New AI Policy

Than why allow the AI on a site when it was created to host fandom art by artists?

If not art, why on here? Why not have a whole other site to dump the AI “art” on?

@Starless
People who have been doing that - historically with edits or traces or recolors, or people replicating Paywalled images, and now who have started doing that with AI images as well - seem to eventually be found out.

One of the strengths of this site is that it is filled with people who can “Name That Tune In 2 Notes” - humans are incredible pattern matching machines.

And, over time, patterns like you’ve described become clear. They may get away with it a few times, but eventually we ID what is going on and then we can deal with them.

So, hopefully, even though AI Generation will get stronger, the user base will also gain the tools or evolve the skills to detect it like we currently are able to detect other kinds of fraud - like tracers or people “using bases” to claim other artist’s works as their own.

I’m uncertain whether a total ban is the right move, so this policy sounds reasonable for now. AI art does fill a vacuum of sorts, but absolutely it is a good idea to put limits on the percentage of total content that is AI generated for this site.

That’s a good question, but I’m not sure if this is the right forum for a discussion of that, beyond what is already in the preamble.

But, speaking just for myself, this is remarkably similar to when SFM first started showing up and people insisted that it should not be allowed on the site. Or when PonyTown screen caps appeared. Or, for me the moment I realized AI was going to become a real problem - when This Is Not A Pony appeared.

The new AI has added the additional horror of what I consider to be massive levels of art theft. That’s a much more complex discussion, but the way this and other sites were harvested seem to me to be, at the very least, incredibly unethical. And also deeply confusing. I found works I’d drawn for a porn comic in the 90’s in one of the sets. At which point my concern went from outrage to utter confusion, because why.

In this case, and speaking only about this site, the problems that I am personally trying to focus on are respecting the rights of human artists (fortunately, many of these issues have already existed for years, ranging from outright theft to mere mimicry, so we have a lot of experience detecting and dealing with these issues), and dealing with some of “Look! I did thing!” and “Baby’s First AI Generated Image” spam that AI has presented - including what can sometimes be insane volumes of “Basically an Anime character who coincidentally has the same color hair as an MLP character but EVERYTHING ELSE IS COMPLETELY WRONG” spam that we get.

When dealing with human artists, they tend to at least have some experience curating their own works. For some people using AI Generation tools they seem to just spew everything that came out, looking to see what will get an upvote, regardless of quality or consideration for others - including the artists whose rights some of them are obviously yet utterly naively violating. Because they simply have zero experience.

2LDR: It’s a big learning curve. For me, this new set of policies and rules is a giant step forward. Personally, I would have preferred an option closer to what you’ve described, but I feel that what we have now will be significantly better and more workable.

There’s a lot of stuff here that is not art, except in the most broad of terms. And we did talk about “a whole other site”, but as mentioned earlier, it’s better for us to stay focused on what we’re doing here and now. Others can make that site - and I hope they will. Then we can refer people to that other site when they want to upload 2 AI Generated screencaps a minute for hours without a break.

If anyone is working on that - godspeed, mofos. I hope you get it up and running soon. And I sincerely pray you’ll have at least some respect for artists and at the very least a modicum of ethics toward the kinds of outright art theft you permit or forbid.

I second the majority of what you said here but this ending I fully agree on. Gonna have to see how everything works out but I believe it will. 😌🙏

This is a good compromise to move things forward. I loathe AI used to make new images whole cloth, its an insult to true artists, but I acknowledge its going to be a tool to help them with their creations. Hopefully the AI spammers will get the message and slow down, or (I can dream) leave altogether.

Based on reports I’ve worked in the last day, I suspect some AI-Only uploaders maybe already are. It’s been good practice for the whole ‘What happens when the uploader of a purely AI Generated image asks for a takedown?’ use case.

What’s the point of restriction to “two MLG images per day”? Should it save disk space or traffic? Should it leave more time for other images to stay on front page? Derpibooru already had filters for this task. Maybe its for future events like what was on April 1st to prevent earning free points for uploads?

Seriously it sounds like what OGs talking in stories about birth of the fandom and restriction to one mlp-thread per day on 4chan, or something like, I don’t seen these events myself.

@Modera
It is a compromise.

And, for myself (and as mentioned previously) I hope it will help people uploading AI Generated images be more careful about the images they choose to upload, and it will encourage people to stop uploading images that they themselves describe as not looking like the character they tagged it as being.

And, yes - there is the added benefit of human created art being more visible for everyone, regardless of their filter choices, and those same works of art not getting flooded off the front page by someone uploading multiple AI generated images a minute. Which has happened. And which under the previous rule set had to be discussed and voted on before we could do anything about them. Now, anyone on staff seeing that, or seeing a report about it, can simply stop the flood and clean up the mess.

May I ask the way how to prove if a picture is not entirely MLG, but MLG assisted?

Edit: I guess it’s arbitrary.

Does it count as assisted or complete ai gen, when you take an ai generated image, and go back and forth with the ai giving it corrections to make and the like?

You know, I’m actually rather concerned by the amount of people trying to argue against this AI restriction, or at least wiggle their way out of it in some manner.
I have previously assumed that people here actually cared about proper artistry and would detest using it, but apparently, there are quite a few people here that actually want to use it.

I have no idea why they’re so adamant about using software to make images, and putting those onto this site. It accomplishes nothing for the person who posts them, and no other user typically cares for the stupid AI image they created.

I’ve already mentioned how much I dislike the concept of using AI on this site, but I’m really just baffled as to why anyone here actually wants to use it.

@EpicGamer10075
I am not really into it either, but I do like some of the artworks made by it :)

The bigger problem in my opinion becomes when other artist’s hard work pieces get blatantly copied in aspects of it :(

@EpicGamer10075
Plenty of people want to use AI, it is a powerful tool right now and the future of art in general. Just because you don’t see that doesn’t mean others don’t. There is no such thing as “proper” art.

Also of course uploading it has a purpose, people like seeing pretty images and AI can generate some nice images especially if people are putting a lot of work into producing them (closer to AI assisted stuff rather than fully generated).

@EpicGamer10075
Welcome to innovation.

@EpicGamer10075
As someone who spends a lot of time using AI to create art: It’s just a really fun way to create cool art and express myself with it. I’ve been using AI to create art since the days of ganbreeder, and it’s great for enhancing creativity- I look at an image at its raw output and I ask “Okay, what do I see in this, and how can I bring it to its full potential?”. There are so many aspects to just the initial generation of images- model merging, prompt engineering (I’ve spent hundreds of hours on that part), learning and using extensions- and then once the initial generation is done, there’s a whole ton of work to do to bring an image to its full potential and realize your own creative vision with inpainting and other tools relying on that same system you’ve built. There’s so much about it that I’m really passionate about.

I’m not against the policy changes here at all really, in the face of a growing anti-AI sentiment it seems relatively very reasonable, which I’m happy for.

You are dodging some harsh truths there.

Photography has been irreversibly damaged as a profession. It’s not a livable job in most cases if at all. Not vanishing alone is not evidence of doing well.

When it comes to artwork AI imagery is not in the same ballpark as the other examples you listed. Machine learning is based on stealing, that’s stealing (theft) artwork from real people and using it (the stolen artwork) to teach a machine to draw pictures for people based on the efforts of real artists, who’s work was (and follow me here) STOLEN.

It is used primarily by bad actors; not creatives and not entrepreneurs. It specifically offers no tangible benefit to the furtherance of society. All it does is destroy the lives and in some cases personal mental health of real, actual artists.

Technology which came along to assist and/or replace other forms of labor throughout history did so under the the power of the apparatus itself. Combines did not literally steal the arms of farmers to accomplish what they do.

Musicians, in our current time, can always play live and technology cannot take that from them. SO even if a program can make a song, it can’t just go out and play an instrument. You could argue an artist can paint live, but you and I both know that is not the same as somebody playing a guitar under a tree or a band hosting a concert.

Further, I am tired of people boiling down something so personal and soulful as art to the equivalence of manual labor. Artwork is not the same as mining, farming, running a register, chopping wood, or even programming. Taking art from artists is not just “oh well, there goes another thing to time”, it’s spiritual murder.

AI art doesn’t just damage art as a job, it also damages it as a hobby. Because when an artist shares their work online, the thieves scrape it for the sake of the machine. That is stepping over a different line, wouldn’t you say?

It’s not just about money or the history of technology. This is about theft and our soulless culture supporting it for the sake of their own selfish desire. Which, and I bet this is the case for 99.9 percent of all pro-AI folks, is loads of porn. Tons and tons of porn. I see you.

Should a computer be able to learn to draw? Sure. Was this the way to do it? NO. That is why I, and many others, have grown to despise it. Not the tech itself, not a fear of being replaced; it’s the theft of our work and utter disrespect.

Addendum: As to the statement “new artists learn by copying art”; tracing is taboo. Tracers get called out and shamed and always have. Learning from others is not the same as AI literally stealing and using our actual work. AI is closer to tracers.

As an artist of Traditional, SFM, and messing around with machine learning art, I like these rules.

Main thing is I don’t like the name AI or Artificial Intelligence. These “AI” are not intelligent yet, they are just leaning what to do and not to do based off of us. Machine learning makes much more sense as a name. Until it can do actual Intelligent things like being able to draw in different styles with as little as one image. Then I will keep calling it machine learning.

Just my two cents. ^^

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@Skoon
There is no theft involved in machine learning, fair use is a thing. If humans can look at art and learn from it then computers can too, it’s all fair use because it’s highly transformative and little of the original work is retained.

Also you should stop thinking you own information anyways, it is an illusion invented by big companies to screw you over (as they are the ones who benefit from it the most). The term intellectual property is a misnomer, the proper term is intellectual monopoly (because information cannot be owned). People naturally want a monopoly over things they create because it’s what allows them to squeeze money out of people the best and this is obviously a bad thing as monopolies in general are bad due to the anti-competitive and creative-extinguishing environment they foster (about the opposite of what you’d want in art). They just had to avoid using that name when creating the law because it’d be more obvious that this is something that should be opposed.

Also your addendum is wrong, AI is not tracing artwork. I think you do not understand how AI works and you have some sort of warped perception about its functionality which is leading you to these conclusions. I suggest you learn how it works before commenting more on it. Tldr though is that AI through seeing many examples is able to extract structural features from images, stuff like big picture concepts such as the relative orientation of say body parts on a pony, then down to stuff like the manner in which lines are drawn, all the way down to the very tiny texture details across an image. The AI can represent such concepts in its latent space and reconstruct an image based on such parameters, and in the case of something like a text to image prompt it is just converting text into some representation like that so it can create an image from it. Pretty much no different from how an artist would create a commission using knowledge they know about art based on some abstract description of what should be drawn.

@Zealousmagician
If you’re looking to create stuff with AI that is actually high quality, yes there can be more to it than people realise. Yes it can be time consuming figuring things out on your own.

But why not just learn how to draw if you’ve spent hundreds of hours on “prompt engineering”? It can take a similar amount of time to learn how to draw, depending on how many hundreds of hours we’re talking about on just this one section of the process alone. I’m genuinely curious here, not a rhetorical question.

Tell me, what future do you see exactly? How do you envision AI improving things? This is something that I’ve noticed is commonly said by people clearly in favour of AI.

Increasing the quantity of something that is as subjective as art is not a benefit on its own - in a more general sense I would rather have less art overall, but more of it is high quality and more distinct from other art pieces, than more art overall that is samey, or average in quality.

@LemonDrop
Using the artwork I put hours of my life into without my permission is theft of my work.

It is not a five second clip of a film. It is not three seconds of a song. It is the stealing and claiming of my singular still images, my complete body of work, as somebody else’s through dishonest and lazy means.

Comparing small independent artists like me to big billionaire corporations is unfair conflation when it comes to ownership of one’s product. It’s a dirty tactic, frankly. You are not entitled to do as you wish with my artwork, nor the artwork of any other artist carte-blanche.

It’s not literally tracing but it is conceptually the same. You will not twist my meaning to suit your narrative.

@Clear Vision
AI will improve the speed artwork can be created at which will in turn raise the quality bar in general for what is considered the best art. This will allow the scope of movies, video games, or just 2D art in general to be far larger, allowing for much more detailed worlds/illustrations/etc in the same amount of time (as it will allow artists to express their ideas easier without going through tedious manual labor). This has already been the trend in the past decades, things like computerized digital art, CGI, etc all have vastly improved the fidelity of say movies from the primitive hand-drawn animation seen in things 100 years ago, allowing for much higher quality and impressive content. AI is jut the next step in that.

Similarly it will make general art far more accessible to people without needing to rely on the bottleneck of an artist in many cases if something doesn’t need to be too terribly “high art” fancy (say I just want to visualize something, it doesn’t need to be perfect or even the best but having that accessible is very powerful).

@Skoon
You do not own your artwork, so no it is not theft.

Even in the delusional legal system we live in, it’s still not theft. Again, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
You are not god, you do not have unlimited authority over your work, copyright even as insane as it is has its limits. You do not seem to understand fair use as the amount of the work used is not the only factor, full works may be used for things like this given pretty much none of the original work is retained and the result is highly transformative.

Also see these, even using an image verbaitim as long as it’s serving some higher purpose (e.g. assisting in Google Search results which is a powerful useful tool) and not being claimed as their work is valid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_v._Arriba_Soft_Corp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Amazon.com,_Inc.