cohost support

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.

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.

"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! :)"