this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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I'm once again asking for FOSS website to not use AI slop.
Next up: AI generated distro
Provide them the art for free, on-demand, and they might stop doing it.
I wonder how they managed until a fucking year ago.
Introducing using the projects logos. It's more informative and clearer. I take me 5 sec to make an edit with krita and I'm not even good at it.
There is also a metric shit-ton of free assets available from Wikimedia and others sources.
Slop isn't free. Not only does it look bad and drive away visitors, they almost certainly used an AI trained on unlicensed (i.e. stolen) artwork. There is no free lunch here.
It's pirated, not stolen.
I know it's a popular meme to say, "if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing", but that is brainrot. It's not even consistent with fair labor practices. It would be like a company saying "if your work doesn't produce value for me, then the time and effort you put in should not be compensated". That's not the deal.
Artists should be paid, and pirating art is stealing. It's just that, in the name of equity and the love of art, they might be OK with it if someone who can't afford it doesn't pay. But speaking on behalf of every artist ever: when a corporation who absolutely can afford it doesn't pay, it's stealing, and the artists want their damn compensation.
Piracy is copyright infringement, not theft.
I agree with you that it's not theft. Theft legally well defined and distinct from copyright infringement. I'm saying copyright infringement is stealing. You are taking from an artist their living. It's honestly baffling to me that one could mental gymnastics themselves into believing otherwise.
The images still exist in their original locations, they have not been stolen.
An artist produces content. They offer the ability to view the content in exchange for money. They rely on this income to make a living. Instead, you find a way to view the content without giving them money. A portion of their income that they would have otherwise received exists in your pocket instead of theirs.
Maybe it will help to think of it as a service: if you get a haircut, and then leave without paying, have you stolen anything?
Look, I'm not saying that stealing is always unethical. Robinhood is a story of someone who steals from the rich to give to the poor, and only temporarily embarrassed Prince Johns would say he's not the good guy in that story. I'm just saying let's be honest about it. Call a spade a spade.
If you deliberately execute only the half of a transaction that is favorable to you, that's stealing. If you sneak into a movie theater without paying, you're stealing. If you download music without paying for it, you're stealing. If a corporation takes art without paying to train a machine to produce facsimiles of that art to make money, they are stealing.
Honestly, if we still disagree, fine. This discussion feels like one of semantics, completely tangential to the point I was making. Cheers.
Right here is where you lost me. How does AI offer you that ability?
I'm saying the corporations developing the AIs did that. They took the content without licensing it, and used it to build something else that they are now profiting from.
But I can also view that content without licensing it...
If I pay someone to create an image in a style of another artist, and they look at that artists work, have I stolen that artwork?
does the art (be it ai or made by human) adds to the content or is it superfluous? If true, then why even bother with ai slop as a cover image?
It’s mainly for Open Graph (the thumbnail you see when you share the website on social media), and it’s good for SEO or engagement in general.
There are plenty of already existing images for this they could reuse. For example:
a banner for the website as a whole is the obvious choice imo
I saw one on another article here that was just a stock image of some penguins, I rather liked that.
The art of clipart composition seems to be a lost art :(
If it adds to the content, then it is worth something. So make someone worth something.
If it doesn't matter, add a random screenshot of kernel code.
The "worth something" doesn't even have to be financial.
Find a nice image that someone has made which is linux-related, and ask if you can use it & credit the author.
If no, try someone else.
If that's too much work, use a random screenshot of kernel code ...
There are artists out there that have already freely shared some really cool art, that would love to be able to point to publications that they have permitted to use it.
If you have some budget, pay them. Value the time involved.
Just not AI filler BS. I'm not going to see some filler AI art and go "oh yeh, I'm going to use that for X/Y/Z".
But if I see some cool art, I'm inclined to commission something for an actual use case
This is the way
You've set up a bit of a word-trap because that 'true' can cover for either of your cases. I can't know what you mean.
If it adds nothing, why does it matter? If it adds something, why do you care?
What are you actually upset about?
I am upset that ai imagery was used. That it was used for something utterly pointless like a cover image makes this even more egregious.
It also just flies in the face of open-source, to use what was likely a closed-source image genAI to produce the image.
Tux has paint on his face and extra arms!
Paint. Yes. That's what I saw. Paint.