Ahoy me hearties!
To run alongside the discussion on the simplified Golden Rules for the instance, I decided to post a separate proposal for a single rule addition.
The proposed rule is: Off topic comments and downvote trolling to protest the use of genAI images is not permitted in our communities.
It would only apply to communities where GenAI art is not disallowed by the community rules, so mods can opt in or out.
Since the rule will likely attract some pushback from the anti-GenAI crowd, I wanted to run this proposal as a member vote to confirm we have broad support.
Exhibit 1 - dbzer0 Main Sidebar for context
Be Weird, Download a Car, Generate Art, Screw Copyrights
Communities about Anarchism, Generative AI, Copylefts, Neurodivergence, Filesharing, and Free Software.
Our instance has been associated with genAI art since its inception, because the founding admin, db0, has also spent years developing and maintaining FOSS Projects like AI Horde (a crowdsourced distributed cluster of image generation workers and text generation workers) and Haidra.
We have a number of popular genAI communities on our instance including:
Exhibit 2 - The Problem
This is the recent experience of one of our community mods:
"From the moment I started the [redacted] community here people have been brigading it trying to suppress it, and had I not had the sense to ban the droves of anti-AI trolls who come to downvote it into oblivion. They probably would be continuing to do so in insanely large volume. A lot of the users who come to downvote do so with empty no content accounts, but a lot are also trolls from the !fuck_AI@lemmy.world community. I’ve also received a fair amount of harassment including threats and bad faith accusations from it like people saying I’m a pedophile or saying I’m pretending to be nonbinary over the fact that I like and use genAI. Really awful behavior that has no place on this instance of this community."
This sort of thing is hateful and should not have to be tolerated by our users. Let's call it what it is: bullying and harassment.
Exhibit 3 - Escalating Problems
If you take look at this post from today in the lighthearted Lefty Memes community, it's a total shit show of offtopic comments. I'm not going to re-litigate the whole experience here since there is a YPTB post about it here.
This sort of brigading is completely unwarranted and I regard it as hostile bullying behaviour towards our community members and moderators. It completely derails the comments and goes way off topic for the community. Even after repeatedly asking these users to open a meta post about the issues they clearly wanted to talk about, instead of brigading the comments, I was mostly ignored and eventually pretty much gave up on trying to moderate the post.
Conclusion
In summary, as an admin on this instance I've noticed a significant uptick in the amount and volume of trolling in our communities by this group of users. I'd like to make sure we have this rule in place so that we can continue to effectively moderate the instance for the enjoyment of our community members, and to protect our moderators and admins from abuse.
Thank you for your consideration. If you have any suggestions to improve the rule, or thoughts on the topic you wish to share, then please do so in the comments.
Edit: for detailed voting information see this post. But in summary, please upvote if you support the rule addition or downvote if you are opposed.
I love dbzer0 because it’s a pro-piracy, leftist instance with great moderation and a sizable userbase. I just sort of try my best to ignore the whole AI thing, not my cup of tea with the whole power consumption and art theft stuff. I’m all for “fuck copyright” when it comes to big corporations but I become a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to independent creators’ works being used to train AI models without their permission. I dunno, all of this has been said before by a thousand other people, you get the gist.
The issue I have is similar to the Nazi bar problem; If you have an AI-friendly community, you have an AI community. You can keep ignoring and blocking AI-posting users as they show up, but it’s easier to generate an image than to assemble one manually, so they keep showing up more and more. It becomes nigh impossible to “just ignore AI posts.” It’s part of why people get so hostile towards them, if people don’t react negatively to AI posts when they see them, people will post more and more of them.
Of course, harassment and bullying is unjustifiable. It’s the internet; some folks are gonna take things too far. Makes me sad to see the effect being separated by screens can produce.
To summarize, I’m all for pro-AI users to have a space to exist (y’know, like, this instance. maybe I should start searching for a different instance? Like, dbzer0 sans AI?), but it is easier said than done to just “ignore AI” without more of it showing up.
Comparing AI to nazis is definitely not an intellectually bankrupt argument to make. But yes, we do have an AI community in this instance, and the majority of us want to keep it that way.
Definitely agree, would be intellectually bankrupt to compare AI to Nazis. Glad I compared AI to the “Nazi Bar” problem instead of comparing AI to Nazis.
And you’re right! AI folks should be able to enjoy their communities. Other folks can simply block them every time they show up over and over again exponentially.
Hell, I wouldn’t do any good crowding this community if I’m not hep to AI stuff. If you have any good recommendations for Lemmy instances that align with dbzer0s views minus AI, let me know! I’d be happy to hear any suggestions.