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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Already we’re seeing sites like Deviant Art and Literotica killed off by AI spam.

What's happening? Or I guess as that's pretty obvious, what is this doing to the user base and how are moderators/the sites dealing with it?

Meanwhile Pixiv embraced AI and is basically a unifans export vehicle. The nobility of the author is secondary to being able to spam endless niche content users actually care for. Unless you're the top tier of artists whose work itself is stylistically unique enough to be differentiatable but not legacy enough to be prompted in, AI will generate whatever the fuck you want. Deviantart Literotica AO3 Wattpad etc survive on fulfilling authorial actualization and paid commissions, both of which were focused on restricted fetishistic content and not creator skill. AI is killing off the lower tier skill tree of this band of creators, and I'm not sure its a bad thing.

Meanwhile Pixiv embraced AI and is basically a unifans export vehicle.

Likewise many stock photo sites are now so full of AI slop that they're becoming useless unless they have a search feature to only search pre-2022 era photos. Otherwise the results are full of the same generic third rate obviously AI photos.