This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
One of my favorite bands just took a bunch of AI accusations, I guess, and he wrote a somewhat-pissed Substack post. That lead singer doesn't often step into culture war stuff, but this was close enough, I think:
and goes on to say that fighting AI art in this way is fruitless:
I regret that the culture war is poking random people in a new way in the last couple of years, and I can't help but cynically laugh at it. Not to mention how short-sighted it is. In that post, the lead singer details how much of a pain it is to do graphic design for music, and videos, and other art, and he hates it. Imagine if you could get a machine to do it? Also, it actually lifts up people who do not have money and allows them to make art like the people who have money do. Look at this VEO 3 shitpost. Genuinely funny, and the production value would be insane if it was real, for a joke that probably wouldn't be worth it. But now, someone with some Gemini credits can make it. This increases the amount of people making things.
I'm not sure I have any real thesis for this post, but I haven't been very good at directing discussion for my own posts, so, reply to this anecdote in any way you see fit. I thought it was interesting, and a little sad.
And the spot that has bugged me for a while now: how much AI/digital assistance is really crossing the arbitrary line you've drawn?
Can you use AI to generate the original concept and then spend a couple hours touching up from there, so the final result is just as much your effort as anything?
Can you sketch out the basic details and then feed it to the AI and basically have it 'paint by numbers' to complete the project?
Can you have the AI spit out 50 separate images, and YOU spend the time cropping, superimposing, rotating, adjusting and compositing them all together for the end result?
Make the rule on what is 'unacceptable' AI art and the tech can run RIGHT up to that line precisely to the pixel... then stick a single tiny digital toe over it, daring your to complain.
That is what makes the tech amazing/dangerous: whatever rules you make for it, the AI itself can be used to circumvent said rules.
Most furry spaces have largely gotten pretty strict rules about aigen, sometimes aligned to the points you've highlighted and sometimes not, and the end result is pretty goofy.
E621, for example, prohibits AI excepting use for "backgrounds (treated like using a photo as a background, quality rules apply); for artwork that references, but does not directly use, AI generated content; and for audio in video posts such as WebM." The moderators will explain, when pinged, exactly how a particular piece falls, and from my understanding are pretty clear and direct about things. I don't know of any sfw examples, but leeto's 4930019 (cw:M/M and M/F) is an example where AI had been used to create pose references, but the final file had never been touched by any AIgen program, and moderators said it was at the very border but still acceptable (though this scared the artist off enough to move to conventional digital pose generators). The rules are workable!
But they end up in a situation where half of the pixels in a particular artpiece are AIgen and it's okay, including a lot of stuff that's setting the stage, and then another piece where AIgen was only used to add some shadow or shading and that's unacceptable. More critically, serious enforcement is dependent on self-reporting. Rick Griffin got a piece banned from FurAffinity (and, presumably, would not be allowed on e621) for some tree renders and shading that I don't think anyone would have noticed had he not spelled it out. Obvious errors in logic or consistency can sometimes point to AIgen when an artist doesn't disclose it (or show other faults that trigger other quality rules), and there's a certain look to some of the most common AIgen, but you can and I have put out hundreds of pieces in an hour with wildly different styles and pretty good image quality consistency.
((And, on the flip side, a bad actor can actively use AI for what AI proponents would still consider stealing. Img2img with someone else's art can have far less actual effort than direct reference or even hand-tracing on a lightbox, but can be different enough to bypass a lot of conventional phash checks or even eyeball tests for 'novelty' and 'uniqueness'. If a small-name account starts doing it, it's hard to catch and harder still to persuasively demonstrate.))
But you can also just kinda have counterintuitive and inconsistent results, and just that's how things are. I'm not even sure some arbitrary rules would be bad -- an art gallery that allowed some limited number of upload per account per day (and restricted alts) using AIgen could avoid a lot of the spam and quality control problems that places which haven't banned the stuff often run into. The rules and points being made up is pretty common.
Yep. And this will increasingly be the case.
Generate a few dozen plausibly human-drawn images, release them on a plausible timeline that a human artist could achieve, and there's little anyone could do but speculate.
Maybe there's some solution that involves uploading the raw files from the WIP to a blockchain or something.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link