.kr/ko-kr/articles/106582)). In 2022 Korea also amended its Unfair Competition Prevention Act to bar profiting from a well-known person's name, likeness, voice and similar identifiers without permission. ![A 3×3 grid showing where to draw the line when rewriting an ending. Columns: read it myself, share it free, sell it. Rows: AI-made original or my own; someone else's work; a real person or someone who died. For an AI-made original, reading and sharing are go ahead, and selling is mostly fine. For someone else's work, reading alone is fine, sharing free depends on the author's fan policy, and selling is don't. For a real person or someone who died, alone is careful, sharing only with consent, and selling is don't. An arrow below reads: the further it travels, the more it needs permission. One person's view, not legal advice](/uploads/6c37760a3ec02817.webp =720) If I draw my own line, it looks roughly like the figure above. It asks just two things: whose story is it, and how far does it go? If it's an AI-made original or my own, I play freely. If it's someone else's work, reading it myself is fine, sharing means following the author's wishes, and selling is out. If it's a real person or someone who has died, even doing it alone calls for care, and showing others requires the family's consent first. The further it travels, the more permission it needs. That's one person's thinking, not a lawyer's judgment. In the playground's "Where is the line?" tab you can draw your own and see how far it is from mine. ## Rewriting an ending is rereading Back to the question in the notebook. What film let you down lately? Imagine a better ending. To answer, you first have to recall the film. Where you lost interest, why the characters made the choices they did, what you were hoping for. So rewriting an ending isn't throwing the original away; it's reading the original once more, carefully. That Dickens's readers spent 150 years writing endings to *Drood* means they spent that long reading it. AI has made that rereading much easier. And the easier it gets, the clearer the things to keep become. Leave the ending someone else made as theirs; enjoy the ending you wrote in your own drawer; don't casually rewrite the ending of someone who has died. Keep to that line, and a disappointing film can turn into quite a good game. *A Page for Today* is a series where I open my idea notebook to a random page and lay that day's thoughts on the line I find there. Today a single question became the twenty-second piece. I don't know how this series ends yet either. If I don't like it, I can rewrite it on the next page.