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.
It's baffling to see people claim the moral high ground, but still violate the copyright they want to protect for the nebulous "indie artists." So much shit was flung yesterday because we dared to ignore copyright, like we do for corporations. People thought it was a Gotcha! that we don't like copyright like OpenAI does.
The difference is, we don't have a profit movie. We are ignoring the laws that the capitalists set up for capitalists. Copyright rarely helps the indie artists. Copyright is what enables Spotify to 0.0001 cents per stream. Copyright is what enables studios to prohibit fully finished shows and movies from being aired or put on media to archive it. Copyright hinders more art than it protects.
And all these people are just full of vitrol for having our own space, using our own computers, for dumb bullshit fun. They act like we're the evil guys when they jump down our throats, brigade our communities, and then call us the bad guys for having our own space.
I love your comment and agree with it wholesale.
I have gone into the fuck ai community multiple times when it hits the 'all' feed and stated that I have absolutely made a living selling art. That the people bitching about AI tend to be the people who aren't paying artists now, and that all the artists I know are fine with AI art.
And why are we fine with it? Because no one wants to draw someone's Sonic OC. No one wants to have to draw some asshole's latex fetish to pay the bills. The problem isn't that AI art is stealing from artists, the problem is that capitalism makes it impossible to exclusively make the art you choose to make and survive.
But liberals hate hearing that the system is the problem, and love anything that tells them that they are "right" and "just" by simply clicking a downvote button.
I used to give away free art whenever I had the time because that's what got me into it- I was too poor to afford to commission someone, but everyone deserves a visual for the character they're playing or for their avatar on a forum. So I had to balance giving people who couldn't afford it, free things, with doing art for people who could pay, so I could live.
People who claim to support artists loooove to give zero dollars to an artist to fix this problem, but preach about how evil gen AI is.
Gen AI never cost me a single customer. People who do commissions, will continue doing commissions. Gen AI is a tool of the capitalist class to cut costs, and in that, it doesn't matter if some prick is abusing someone on a forum somewhere- the owner class doesn't care if you're making a poor kid feel bad about using AI instead of being bougie enough to pay. They'll cut that cost and ignore your outraged and there's nothing you can do about it.
So to me, it's just another way for the haves to fight the have-nots. Oh, you're too poor to have your own artist? We'll bully you off the internet!
They don't pay artists, they don't pay for copyright when sharing memes featuring IP owned by companies/individuals, they don't do anything to help artists but claim they do. I've seen people flame actual digital artists because they made a mistake, and thought they were AI.
Yep. I believe a quote is "Each time we achieve a new bit of technology, we are handed a key, and are given two doors. The key can open either, it is up to us to decide which door we open." And the quote was about atomic energy.
Atomic energy can power entire cities. Atomic energy can level entire cities. A tool is neutral in its use. AI can be used to make people laugh, or it can be used to make people angry online with disinfo. A hammer can be used to drive a nail, or cave in a skull.
I think inherently, the idea that it takes away from artists is somewhat valid, but the key issue is, if artists didn't have to sell art to make a living, and instead made art for art, then the conversation would be entirely different. Artists have to charge commission rates, and for a lot of them its worth the money.
My friends are talented artists, and I do not beg them for free art. I value their time spent on things. Some have given me free art, for birthdays or because I wrote something funny that made them inspired to draw or doodle. Those are inherently worth more to me than any AI piece. But I also don't ever see AI replacing any of them.
The capitalists probably enjoy that people have weaponized their hatred for AI art being used by some random person online, it saves the owns of OpenAI or whatever the time of clearing their spam inbox. If they devoted the energy to hating I-Make-Memes-Using-AI-69420 into pressuring any meaningful change for artists' lives that they swear they care about, they'd probably push their reps to enable more money for the arts.
They won't, because being angry at people online to them is activism. Like how they think sharing a memes using homophobia as the punchline is a Gotcha! to Trump, like he somehow pays attention to reddit or lemmy. It does nothing to actually do anything meaningful on even the micro scale. It just makes them look like an asshole while rallying around a vaguely good cause.