I’ve been reading about the user revolt on the Twin Peaks subreddit calling for a ban on AI art. As best I can tell we don’t really have people posting AI stuff here yet, but I’m wondering if it would be a good idea to ban it before it becomes a problem. I’m soliciting feedback from y’all on this, please let me know what you prefer.
Thanks everyone for your feedback. I get that this is a contentious issue, and I appreciate everyone being nice to eachother (and me) while discussing it. (Those of you that didn’t, you know who you are)
Based on the upvoted comments and the arguments that I found most cogent, I will be banning generative AI in the community.
A few related issues were raised, and I’d like to explain how I intend to address them:
https://ttrpg.network/post/26260249/17201676 Rhaedus raised concerns about the difficulty in determining if something is AI generated or not. As with all rule enforcement on this site, I’ll be relying on you all to report suspected violations, and I promise I’ll give you my best-effort attempt to make a fair judgement.
https://ttrpg.network/post/26260249/17206513 Carl and others raised concerns that this might impact posts predominantly about human-created content that have some trivial or incidental amount of AI generated comment. In such a situation, if the use of Gen AI is really that minimal, it would never come to my attention in the first place, and therefore wouldn’t get removed anyway.
Several users advocated for an explicit carve out for discussions about the use of AI, which is a good idea and will be included in the rule.
Thank you again for your input and your civility.
I don’t see much value in providing storage and bandwidth for things that people didn’t put enough of themselves into to bother lifting a pencil. There are enough boosters for that sort of thing out there already that they can do the job of supporting them with material resources.
I think you’ll find that if you ban people from posting anything they didn’t make themselves you’ll be cutting out rather a huge swath of material. Even before generative AI became a thing, did you make all your own character portraits? Write every adventure you ran? Invent your own RPG rules? If I were to use Hero Forge to create a miniature, would that be banned?
My 2c:
The technology that makes the fediverse is based on open source principles.
The corporate world has made untold billions off of the backs of the open source community, not just by stealing projects outright, but by throwing a closed source application on top of an own source foundation.Hell, every Linux user in the last 20 years can easily point to features in Windows, Mac, Android and iOS that are blatantly stolen from open source.
Almost all AIs are the exact same they shamelessly steal from the open internet, from all of us.
No AI.
If you want to ban anything that isn’t “open source” you’re going to hit a lot more than just generative AI. Not to mention that there are open models and open source gen AI tools, so you’re not even banning generative AI that way.
That is a straw man.
I never said banning non open source. I equated corporate “AI” with the corporate practice of stealing open source projects.
You closed with “No AI.” It doesn’t feel like a straw man. It’s fine to say no corporate AI but that might be even harder to single out.
I’m personally looking into domain specific fine tunes of small, open source models that can compete with larger models in at least one small area - specifically in roleplaying, though my interest is creating a chat bot to facilitate group gaming, not generating systems or art.
AI is just a tool. if some have a philosophical or moral problem with it then they can abstain.
AI not going away, and its use will only increase. so I’m the long term it will either have to be allowed, or this sub will fade into obsolescence.
I see no value in banning it.
Even if we ignore the ethics and quality of it, which many people are understandably unwilling to do, part of the problem with it is that it can crowd out everything else. It takes so little effort that where it is allowed, there is always a real chance of it becoming virtually the only thing posted
A general rule against spamming should suffice to deal with that.
Is it still spam if it’s posted by different people?
That would depend on the wording of the general rule, which would depend on what exactly it’s trying to accomplish.
if it drowns out everything else, it means that it’s being upvoted. if it’s being upvoted, then it means the community likes it. I see no issue with a preponderance of content coming from a single tool when the community is ultimately capable of moderating it just like any other content. why should I not be allowed to upvote something that I like because it came from AI, just because other people have a moral objection to it? I respect their right to object, but I don’t think they should be able to force those values onto me. if that is their goal, then they need to articulate an issue and be persuasive, not make rules in communities in which I’m a participant.
‘Upvotes mean it’s fine’ is how you get /r/Funny with different CSS.
That philosophy never, ever works for communities about specific topics, though. Too many people see it in their all or subbed feeds without looking at where it was posted
It’s also entirely possible for any individual kind of post, regardless of it being AI or not, to be legitimately decent content for a community but still crowd out other kinds of content that the community wants to promote. That’s why many places have specific days for specific kinds of content, like allowing meme posts on Mondays but not other days so that discussions still get to the top
why should I not be allowed to upvote something that I like because it came from AI, just because other people have a moral objection to it?
This principle basically doesn’t allow any restrictions on any kind of content anywhere unless it’s explicitly harmful enough to raise that as a separate objection. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to upvote hardcore pornography on the news community? It’s not a practical way to actually run a community
“AI is just a tool” is not how anyone uses AI. They treat AI like a free employee who will do the work for them. Note how people don’t say it replaces a paintbrush, but that it replaces a commissioned artist.
“AI is not going away” is just a lie, making it seem inevitable so you stop fighting it. Just like how bitcoin is going to revolutionise currency, and now NFTs are the future.
I see complete justification in banning the garbage output from the world-burning nazi-built plagiarism machine.
‘People say it’s a tool, but they use it for the thing it does!’ … what?
How else could you use generative AI, except to generate a thing for you?
Most things that could be commissioned - aren’t. The money is never spent. The money isn’t real. No one is robbed when a robot does the thing instead, because what it’s instead of, is the thing not happening.
You cannot kvetch about this replacing all artists forever and still insist it’s a flash in the pan. The tech works. You can run it on your own computer, to-day. It plainly serves a desirable purpose. That alone makes comparisons to NFTs as spurious as those dolts insisting ‘people doubted the internet.’
Any visions of this blowing over should’ve vanished when it became a porn faucet.
‘Nobody anywhere wants this because I personally feel icky.’ Okay good luck with that. But it’s not a coherent opinion.
This software is obviously fucking desirable, or people wouldn’t be using it. And posting it, and following it, and commenting on it, and on and on. There’s a lot of people besides you.
After the dot-com bubble, the internet didn’t “die off.”
This topic gives me flashbacks to arguing with creationists. Y’all invent whatever sweeping absolutes must be true, for your next sentence to matter. So there is only one possible reason for art! and if that reason’s different from comment to comment then ehhh who cares. False! Okay true but only if. Anyone who disagrees isn’t a true Scotsman. It wasn’t a ranking, my guy. “Better than” isn’t relevant.
And now it’s not even a tool. That’s a neat trick. It’s the only mechanism ever invented that’s immune to human intent! It becomes a legal person whenever that’s convenient to someone spitting at it. No mere user is responsible for some horrifying combination of fetishes in one image, no matter how long they spent tweaking the controls for this software. A picture is worth infinity words, so any resemblance to ideas a human being wanted and worked toward is utter coincidence.
And it’s snake oil!, despite visibly functioning as advertised. To such a degree that you’re worried that artists will starve. It’s okay, they’ll come back to life, once this constantly-improving new class of software vanishes on account of mumble mumble hey look over there.
Hate getting lock-sniped on a high-effort response.
The kinds of people who find replacing artists a “desirable purpose” do not belong in a creative community.
