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.

I think this is an issue with the all feed. Controversial communities would be more peaceful if there was a tick box for "show posts on all feed"

Harassing a gen AI instance should certainly be blocked, but calling out ai art in a non ai focused instance should be allowed as long as it’s following other rules of not being shitty.

I fully support the sentiment, but as others have noted, calling out genai specifically is a bit limiting.

I would potentially propose something more to protect our other comms at the same time that might potentially get brigaded; IE: piracy

"Off topic comments and downvote trolling to protest the spirit of our communities for contentious topics will not be permitted."

Just my thoughts. Cover butts here if a change is made anyway since many of the core vibes of db0 are fairly contentious to begin with.

Thanks for making the post! I know that this is something that would've been best if acted on fast, but I appreciate that you're trying to involve the community.

Yesterday I was very anti-this, but then I saw the brigade happen, and I realized I was wrong. I've changed my opinion. The fuck ai community on here is pretty big, regularly hits all, and there's nothing antis love quite like finding the people they feel morally superior to, and 'punishing' them. Combine that with liberals loving virtue signalling instead of actually helping people who need it, and it's a shitstorm.

For anybody reading this who believes, as I do, that censorship is the evil, please keep in mind that it isn't censorship to protect marginalized groups, and on lemmy, people who admit to using or supporting gen ai are very much the minority. They deserve a space to be able to talk about it without getting hammered by people looking to start a fight over it.

I'm not a huge fan of AI art, but seeing how people go out their way to harass (not just spam downvoting, outright DMing and telling people to commit suicide because of it) something needs to be done, i agree.

It should be a more general rule imo. i.e.: if you don't like it, ignore it; type of stuff (excluding fash-shit) if i don't like piracy for example, instead of downvoting each post and commenting "piracy is theft" under each post i'd just fucking block the community.

Anyways, i think GenAI criticism should be allowed, and even healthy; but just saying "Don' like it." and contributing absolutely nothing to the conversation is just useless.

downvote trolling

I think this needs some clarification about what does and does not warrant mod actions.

Comments are free-form, so are easy to determine as off topic and unlikely to hit bystanders, but downvotes don't communicate intent.

Anecdotally I have come across a post in a sub I like, found it glaringly annoying/ugly/wrong etc. downvoted, then seen another one and actually gone into the sub to see if it is a wider trend and specifically downvoted a bunch of these.
Lemmy is a rating system, I think this behavior is acceptable.

I would draw the line at coming back repeatedly to keep "filtering" in this way, while not otherwise being active in the community and while not being subscribed to it. (Not that being subscribed is even visible)

Is it possible to tell apart a lurker superhumanly good at finding genai really ugly, from the 15 downvote bots of an anti-genai brigadier?

I feel that this is already covered by the golden rules- namely "1. Don’t be shitty" and "6. When going to other communities, respect their and our rules" in the recent proposal.

The issue here is that certain comms affiliated with genai are being targeted by downvote brigades and trolls, yeah? I won't pretend to have the technical knowledge to provide a solution, but I would rather see efforts to generally combat that happening on /0, rather than carving out rules for targeted groups each time the issue arises.

To be clear, I'm not saying that genai users don't deserve a space where they can discuss their interest. I just don't think that carving out special protections is an actual solution to the problem.

I agree with this rule. People who disagree with the usage of GenAI can do that, but they need to stop brigading and harassing unrelated content and communities. It’s also often seen on other websites, where Anti-AI posts (often very loosely related to the actual topic) get moved to the top of the community. I don’t accuse people of intentionally organizing and brigading, but websites with algorithms are just more likely to show these posts to anti-ai people if they interact with that type of content, even if the community is unrelated and they have literally never posted in it before.

We don’t need that here.

I'm nota stranger to holding wildly unpopular opinions. I'm an egoist, it's in my nature. Personally, I think genAI is dumb. Harassing and abusing people for liking something is unacceptable behavior, though. I've been noticing most of my comments have been vote brigaded recently, especially my comment shitting on Dessalines.

I vote yea.

I would prefer that rule apply to all communities about any topic-- trolling and screeching about something you disagree with that happens to be the subject of the community should not be tolerated. The subscribers of that community should not have to put up with it. Regardless of community.

I would agree to that.

Edit: clarifying that communities and topics don't break instance rules

Anti-GenAI users have plenty of platforms to share their views. Derailing discussions and brigading in other communities serves no purpose but to foster an adversarial relationship between communities.

I generally don’t like making a rule banning a viewpoint, but I don’t see what positive contribution that viewpoint adds in this specific context, especially when asserted so aggressively and off-topic.

I don't really care about genAI or have any strong opinions but damn, that behavior is not okay at all... I really hope we go through with this change. I wouldn't want to see people like this continuing to behave in such a way here, makes it feel very unsafe or unwelcoming. God forbid I accidentally crosspost an AI meme from Reddit without knowing and get swarmed with hate and anger. That doesn't seem like something that should happen here, or anywhere at all really.

I agree with implementing this rule.

Fully support this decision. People who don't like AI should block the communities or the instance. They shouldn't come here complaining about it and they certainly shouldn't harass or attack other users. The brigading is also really bad. I've certainly seen it happen in my communities already. I sort of gave up on one of them because of it. I'd love to see more enforcement against this behavior and less tolerance of it. People need to understand that communities have the right to exist independent of their own opinions.

I'm for it. Outside of s 1-3, I feel it just goes against golden rule one. Don't be shitty to each other.

I'm a car guy. I get that there is a fuckcars community and I respect their opinion. But if I modded a car community on an instance that was partially focused on downloading cars, I'd be pretty pissed if those folks started bashing on me and my friends just because I enjoy a hobby. It's pretty shitty behavior and if your goal is to make others feel shitty, you shouldn't be surprised when you feel shitty for receiving a ban.

Treat others how you want to be treated, or whatever.

Sounds like a good rule. Although maybe also having one or more community where arguing about AI is generally considered on topic, maybe similar idea to r/aiwars, would be good to avoid entirely shutting out that discussion.