Community Rules
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Be nice. Assume others have good intent (within reason).
Block or ignore posts, comments, and users that irritate you in some way rather than engaging. Report if they are actually breaking community rules.
Use content warnings and/or mark as NSFW when appropriate. Most posts with content warnings likely need to be marked NSFW.
Most 196 posts are memes, shitposts, cute images, or even just recent things that happened, etc. There is no real theme, but try to avoid posts that are very inflammatory, offensive, very low quality, or very "off topic".
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Avoid AI generated content.
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Moderator Guidelines
Crudely drawn Yu-Gi-Oh! Card saying "No"
How about instead of using a corporate investment scheme to make a meme... just write it? Or use memegenerator, or paint? It honestly doesn't take more effort than using AI. Hell I think sometimes AI would be more effort (and shitty use of energy) - to make the same thing you could use a template for.
Or just share cool shit - Like this!
I'm fully against it's use here and completely support a ban.
I'm not fully against AI but it's essentially the same as an artist tracing art something well known and hated in the artist community. All AI art must take every piece from somewhere. Every section is traced. That's scum behavior.
If, let's say, one were to use an AI generator that only used art it had permission to use, that's fine and lile tracing cc0 art. It's lazy as hell, and going to likely look terrible, but no moral issue. Currently however you're just stealing other peoples art.
As for the "we already do this for shitposts" argument:
1.) It's reasonably easy to still find the original artists ifthe image isn't generated by AI.
2.) Using it just supports this awful practice.
3.) An insane amount of electricity and water are burned to get that image.
4.) Just find some random, already available image if quality doesn't matter. Photoshop it to fit if you have to and who cares if your skill is trash that makes it so much more funny.
5.) You should put a bitmore effort into your shitpost. Make it a nice, long, fiber filled log of a shotpost.
I personally am in favor of no generative AI on this sub. If it is going to be added please mandate it being tagged in the title. Maybe that would be better because then people wouldn't feel the need to try to pass the photos the AI made for them off as non-GenAI posts?
I say fuck it. Ban it all. If you can't be bothered to crudely draw a knockoff meme in paint like the rest of us you don't deserve to post anything. Saying that you will get rid of low quality ai is saying you're going to get rid of all of it anyway.
My take is that it's just another way of illustrating your shitpost. Doesn't matter whether you drew it yourself, or you genned it with Stable Diffusion, or took a random stock photo from Google Images. It should all be subject to the same quality guidelines anyway (e.g. no spam).
I don't believe that it's theft any more than making fanart or taking inspiration from other artworks is theft, either - GiovanH's blog post provides a better elaboration on this than I could.
I agree with some other commenters that regardless of what the policy ends up being, harassment is unacceptable and the mods should vigilantly act against it.
A lot of good reasoning is going on already so I won't repeat what I've upvoted already.
What I'll add is that from a purely emotional perspective I am systematically turned off by AI output. It repulses me like a pond swarming with existential leeches. It bears a mark of contempt towards the human experience.
I'm torn on it. First off, I reckon a lot of it is a misuse of technology. We should be using for it boring repetitive drudge work, not for creative works. That said, a lot of the 'creative industries' are devoted to bullshit like advertising. I mean, why have someone pour hours of their time and creativity to make something that'll just be used to sell hamburgers, or be seen on screen for 2 seconds on one of Simon Whistler's thousand videos this week? I'm sure they'd much prefer to be making something a bit more meaningful. Unfortunately that doesn't pay. Which is why we desperately need a UBI. The benefits of the increases in productivity afforded by automation need to be passed on to everyone, not just the fat, rich cunts.
All AI art is trained on the work of real artists who didn't give consent for these programs to copy their work.
If society thought people copying parts of other artists work was stealing before AI we should treat AI art as stealing because it copys parts of artists work.
I think framing copyright piracy as a moral panic is sleazy and wrong, just as I believe that anti-piracy campaigns which seek to scare and demonize people who pirate music or movies are wrong. I cannot support this rhetoric in good faith, this is the modern day equivalent of "think of the children" for enforcing fake ownership of something that can't be really owned.
It's ultimately trying to justify passing off the work of others as their own by obfiscating the way in which it's done.
It's not worth creating your own art if an AI is just going to rip your style and take credit the second you post it.
I often find the people who make excuses for AI art theft have never taken the days to make a piece of art that you upload to a community just to see others passing off your work as their own.
It's been proven the artists used in the training data can be identified by the art the AI generates. As well as with generted text. It doesn't copy pixel for pixel or word for word, but it copys identifiable techniques and prose.
I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it if every artist agreed for their works to be used, but these bots just scraped the open internet and took everything they could find and that's the training data.
It’s not worth creating your own art if an AI is just going to rip your style and take credit the second you post it.
This is almost verbatim the same argument they use against piracy saying if people can pirate "no one buys any disks from the store" - DP (Don't copy that Floppy). And it's wrong. I use AI the same way I use piracy, and I do appreciate real art. Which is why I say that the anti-AI arguments I see floating around are bullshit, you don't know people who use it, you're regurgitating ideas and talking points that don't apply evenly to all people, just like anti-piracy propaganda does.
I'm not taking credit for it, maybe some people do, but it's a strawman argument to say everyone does. I see AI generation as another form of piracy.
I wouldn’t have as much of a problem with it if every artist agreed for their works to be used, but these bots just scraped the open internet and took everything they could find and that’s the training data.
Like I said, same thing as piracy. The arguments against piracy fall onto deaf ears, and I don't respect them. Because Copyright, especially broken long copyright like what the US has is killing our culture. I don't respect it and will not honor it. People who make a moral panic about forms of piracy are basically screaming "Think of the children" as far as I'm concerned.
This is almost verbatim the same argument they use against piracy saying if people can pirate "no one buys any disks from the store"
Do you understand the different conext of wanting something to be profitable vs wanting people to know you made the thing you worked to create?
This is i think a core separation on the issue, and speaks to how little empathy the AI shovelers have for the tools they use trained on the hard work of real human beings.
I'm not taking credit for it, maybe some people do, but it's a strawman argument to say everyone does.
So who are these people crediting when the image they asked to be generated is using art that isn't credited?
People who make a moral panic about forms of piracy are basically screaming "Think of the children" as far as I'm concerned.
Spoken like someone who hasn't created art great enough that they want their name on it.
Spoken like someone who hasn’t created art great enough that they want their name on it.
Willing to bet that you along with the majority of the morally outraged people on this subject who are whining haven't either. They're usually at it for the same reasons people who whine about piracy do what they do and simp for IP holders, because they've seen others do it.
So who are these people crediting when the image they asked to be generated is using art that isn’t credited?
They aren't crediting anyone or taking credit, same as pirating content. Just like how we don't go out of our way to give credit to the people who pirated the content or the people who made the film.
copys identifiable techniques and prose.
I am not going to even indulge the idea of this of owning style or technique, I've seen some really toxic ideas around trying to own style, traits, or even a fictional species and this is downright petty, and one of the most extreme forms of gatekeeping in that space yet. It's also so low that it's not even protected by copyright but even if it were I'd respect it less than I do more concrete forms of intellectual property (which I don't respect either).
its a flawed description of the issue i agree. put it another way. if i search an image database using keywords and skim until i find exactly what i want. then post that image as my own. have i created something? thats all generated images are. existing images, progromatically mushed together without real intent. i dont really take issue with the use of tools within programs like photoshop. that becomes a question of intent sometimes sure, but you're still typically putting in effort and making decisions during the process. yes generative 'ai' is cool tech. the same way LLMs incorporating conversational manipulations of psychics is fascinating. or how the mechanics of magic tricks can be as interesting as the trick. but magic still isnt real and im still not having an actual conversation with my computer.
I'm not really arguing against that, or trying to say that AI is any less or more creative. I'm saying that the moral panic of "copyright infringement" AKA "art theft" is stupid to me because it's based on the made up idea that people own the physical analog of an idea the same way I can own a laptop or a car. Piracy isn't stealing, and it never has been. Piracy's moral panic is based on the idea of me not buying something because I was able to pirate it. Here's the thing though. I'm not going to buy it anyway, if you think I will you don't know me.
Someone could say that I'm bad because I used AI to generate my pfp, but I wouldn't have commissioned an artist to draw it for me. I would've just taken it for free somewhere else whether it was a legal source like freely licensed or a screen-rip from an anime. If there wasn't anywhere else I just wouldn't have a pfp. Piracy isn't stealing, the amount of pirates who would buy anyway is lower than any anti-piracy advocates would like you to believe. And I do believe the same is true here for the most part.
There's muddyness when it comes to commercial AI and I don't like big tech commercial AI since they are sleazy and scamming people, but also because they will happily cut us all off and make us pay. I do not think OpenAI or Ahthropic are good companies or doing good things for our world. I just don't believe the standard Anti-AI rhetoric that it's bad because of copyright infringement. I've pirated movies in the past, even when it was shitty and low quality. This isn't much different to me, yeah it's not as good as the real thing, I don't deny that. Same with AI, AI images are like those pirated movies, lower quality, maybe shaky, real art is something else.
thats where you lose me. when we're talking about the blanket statement that all generative ai is theft when opensource solution exist, i agree with you. there is nuance here, generative ai in an opensource context is fine. whatever i think of it's value doesnt matter.
but ignoring all nuance around copyright or calling this a moral panic while claiming some kind of moral high ground on privacy loses the plot. it's an uncalled for detour in an otherwise good argument. not all internet piracy is bad, not all internet piracy is advocating freedom of inforormation. just like you cant steal food, you cant steal from the rich. sure a debate could be had about pirating a marvel movie or taylor swifts next album takes money somewhere along the whole supply chain and evtually hurts a person somehow. but now we're talking about an entire system here and also fuck'em. but thats not the free flow of information. if i put something from behind a paywall onto sci-hub. yeah some company could use some ip in there to make money. they were going to act morally bankrupt anyway. piracy and free flow of information right?
now as most scientists will just give you their work, then give you extra stuff because they're excited you're interested. if they say "please dont let this one section out, i thought you'd like it but its what i pay my bills from". and i still post that section. i've stolen their labor like a good capitalist. if a diy band kickstarters their ablum saying it'll be free after they make enough to eat. and i post that on a torrent site day one. just a pirate and an asshole who stole their labor. generative ai overwhelmingly uses content from small copyright holders who cant afford it, while providing a profit vehicle for copyright holders who can afford not to care. in this context the copyright is the only tool available to those small artists to protect their labor and ability to eat.
make your pfp with gen ai using freely offered data, cool glad you found an activity that gives you joy. do it using pirated data, cool glad you found an activity that gives you joy but theres no moral high ground there.
I'm only describing it as moral panic because in the vast majority of the argument people have talking about copyright and "Art theft" they are framing their position as a moral high ground. I really don't think there is one either. People are going to do what they do. They can use freely available creative commons materials, or they can pirate the good stuff. One isn't better than the others.
Ultimately when it comes to an AI like OpenAI, I couldn't care less if they source and license the data responsibly, use Free to use material, or engage in piracy. They can fuck themselves any way they do it. Because an AI company like that is going to screw us over in the long run. No matter how nice they play.
Your argument about pirating indie music or games does seem to be a common one, and I would agree if it weren't for one big part. Most pirates do buy when they can. I certainly do. There are things I pirate I would never buy and there are even things I would never pirate. But games I pirated and liked, especially indie games I've bought. Music and Art is a trickier subject because people these days mostly stream and view online, though if we're going to compare to art commission I would argue that a person who would commission a piece of art would probably still do it, but on the flip side someone who wouldn't, just wouldn't. Regardless if AI is available to do it or not.
Personally I feel like AI should be allowed if the memes and content are high quality and that they aren't being spammed rapidly.
What I do think should be done regardless of the outcome to ban AI or not is heavy policing on anti-AI harassment, trolling, witch-hunting, and bad faith arguments. I was just harassed by an idiot and still haven't fully recovered but this shit is unacceptable. So if we ban AI or not we need to ban the idiots trolling and trying to hunt down people they suspect of using AI. These people are toxic to the community and will hurt the community more than even low-effort AI spam will. I'm not going to provide names of people because they will accuse me of harassing them and probably harass me in return (just like the idiot earlier).
yeh agreed on the harassment thing, pointing out that something is ai or respectfully discussing is fine but attacking people over it is absolutely not
btw if that happened in this community u can report the comments or dm me or another mod the details and they would be moderated as needed
AI image generation in particular is something I think should absolutely be banned completely. Giving the benefit of the doubt is okay, providing sources makes the poster a god imo.
Those tools are able to create non-consensual pornography, it can be used to create CP. It also steals from artists, plagiarises their work and enables some really problematic scams that I've been constantly fighting to keep out of an online safe space I maintain.
It's important to take a stand against exploitative shit, if only to show some basic solidarity with those screwed over by it.
Not necessarily disagreeing with you here, but I will point out that Photoshop can and probably has been used to create non-consentual pornography and scams as well
Yeah someone said this in another thread and it's just like, completely meaningless. Just because a thing that can cause harm already exists doesn't mean we should normalise the harm, especially when a tool like this makes it more accessible and far easier for that harm to occur.
So far as I see it that point is just another negative towards AI, it means people want to do harm, taking all of the effort out is necessarily going to worsen the issue. I'm not going to comment on what should be done about Photoshop because this isn't a discussion about Photoshop.
I do think the positives of image AI just aren't really there right now. Outside of maybe DLSS.
I had to teach a class using modern photoshop two years ago and the AI features in Photoshop are inescapable. Of course, people will turn them off (I did because they’re annoying on an interface level if nothing else) but judging by the comments here, I doubt people have any idea how much AI is in the work they see, since they don’t seem to understand the scale at which its employed in regular graphic design tooling at this point.
Aside from that the question of whether something’s art or not is just silly and gatekeeping. If someone put a bunch of low quality sketches that was their shit web comic (I seem to recall some guy did for like 2 days here) people rightfully tell them to get that shit out of here. No body likes bad art, whether it comes from an AI or not. If people want to make it ideological, given what I mentioned above, I suppose it depends to what level moderation wants to succumb to ideologues.
a human manipulating a generated image still doesnt make it art. it can be a nice picture and the tech behind making it can be neat, but it's not art. that said i just dont engage on posts i know are ai content. presenting a generated image without being clear about it is just being a dick. it dosesnt have to be in the title but it should be aknowledged. i dono if a full ban is needed but if i wanted my feed full of slop i'd be subbed to communites for ai, or .world's 196. this place seems more about snark and joy, which ai rarely brings out.
I think whatever your stance on the ethics, trying to ban AI as a method of production is futile. Images created using AI are nearing the point of being indistinguishable from images created using other methods. Jokes from last year about how AI can't get the number of fingers on a hand right already seem outdated. It will soon become impossible to tell the difference between AI and non-AI imagery with any certainty, and we've already crossed that threshold for some images. That means a ban is ultimately not going to work. There's obviously lots of bad quality AI content out there, but there's also lots of bad quality content out there in general. I think focusing on the quality is more relevant than the method of production.
I agree, I fear that we're going to see a lot of gaslighting and accusations of AI generated content if we try this route. I've already seen this happening with people accusing others of AI generated text and it's shitty. I can recognize the risk of people being shitty and evil and I think that's something that needs to be fought against directly, not enabled by just yelling "AI bAD" and leaning into Ad-hominem and personal attacks.
I don't have much opinion myself since I've never used it, I feel like if it's not low quality and is properly tagged as AI it should be allowed. Maybe it should only be allowed on specific days too. Since people can pump out a lot of it. Probably should be limited to less of it if we're going to have it at all.
Maybe also make it so only base images can be AI, but you shouldn't generate whole memes with it, since that way they would at least still be original memes to an extent. Not really sure, though the witch-hunting and tribalism and lashing out at people needs to stop regardless. It makes this community feel unsafe to be in.
AI memes are something I associate with Facebook and Xitter, not something I enjoy having show up in my feed. Personally I would rather see literal MS paint stick figures than AI slop.
guess what i jus uploaded >v<
I always upvote OC art when I see it 👍
I think a lot of us mods feel that AI should be allowed so long as it is not low quality and serves some purpose
Pretty much sums up my view of it. It's a shame it's vilified since it's good at making short comics and memes. I'd also rather original ai content then reposts personally.
I can understand certain subs being against it, like traditional art subs and subs relating to shows where movie stills are preferred (the star trek ones for instance). But in the end, this is a meme sub.
That being said, it's seriously polarizing and every post with even a hint of AI turns into a fight. Tagging is at least a small compromise but I don't think it will do much without filtering. Maybe an option would be to ask users who wish to post AI content to use an alt classified as a bot, so users can filter it that way while we wait for a proper flair system.
It's not art in the first place. Just images without any value at all. I come here for posts by other people, a way of communicating with my fellow humans, not slop.
I think memes are like the one place ai works for. I don't care much either way, just please lean on the side of allowance when it's hard to tell.
I think AI art should be allowed. It doesn't matter if a shitpost is AI or not, and witch hunting should always be punished. There are too many people out there harassing and hurting people online. Their behavior should be discouraged.
Edit: It should be allowed just for the reason that people don't need the excuse to act out. I can't state an opinion without them feeling like they need to downvote to punish me.
Edit: It should be allowed just for the reason that people don’t need the excuse to act out. I can’t state an opinion without them feeling like they need to downvote to punish me.
People should be banned or punished for acting out regardless of if it's banned or not, them being allowed to just act out makes the space tribalist and hostile. It makes people (especially neurodivergent people) feel unwelcome. Which as an inclusive community which has many vulnerable people is the opposite of what we want. @[email protected] Please take note of this because I think the safety aspect here is something that is seriously overlooked. No one wants to come into a community and be yelled at because someone thought their art was AI, people who do that should be banned on the spot whether we allow or ban AI itself.
Until there are viable options for ethical AI generation (that is, all training data is used with the authors' and artists' explicit permission), I'd suggest banning it, but erring on the lenient side when people aren't sure whether an image is AI-generated.
I don't agree with this. Copyright and Intellectual property arguments like this are the modern day equivalent of "Think of the children" but with IP holders instead of children. I'm an avid believer in piracy and information access and this sounds like pro-copyright dogma to me.
What I think is a better solution is to have open-source and self-hostable models like AIhorde which aren't corporate in nature and don't make money. They are open-source projects that anyone can run or contribute to. But screw copyright and screw IP gatekeeping, I'm not going to justify or rationalize this with what are ultimately the same slippery slope arguments used against piracy
No, AIHorde still uses corporate models. The only open source part is distributing the computation.
Do I need Stephen Hillenburg's permission to post a Spongebob meme?
It feels like splitting hairs to me when it comes to memes, specifically, which are explicitly made from other people's art as source material.
I'm more lenient than most of the other posts, mainly because at this stage I think filtering and moderation is difficult to do. I also think arguing about if AI art is bad or not is a bit late now given it's everywhere in the open public domain. Was it wrong in how it was generated, absolutely. I don't think at this point using that as a rallying cry is useful, especially since so many memes do the exact same thing, piggybacking on someone else's work.
So I think stick with original rules of higher quality and don't try to chase the impossible path of determining origins. If anything have in the rules that AI generation be labeled as such to let those who want to avoid it for whatever reasons be able to filter them out. I don't think the mods should have to become experts on AI detection (like anyone is at the rate it's going).
I'm personally of the belief that there is so much AI art generated with stolen art data that I'd rather we not post it.
If I wanted AI memes there are dedicated websites for AI generated memes. It should be outright banned from this sub, people can just spam otherwise.
I understand all the reasons why AI is bad, but like... Memes are largely made of remixing popular culture anyway. A Spongebob meme is not an original work, it's literally using pre-made assets (in a Fair Use manner). Why should AI be dismissed for a throwaway meme/shitpost? Nearly all memes already exist as an exact copy of someone else's artistic work, slightly remixed.
AI in general is terrible, especially when it displaces the paid labor of real artists, but I feel like dumb shitposts should be the one place it should be accepted since memes are already remixing pop culture anyway. Why should a more advanced remix of pop culture be treated differently? It's just a shitpost? Nobody is making money off of it (at least if it is generated locally and not via a paid service), it is not displacing artists. Why treat it different than memes that crib popular culture already?
