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Ban on Ai Art

The current trend of Lensa, Midjourney, etc is rent seeking ghoulish behavior that seeks to destabilize  artistic labor even more than it already is. 


This is NFT shit all over again and theres needs to be a zero tolerance of it. This is automated theft and exploitation to be stopped.


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The copyright system is bad because of the ways it allows monopolies to hoard IP. AI art is not bad because of the people using it to generate memes, it is bad because of the companies who are training it using data they don't own, that they've scraped from millions of people without asking. These aren't conflicting thoughts. This is not a conversation about gatekeeping or accessibility it is about companies trying to storm a space, seize what isn't theirs, and then charge rent for it. It is about a technology being fed the work of (very recently) deceased artists to try and replicate their work (taking advantage of the dead is a consistent thread with these nft guys huh). So again I reiterate, I support a full ban of art generated using models that scrape images or text without consent of the creators.

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"I'm perfectly ok using a program that was trained on stolen medical, photos and isis beheadings because none of the actual pixels are in the new images! :)" 

We already have tag muffling, blocking and other features either implemented or planned for implementation which enable users to avoid content they are morally opposed to. It should be on the users to curate their experiences, not the site staff to react to controversial topics and take sides.


I am a digital artist myself and have used digital tools for many years, including AI, to assist me in my artistic process. That doesn't mean I support the bad practices that many visual AI have been built on at the present moment, but I also think it would would be incredibly shortsighted to ban an entire artistic medium based on a kneejerk moral panic. This is compounded by the fact that humans are often poor at telling the difference between AI-generated art and fully original paintings, or collage and photobashing techniques; I agree with the earlier point that a ban would only promote bullying and witch-hunting behavior toward artists, and create an atmosphere of accusation and distrust.


This isn't a defense of the ethical problems which concern AI art, but you could also make similar arguments for a number of other art forms or content which are already accepted on the site. Cohost is also not an image provider in the first place, so it also doesn't really make sense to compare it to a stock image website in terms of policy.


Regarding the concern of art theft, I don't see how it's any different from existing rules. If someone believes that their work has been stolen, they can report the offending user. I don't think it necessarily matters whether the theft is due to tracing, reposting or AI being used to alter it, all of which should fall under the same blanket of thieving behavior.