I made this topic because NovelAI just opened its image-generation service with an e621-based module. The time is now to establish some firm standards, because Pandora's Box will only keep opening wider.

There's some very heated... debate... on whether AI artists are actually to be considered artists. Fighting them will be futile, they'll push back to the last if we try. And some will slip through the cracks if we ban them outright. So here's my proposal for rules surrounding AI images, because we need SOME.

• The tag artist:ai_generated must be present. This will allow people to blacklist it if they so desire. (Specific services such as dall-e or stable_diffusion should be aliased or implied.) This also applies to images with post-editing, or images with only some AI components. Tags such as meta:ai_edit are to be applied where appropriate.
• The minimum quality standards are to have extra weight when approving or rejecting AI submissions. (It's well known that there's some aesthetic issues that tend to happen with them.)
• If an image is found to be too similar to an existing one, whether the original is on this site or otherwise, it is to be treated as traced. This includes anything made with "Generate Variations"/"Img2Img"/similar features.

I reiterate: I understand that we might want an outright ban more, but trying will ultimately be useless.

This has already been chewed through in topic #34344. e621.net will not allow AI generated artwork.

AI-generated artworks already fall under Low quality submissions based on the Uploading Guidelines, so it shouldn't even be posted here to begin with.

We may not be able to fully stem the flow of AI-generated artworks onto the site, but we can punish those who actually get caught doing so.
Either by blacklisting the artist from the site or by zero-ing the poster's upload limit.

Speaking of Stable Diffusion I literally just stumbled upon these on Pixiv.

https://www.pixiv.net/artworks/101671235

thegreatwolfgang said:
We may not be able to fully stem the flow of AI-generated artworks onto the site, but we can punish those who actually get caught doing so.
Either by blacklisting the artist from the site or by zero-ing the poster's upload limit.

I strongly disagree to the idea of adding artists to the avoid posting list for reasons other than the artist themself requesting to be on it.

electricitywolf said:
I strongly disagree to the idea of adding artists to the avoid posting list for reasons other than the artist themself requesting to be on it.

This already happens. I came across at least one such artist from the DNP list but I'm sure there's more.

ebea57 said:
This already happens. I came across at least one such artist from the DNP list but I'm sure there's more.

Who? Why?

electricitywolf said:
Who? Why?

tom_fischbach being a relatively recent prominent one. And because people would make so many edits of his art, sometimes multiple edits of the same image, of wildly varying quality, and people would keep complaining about theirs being rejected while some others are accepted.

watsit said:
tom_fischbach being a relatively recent prominent one. And because people would make so many edits of his art, sometimes multiple edits of the same image, of wildly varying quality, and people would keep complaining about theirs being rejected while some others are accepted.

guess it shouldn't be too surprising to find so many low effort third party edits of a very popular artist's work

also off topic: they guy who made twokinds is markiplier's brother?

electricitywolf said:
Who? Why?

gatomonlover for instance. Artist banned for being underage.

electricitywolf said:
I strongly disagree to the idea of adding artists to the avoid posting list for reasons other than the artist themself requesting to be on it.

If their artworks are purely AI-generated, then they should be blacklisted.
Otherwise, adding another clause for AI artworks on the "Avoid posting these things" section would also work.

dripen_arn said:
also off topic: they guy who made twokinds is markiplier's brother?

Yes.

lendrimujina said:
I reiterate: I understand that we might want an outright ban more, but trying will ultimately be useless.

So you saying that we having manually curated website with quality standards, should now just forget all of that and allow basically unlimited flow of generated artwork because resistance is futile? lol

ebea57 said:
This already happens. I came across at least one such artist from the DNP list but I'm sure there's more.

This happens in extreme cases where the content from the artist has gotten to the point to handle that it's basically draining everyones time and resources for material that will be deleted regardless.

One that I personally have been involved is an artist that was 16 under couple years ago, they do artwork on daily basis, they change their nickname on monthly basis and every time their artwork gets here it's flagged as being traced because every single piece they do is trace from someone else.
Sadly because no artist they trace from is enforcing their copyrights, they are still doing it couple years later on twitter, reddit and furaffinity and all they get is praise, because they have full control over their audience, anyone questioning or calling them out gets blocked and their comments deleted immidiately. They also had handful of e621 accounts and immidiately was making new one to post their content again once previous was either upload limit zeroed or banned.

It got so frequent and bad that head admin put them on DNP list so it would at the very least start decreasing the happening, which it has, because posting DNP artist is againts the rules.

lendrimujina said:
I made this topic because NovelAI just opened its image-generation service with an e621-based module. The time is now to establish some firm standards, because Pandora's Box will only keep opening wider.
snipped...

Or we could direct them to an AI art booru. With the kind of interest this is going to attract, I'm sure there's a lot of people that would use one. Added bonus, we can just automatically blacklist all images from said Booru (it would be half the point).

kemonophonic said:
Speaking of Stable Diffusion I literally just stumbled upon these on Pixiv.

https://www.pixiv.net/artworks/101671235

Those are... actually good enough I couldn't tell. I'm going to have to up my game to detect ones like these! :/

It gets better: I think Tom himself made a lot of those edits? Some artists I see made umpteenth versions in their CG-like sets like I have bought on GR.

I actually saw someone claim an artist was 16, but his 8yo (as in, on the site that long) animation was... "pretty good for an 8yo" (was sarcasm). Also, a quick Google showed that the artist was over 18. I called them out for that. Said account had copypasta'd spam from their alt account, as well. XD

lendrimujina said:
I made this topic because NovelAI just opened its image-generation service with an e621-based module. The time is now to establish some firm standards, because Pandora's Box will only keep opening wider.

There's some very heated... debate... on whether AI artists are actually to be considered artists. Fighting them will be futile, they'll push back to the last if we try. And some will slip through the cracks if we ban them outright. So here's my proposal for rules surrounding AI images, because we need SOME.

• The tag artist:ai_generated must be present. This will allow people to blacklist it if they so desire. (Specific services such as dall-e or stable_diffusion should be aliased or implied.) This also applies to images with post-editing, or images with only some AI components. Tags such as meta:ai_edit are to be applied where appropriate.
• The minimum quality standards are to have extra weight when approving or rejecting AI submissions. (It's well known that there's some aesthetic issues that tend to happen with them.)
• If an image is found to be too similar to an existing one, whether the original is on this site or otherwise, it is to be treated as traced. This includes anything made with "Generate Variations"/"Img2Img"/similar features.

I reiterate: I understand that we might want an outright ban more, but trying will ultimately be useless.

This is the best way to go about it, tbh. Otherwise, people are just going to upload their AI artwork here and not tell anyone that it's AI-generated, taking full credit for it. That would be the worst-case scenario, imo.

thegreatwolfgang said:
AI-generated artworks already fall under Low quality submissions based on the Uploading Guidelines, so it shouldn't even be posted here to begin with.

I was under the impression that only low-quality AI art isn't allowed because... it's low-quality, as the category implies.
What about the high-quality AI images? AI-created artwork is advancing at an incredible pace, and some pieces are indistinguishable from artwork produced by real, skilled artists.

thegreatwolfgang said:
We may not be able to fully stem the flow of AI-generated artworks onto the site, but we can punish those who actually get caught doing so.
Either by blacklisting the artist from the site or by zero-ing the poster's upload limit.

Dude, what? That's a terrible idea. What if they do a mix of AI artwork and hand-drawn artwork? We are not the internet police; nobody should ever be added to the blacklist unless they personally request it (excluding certain rare exceptions, such as underage).

mairo said:
So you saying that we having manually curated website with quality standards, should now just forget all of that and allow basically unlimited flow of generated artwork because resistance is futile? lol

The quality standards still apply; if the image has obvious artifacts then no, it doesn't pass quality standards. Only the well-made pieces that have had a lot of time and effort put in, including compositing and manual touchup should be allowed — in other words, AI artwork that is indistinguishable from hand-drawn artwork.

fishyvap said:
I was under the impression that only low-quality AI art isn't allowed because... it's low-quality, as the category implies.
What about the high-quality AI images? AI-created artwork is advancing at an incredible pace, and some pieces are indistinguishable from artwork produced by real, skilled artists.

The only point I see AI images being accepted is if they are completely indistinguishable of that made by a human AND possess a unique, non-derivative art style.

To quote what FurAffinity said when they banned AI artworks from their website :

• "AI and machine learning applications (DALL-E, Craiyon) sample other artists' work to create content. That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images."

Dude, what? That's a terrible idea. What if they do a mix of AI artwork and hand-drawn artwork? We are not the internet police; nobody should ever be added to the blacklist unless they personally request it (excluding certain rare exceptions, such as underage).

If they (or reposters) keep spamming AI-generated artwork en-masse on the website, then it is justified blacklisting.
Or at the very least, bannable for the user involved since it violates Uploading Guidelines.

Among all the other comments in this thread, this snippet stood out to me:

fishyvap said:
Dude, what? That's a terrible idea... We are not the internet police; nobody should ever be added to the blacklist unless they personally request it...

The e621 staff, indeed, are not the internet police – and fortunately, moderating their website does not make them the internet police. However a website's staff decide to run their own site, it's not as though they're policing the entire internet.

e621's administrative team is empowered to set and enforce rules. They can restrict or disallow whomever they want from participating on the site; that's the right of most any website's ownership and management. Disgruntled users are still free to spend their time on the myriad other furry websites out there.

monroethelizard said:
Among all the other comments in this thread, this snippet stood out to me:

The e621 staff, indeed, are not the internet police – and fortunately, moderating their website does not make them the internet police. However a website's staff decide to run their own site, it's not as though they're policing the entire internet.

e621's administrative team is empowered to set and enforce rules. They can restrict or disallow whomever they want from participating on the site; that's the right of most any website's ownership and management. Disgruntled users are still free to spend their time on the myriad other furry websites out there.

Enforcing things that take place outside of your website is indeed policing the internet. For example, banning someone for something they did on a website completely unrelated to theirs, or in this case, blacklisting all of an artist's work simply because they decided to try using a tool that one staff member dislikes — AI.

monroethelizard said:
Disgruntled users are still free to spend their time on the myriad other furry websites out there.

It pains me that people like you would so happily splinter one of the largest furry communities on the internet, especially one that had originally set out with the goal of being an archive, instead of working together to find a compromise. We allow cub, rape, gore, scat, and piss, sometimes all together in the same image — yet allowing AI-created artwork is one thing that crosses the line?

They own it, so they can do whatever they want with it!

This is the absolute worst mindset that people have been adopting lately. This isn't a private website with a few hand-selected people let in. This is a public, flourishing community that puts in just as much work as they do. There are responsibilities that come with creating a community; you don't get to just do whatever you feel like with it and expect it to not fall apart.
The site staff didn't upload nor tag the majority of the content on this website. They didn't write the majority of wiki entries. They are maintainers, not oligarchs. Without the community, this website would be nothing. By spreading this mindset, you are actively wishing harm upon this website.

---

thegreatwolfgang said:
The only point I see AI images being accepted is if they are completely indistinguishable of that made by a human AND possess a unique, non-derivative art style.

To quote what FurAffinity said when they banned AI artworks from their website :

• "AI and machine learning applications (DALL-E, Craiyon) sample other artists' work to create content. That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images."

Fender isn't exactly an AI expert. Does he think artists just magically learn without ever looking at a single reference? Sure, they could use the real world as a reference, but we all know furry artists aren't doing that — there referencing other artwork and images. It's hardly that different for the AI. It learns how to create by looking at millions of images. Plenty of artists use references for their artwork, and there is and has never been anything wrong with that. It's not as if the AI is literally copy and pasting pixels from different pictures. These systems don't even store any images, just the training data.

Nobody actually believes that these AIs are plagiarizing artwork. They're just concerned that artists will be put out of business, which is a perfectly reasonable fear to have — just don't try to disguise it behind a different, made-up problem. No image made by an AI would ever be found guilty of copyright, unless the creator intentionally went out of their way to force it to copy an existing piece they've fed to it... which would be the fault of the creator, not the AI.

thegreatwolfgang said:
If they (or reposters) keep spamming AI-generated artwork en-masse on the website, then it is justified blacklisting.
Or at the very least, bannable for the user involved since it violates Uploading Guidelines.

The latter would be preferable by far.

fishyvap said:
This isn't a private website with a few hand-selected people let in. This is a public, flourishing community that puts in just as much work as they do. There are responsibilities that come with creating a community; you don't get to just do whatever you feel like with it and expect it to not fall apart.

Partially incorrect. E621 is, without a doubt, a private website. It is privately owned by a private company known as Bad Dragon (is it an LLC? I'm not sure if it is, although it should be) and run by a few hand-selected people. Bad Dragon can indeed do what they feel like with it, whether it ends up falling apart or not. If they wish to make like the first administration, they can totally take down the site because they're sick of all the drama whether we users like it or not. But they maintain it because they find value in it, both financially and personally.

That said, yes, there is a public community that's built up around e621. Bad Dragon and e621's staff are well aware they need this community to help maintain and build the site, but they also can't let the inmates run the asylum or everything will fall apart a heck of a lot more than if they decide they don't want AI-generated pictures here. We shouldn't be thinking the public has more power here than we really do; otherwise, it's just our public egos demanding we take over the asylum because we inmates think we're sane enough to run ourselves.

clawstripe said:
Partially incorrect. E621 is, without a doubt, a private website. It is privately owned by a private company known as Bad Dragon (is it an LLC? I'm not sure if it is, although it should be) and run by a few hand-selected people. Bad Dragon can indeed do what they feel like with it, whether it ends up falling apart or not. If they wish to make like the first administration, they can totally take down the site because they're sick of all the drama whether we users like it or not. But they maintain it because they find value in it, both financially and personally.

"Private" and "public" in the context you're talking about are terms that represent nothing more than a company's ownership status. A public company sells shares on the stock market, while a private company sells shares... privately. It has nothing to do with literally anything else. I've seen plenty of people using this argument to justify all sorts of things, even when the company they're defending is, in fact, publically shared. And even then, the owners of both private and public companies can't do whatever they want without backlash from their private/public shareholders and their customers, risking collapse. Like I said, they can't do whatever they want with the website without expecting the community to fall apart. That was kind of exactly my point, except in this case, it goes much deeper.

Unlike a company (private or not), which compensates everyone who contributes to their success, e621 takes millions of contributions from millions of users with absolutely no compensation to them. Even the website's code itself has 40+ contributors (myself included), of which very few are staff members. So for a select few staff members to then claim they own the site and can do whatever they want with it? Sorry, but I hope can understand how that doesn't sit well with me.

clawstripe said:
That said, yes, there is a public community that's built up around e621. Bad Dragon and e621's staff are well aware they need this community to help maintain and build the site, but they also can't let the inmates run the asylum or everything will fall apart a heck of a lot more than if they decide they don't want AI-generated pictures here. We shouldn't be thinking the public has more power here than we really do; otherwise, it's just our public egos demanding we take over the asylum because we inmates think we're sane enough to run ourselves.

I really don't understand what you're going on about here. The topic is about allowing high-quality AI-created artwork to be uploaded and properly tagged here. Nobody is suggesting we turn the website into an anarchy or "asylum" or whatever (that's a horrible analogy, no offense). Allowing AI artwork isn't going to harm the site any more that allowing cub and other controversial content does. Don't wanna see it? Blacklist it. That has always been the motto, and I don't see why this should be any different.

e6 and e9 are for human artists, not for machines. People writing prompts into a text box doesn't make them an artist any more than writing a commission prompt and having it fulfilled by an actual artist. The fact that people have to use a different form of language to communicate their idea has zero bearing on the distinction, try communicating with an artist in a foreign language without relying on an online translator and it's the exact same spiel.

Using AI for supplementing regular art, like helping with backgrounds or as pose references, are fine, but we are definitely drawing the line at people either uploading unmodified AI artwork, or compositing AI works and applying mild touch ups.

kemonophonic said:
https://www.pixiv.net/artworks/101671235

Weird how every single time there's an example being passed around of good AI artwork it's always pinups of big breasted woman with no hands in sight. I wonder if they're hoping the large breasts will distract from the faces, eyes, or suspicious lack of hands.

notmenotyou said:
e6 and e9 are for human artists, not for machines.

Segregate them to e621.ai? 😍

notmenotyou said:
People writing prompts into a text box doesn't make them an artist any more than writing a commission prompt and having it fulfilled by an actual artist. The fact that people have to use a different form of language to communicate their idea has zero bearing on the distinction, try communicating with an artist in a foreign language without relying on an online translator and it's the exact same spiel.

Using AI for supplementing regular art, like helping with backgrounds or as pose references, are fine, but we are definitely drawing the line at people either uploading unmodified AI artwork, or compositing AI works and applying mild touch ups.

Well that's the thing — low-effort AI artwork is easy to identify and wouldn't pass quality standards anyway. High-quality AI-created art is much harder to spot, and requires a ton of time and effort, including manually drawing on a canvas for the AI to interpret from, adjusting that canvas image along with dozens of setting and tags/prompts, spending hours iterating all of the above to find the best outcomes, and, yes, compositing your best results together and then touching them up in an image editor. In this case, it is being used as a tool to create artwork. Maybe not in a way that some people like, but it's original work nonetheless, in the same way that professional photography is; they obviously didn't create and probably don't own what they took a picture of, but they still used their experience to put in a great deal of effort to get their photo to look the way it does. Yes, I know real-life photography isn't allowed here, it's just an example.

notmenotyou said:
Weird how every single time there's an example being passed around of good AI artwork it's always pinups of big breasted woman with no hands in sight. I wonder if they're hoping the large breasts will distract from the faces, eyes, or suspicious lack of hands.

A perfect example of low-effort AI artwork. Nobody would be fooled by these, and they shouldn't be allowed here because of already-present quality standards.

fishyvap said:
Enforcing things that take place outside of your website is indeed policing the internet. For example, banning someone for something they did on a website completely unrelated to theirs, or in this case, blacklisting all of an artist's work simply because they decided to try using a tool that one staff member dislikes — AI.

No one's going to be blacklisted from this site because they use an AI art generator. They would be blacklisted from this site because such generated art is constantly uploaded to this site, against its rules, and they don't have any content that would be acceptable for this site anyway. It wouldn't be because of something they did on a website completely unrelated to here, but because of something that happened on this site. Check out post #3590930. They used an AI art generator. However, they didn't try to post that generated art here, and instead redrew a similar picture by hand and gave it a more personal touch. They're under no threat of having their art blacklisted for doing that.

fishyvap said:
It pains me that people like you would so happily splinter one of the largest furry communities on the internet, especially one that had originally set out with the goal of being an archive, instead of working together to find a compromise.

No one's being told they can't be here at all just because they like dabbling in AI generated art. But this isn't a site for AI generated art. Just like no one's being told they can't be here at all just because they like dabbling in written stories. But this isn't a site for written stories. However, if you supplement those things with enough original (non-AI-generated) artwork, that content you create may be allowed to be posted.

fishyvap said:
We allow cub, rape, gore, scat, and piss, sometimes all together in the same image — yet allowing AI-created artwork is one thing that crosses the line?

I really hope you can tell the difference between the type of content allowed, and the source of said content.

fishyvap said:
Fender isn't exactly an AI expert. Does he think artists just magically learn without ever looking at a single reference?

There is a difference between the way people and AI "learn". AI takes the data its given, and creates results its told to. Add in enough variability, and the results vary (but not too much, so the results are somewhat stable). But it's not a thinking mind with its own wishes and desires, it doesn't have its own likes or dislikes, it doesn't have life experiences that influence what it wants to do or how it wants to do it, it's not using it's own skill that it built up over the course of its life; its just doing what its told to do by its creators with the curated data its given by its creators, and adjusted until it produces results its creators are happy with. https://i.imgur.com/pgJnMBT.png

fishyvap said:
Sure, they could use the real world as a reference, but we all know furry artists aren't doing that

That's a blanket statement if I ever saw one. People who learn art solely by other peoples' art tend to have quality issues, in the same way as making an imperfect copy of an imperfect copy causes quality degradation. But plenty of artists do learn using materials that include real world references.

alphamule said:
Those are... actually good enough I couldn't tell. I'm going to have to up my game to detect ones like these! :/

Check the eyes, patterns (e.g. fur), inelegant hand hiding, and for odd anatomy that an artist who would be capable of the rest of the image probably wouldn't draw by mistake. It's actually pretty easy to tell if you know what you're looking for, and overall, they're all very "watery" looking.

hungrymaple said:
It's actually pretty easy to tell if you know what you're looking for, and overall, they're all very "watery" looking.

But what happens if an artist wants that "watery" look?

notmenotyou said:
Using AI for supplementing regular art, like helping with backgrounds or as pose references, are fine, but we are definitely drawing the line at people either uploading unmodified AI artwork, or compositing AI works and applying mild touch ups.

Actually, I'm hoping we can get more clarification on this.

It is possible for an artist to draw something, and then to feed their artwork into the AI to enhance/redraw it, as seen here (which has been approved).

Where is the line drawn on this? Can someone draw some MS paint doodle, feed it into the AI, and then upload it here (assuming it looks good enough to pass quality standards)?

notmenotyou said:
Using AI for supplementing regular art, like helping with backgrounds or as pose references, are fine, but we are definitely drawing the line at people either uploading unmodified AI artwork, or compositing AI works and applying mild touch ups.

Also of note, what is considered 'mild'? This piece (also approved after the submission rules were updated for AI) was created entirely out of different AI images that were composited together and touched up, as explained here.

fishyvap said:
Actually, I'm hoping we can get more clarification on this.

It is possible for an artist to draw something, and then to feed their artwork into the AI to enhance/redraw it, as seen here (which has been approved).

Where is the line drawn on this? Can someone draw some MS paint doodle, feed it into the AI, and then upload it here (assuming it looks good enough to pass quality standards)?

Upscales are against the rules, and your example is not upscaled.

dubsthefox said:
Upscales are against the rules, and your example is not upscaled.

Please read up for context, nobody is talking about AI upscaling here. We're talking about AI-generated/created images, which were vaguely added to be against quality standards about a month or so ago.

fishyvap said:
Actually, I'm hoping we can get more clarification on this.

It is possible for an artist to draw something, and then to feed their artwork into the AI to enhance/redraw it, as seen here (which has been approved).

Where is the line drawn on this? Can someone draw some MS paint doodle, feed it into the AI, and then upload it here (assuming it looks good enough to pass quality standards)?

this is just a paint-over of an AI generated image, not an painting that was fed into an AI to improve it. the artist literally shows the process of painting over the image in one of the tweets linked in the discription.

dubsthefox said:
Upscales are against the rules.

I'm not sure if this is 100% true, I believe the rule is that we do not accept posts of the upscaled image if the original resolution version is available.
if the artist only ever made the upscaled image public, that's the version we'd have to use. I'm not sure this is something that's ever done with resolution, but it's not super uncommon to see frame-by-frame animations that, for some godforsaken reason, the artist took and dumped into DAIN or some other interpolation AI and just didn't make the animation with the original framerate available.

essentially, the original res original framerate is considered bvas if it's available, otherwise we'll just have to deal with the vaseline some people like to smear on their art to make it look worse... unless the AI artifacting and stuff looks _really_ bad, then it'd probably get removed regardless.
and this would probably extend to any other ai """improvements""" that an art piece might be subjected to.

darryus said:
this is just a paint-over of an AI generated image, not an painting that was fed into an AI to improve it. the artist literally shows the process of painting over the image in one of the tweets linked in the discription.

On second look, you're partially right; I misunderstood what they meant by 'original'. Except this wasn't really a "paint-over", since they're directly modifying the AI-generated image rather than repainting the entire thing. So that means this image is quite literally an entirely AI–generated piece that had touch-ups applied to it... Which NMNY himself said isn't allowed.

Thus, much clarification is still needed.

watsit said:
No one's going to be blacklisted from this site because they use an AI art generator. They would be blacklisted from this site because such generated art is constantly uploaded to this site, against its rules, and they don't have any content that would be acceptable for this site anyway. It wouldn't be because of something they did on a website completely unrelated to here, but because of something that happened on this site. Check out post #3590930. They used an AI art generator. However, they didn't try to post that generated art here, and instead redrew a similar picture by hand and gave it a more personal touch. They're under no threat of having their art blacklisted for doing that.

So is the AI-generated piece plagiarism or not? If so, how is tracing a plagiarized piece not still plagiarism?

watsit said:
No one's being told they can't be here at all just because they like dabbling in AI generated art. But this isn't a site for AI generated art. Just like no one's being told they can't be here at all just because they like dabbling in written stories. But this isn't a site for written stories. However, if you supplement those things with enough original (non-AI-generated) artwork, that content you create may be allowed to be posted.

I really hope you can tell the difference between the type of content allowed, and the source of said content.

The irony is thick here, considering you used an example about content to make a comparison to source. Writing isn't allowed here because it's an image booru site. You'd have redesign the website extensively to support stories in a way that makes sense (i.e. not slapped into an image's description with no way to tag or search for what's in the story text itself). There are no technical limitations preventing people from uploading AI artwork. An image is an image. The only thing preventing people from uploading AI artwork are personal conscientious objections and disinformation about AI-created images being plagiarism.

watsit said:
There is a difference between the way people and AI "learn". AI takes the data its given, and creates results its told to. Add in enough variability, and the results vary (but not too much, so the results are somewhat stable). But it's not a thinking mind with its own wishes and desires, it doesn't have its own likes or dislikes, it doesn't have life experiences that influence what it wants to do or how it wants to do it, it's not using it's own skill that it built up over the course of its life; its just doing what its told to do by its creators with the curated data its given by its creators, and adjusted until it produces results its creators are happy with. https://i.imgur.com/pgJnMBT.png

This is almost entirely philosophical prattling, and the image you linked tells me you don't understand subject very well. The image you linked is talking about using AI for non-creative work where variability and unpredictability are undesirable, such as programming — or god forbid, self-driving. Creativity is one of the best uses for AI, since variability and unpredictability is desirable in this instance.

watsit said:
That's a blanket statement if I ever saw one. People who learn art solely by other peoples' art tend to have quality issues, in the same way as making an imperfect copy of an imperfect copy causes quality degradation. But plenty of artists do learn using materials that include real world references.

Great, and you can feed the AI real world images. The point doesn't change.

fishyvap said:
So is the AI-generated piece plagiarism or not? If so, how is tracing a plagiarized piece not still plagiarism?

He didn't trace it. As he said, he

redrew it from the ground up in my pixel/binary artstyle, altering details, correcting mistakes, and outright swapping the character

fishyvap said:
The irony is thick here, considering you used an example about content to make a comparison to source. Writing isn't allowed here because it's an image booru site.

Replace "writing" with "photography", then. Images of the real world aren't allowed if they haven't been notably reworked (photo_manipulation).

fishyvap said:
This is almost entirely philosophical prattling, and the image you linked tells me you don't understand subject very well. The image you linked is talking about using AI for non-creative work where variability and unpredictability are undesirable, such as programming — or god forbid, self-driving.

The image I linked to talks about how AI/machine learning works. Nothing more nothing less. It doesn't specify what fields it's used in or for what purpose. It's making a funny, but true, joke about how "change it until it works" is generally considered poor design, but machine learning does just that at very fast speed and is considered a good way to do it.

fishyvap said:
Creativity is one of the best uses for AI, since variability and unpredictability is desirable in this instance.

Maybe. And no one's saying you can't use AI, as a couple examples in this thread have shown. The restriction is aimed at "people either uploading unmodified AI artwork, or compositing AI works and applying mild touch ups", i.e. not putting much, if any, of their own artistic creativity in the resulting image.

watsit said:
He didn't trace it. As he said, he "Replace "writing" with "photography", then. Images of the real world aren't allowed if they haven't been notably reworked (photo_manipulation)."

It's clearly a trace, dude. If anyone tried that with an art piece created by a human, they'd would've been immediately canceled and DNP'd. So either either AI artwork isn't plagiarism, or this piece is. (Hint: Neither are plagiarism.)

watsit said:
The image I linked to talks about how AI/machine learning works. Nothing more nothing less. It doesn't specify what fields it's used in or for what purpose. It's making a funny, but true, joke about how "change it until it works" is generally considered poor design, but machine learning does just that at very fast speed and is considered a good way to do it.

... Which is exactly what makes it good for creative work, such as drawing.

watsit said:
Maybe. And no one's saying you can't use AI, as a couple examples in this thread have shown. The restriction is aimed at "people either uploading unmodified AI artwork, or compositing AI works and applying mild touch ups", i.e. not putting much, if any, of their own artistic creativity in the resulting image.

So if you picture an image in your head, draw out the basic blueprint for it, feed that blueprint to the AI, tell it exactly what you want it to draw, spend hours tweaking and iterating the prompt, settings, and input image, and then spend many more hours compositing the best results and then manually touching up much of the image by hand to get it looking exactly how you envisioned it, is that enough effort and 'creativity'? Or should you just shave off a day's work by stopping at step 3 and tracing over the image in a pixel art style instead, because that's somehow much more creative?

fishyvap said:
It's clearly a trace, dude.

You can clearly see the linework is different. It's the same pose, sure, but drawing the same pose doesn't make it a trace.

fishyvap said:
So if you picture an image in your head, draw out the basic blueprint for it, feed that blueprint to the AI, tell it exactly what you want it to draw, spend hours tweaking and iterating the prompt, settings, and input image, and then spend many more hours compositing the best results and then manually touching up much of the image by hand to get it looking exactly how you envisioned it, is that enough effort and 'creativity'?

Possibly, given the "spend hours tweaking and iterating the ... input image, ... and then manually touching up much of the image by hand". Depends on what exactly that "hours tweaking" and "touching up much of the image" actually means, but from that rough description, I'd think it would probably be acceptable.

fishyvap said:
...If anyone tried that with an art piece created by a human, they'd would've been immediately canceled and DNP'd...

What are you talking about? They would probably get a neutral flag for that, if they do it only once.

watsit said:
You can clearly see the linework is different. It's the same pose, sure, but drawing the same pose doesn't make it a trace.

Dude, tweaking the lineart that you traced doesn't absolve it from being a trace. That is exactly the kind of argument I've seen trace artists try and fail to use in the past. Several points of the image match up perfectly with the original, without a single bit of manipulation on my end (that's an exact 1-to-1 overlay). It's pretty clear that he drew over the image rather than referencing it... Which is totally fine in this case, since nobody owns the artwork he traced. But still, it's definitely a trace.

dubsthefox said:
What are you talking about? They would probably get a neutral flag for that, if they do it only once.

I know people who have been permabanned for far less with no prior record. Regardless, there would definitely be an uproar if they traced another artist's work rather than an AI's artwork.

fishyvap said:
I know people who have been permabanned for far less with no prior record. Regardless, there would definitely be an uproar if they traced another artist's work rather than an AI's artwork.

the only reason users get permed without priors is if they're underaged, post literally illegal stuff, talk about doing/having done actual crimes in real-life, encouraging people to do actual crimes in real-life, or they're ban evading.

darryus said:
the only reason users get permed without priors is if they're underaged, post literally illegal stuff, talk about doing/having done actual crimes in real-life, encouraging people to do actual crimes in real-life, or they're ban evading.

None of the above, but I'd rather not derail.

fishyvap said:
Dude, tweaking the lineart that you traced doesn't absolve it from being a trace.

Calling it a trace doesn't make it a trace. He said he sketched over the original, then redrew it from the ground up in his own style, and the comparison you made clearly shows he that he did redo the linework, proving that claim true. Again, drawing the same pose doesn't make it a trace.

fishyvap said:
Several points of the image match up perfectly with the original ... It's pretty clear that he drew over the image rather than referencing it...

None of the lines match up. Yes, the leg is in the same position, the knee, the arms, etc, but that is the pose, not the linework, which is clearly different.

watsit said:
He said he sketched over the original

That's... literally what tracing is.

To copy (a drawing, map, or design) by drawing over its lines on a superimposed piece of paper or similar

I'm not sure what definition you have in mind, but drawing over another image is the exact definition of tracing.

watsit said:
None of the lines match up. Yes, the leg is in the same position, the knee, the arms, etc, but that is the pose, not the linework, which is clearly different.

Many parts of the linework do match up perfectly, as I said and shown. Notice how the highlighted parts don't have any ghosting — because they're an exact match to the original. Having that many parts of an image line up exactly without doing anything special to get them to line up can only happen via tracing. And even then, it's not that hard for a trace artist to tween their traced line to make them slightly different.

Anyway, this is getting off topic and I don't really want to spend the next X hours watching someone die on this hill.

The point is, if you think sketching over someone else's artwork does not count as plagiarism, then how on Earth can you consider AI-generated artwork to be plagiarism?

fishyvap said:
That's... literally what tracing is.

To copy (a drawing, map, or design) by drawing over its lines on a superimposed piece of paper or similar

I'm not sure what definition you have in mind, but drawing over another image is the exact definition of tracing.

The relevant part: "drawing over its lines". Sketching over an image is not the same as drawing over its lines.

fishyvap said:
Notice how the highlighted parts don't have any ghosting — because they're an exact match to the original.

That's a really bad crossfade shot. The original is nearly (if not actually) invisible in various spots, particularly where the original lines are thin (where'd the original's left arm go?), causing you to misinterpret where the lines are. That makes it easy to mistake them as overlapping. But if you look carefully, they're different.

fishyvap said:
The point is, if you think sketching over someone else's artwork does not count as plagiarism, then how on Earth can you consider AI-generated artwork to be plagiarism?

Did I ever say it was? The whole point of this tangent was you saying "blacklisting all of an artist's work simply because they decided to try using a tool that one staff member dislikes — AI", and the given post was to show you could actually use AI generated artwork as a basis, and as long as you put in enough creative work on top of it, it would be acceptable here.

watsit said:
The relevant part: "drawing over its lines". Sketching over an image is not the same as drawing over its lines.

Is sketching not a form of drawing now? Dude, come on. Here's another example of someone sketching over a different artist's work, changing some bits and adjusting the pose slightly, and then lining over their sketch. Almost none of the lines match up exactly, perhaps even moreso than the piece in question. Nonetheless, it was deleted by admins, because it was clearly a trace. The other one would have also been deleted by admins if the traced artwork wasn't AI generated.

watsit said:
That's a really bad crossfade shot. The original is nearly (if not actually) invisible in various spots, particularly where the original lines are thin (where'd the original's left arm go?), causing you to misinterpret where the lines are. That makes it easy to mistake them as overlapping. But if you look carefully, they're different.

You might want to adjust your monitor; I can clearly see where it is or isn't ghosting. I also have each frame open in GIMP and I made sure to crosscheck between the two original pieces over and over before marking the lines. I looked much more closely than you have, and I am 100% certain that those lines are an exact match. Even if they weren't, it'd still be close enough to be considered a trace by staff's standard.

There are countless examples of traced artwork just like this being deleted, no matter how much the lines were altered. Do we really have to keep dragging this on?

watsit said:
Did I ever say it was? The whole point of this tangent was you saying "blacklisting all of an artist's work simply because they decided to try using a tool that one staff member dislikes — AI", and the given post was to show you could actually use AI generated artwork as a basis, and as long as you put in enough creative work on top of it, it would be acceptable here.

Right, so tracing a single piece of art made by an AI is fine, but spending hours compositing several different generated images together and touching much of it up by hand isn't (since a post that did exactly that was deleted). That's the point I'm getting at.

How do we know where the line is drawn? Is it just up to what staff member lands on your image first and what their current mood is? Does staff have any concrete guidelines for deciding what AI-assisted artwork is or isn't acceptable? I'd say both methods are equally as creative and require similar skill and effort.

fishyvap said:
I know people who have been permabanned for far less with no prior record.

"I know someone who has done something, and they got banned, but I won't tell who and what it was", is a weak argument. Without any evidence, I doubt that.

fishyvap said:
Regardless, there would definitely be an uproar if they traced another artist's work rather than an AI's artwork.

What Watsit said. + I can see that AI is a good pose generator. But it shouldn't _^(opinion) be much more than that. I think it is disrespectful to artists who put a lot of effort into their art. Furthermore, I hate that you can literally tell which artist's style the AI should copy.

dubsthefox said:
"I know someone who has done something, and they got banned, but I won't tell who and what it was", is a weak argument. Without any evidence, I doubt that.

It's a very long story that I'll almost certainly get a negative note/ban for dredging up in public. You can DM me if you really want the details.

dubsthefox said:
What Watsit said. + I can see that AI is a good pose generator. But it shouldn't _^(opinion) be much more than that. I think it is disrespectful to artists who put a lot of effort into their art. Furthermore, I hate that you can literally tell which artist's style the AI should copy.

Rather than hating the tool for what people can do with it, you should hate the malicious actors that choose to abuse the tool for nefarious purposes. A diversely-trained AI will not copy an artist unless you try really hard to force it to.
If a someone gets stabbed with a steak knife, would you rather jail the perpetrator or ban the use of steak knives?

fishyvap said:
None of the above, but I'd rather not derail.

_{oh, also vote-cheating alts.}
you can't just make shit up or say stuff without giving an actual example and then sidestep the instant any pressure is put on the claim because the thing _you_ brought up was now off-topic.
I just manually looked through every banned user with more than 80 uploads or 800 tag edits, there's only two that have no ban reason, both banned nearly a decade+ ago, there were three other users of note; one was an actual child predator, one was a russian shill, and the other was Aurali, every other user either has several negs+neutrals, or were one of the reasons I had previously stated.
random samples of banned users with fewer edits/uploads were almost all just vote-cheating alts, ban evades, or really obvious trolls.

darryus said:
_{oh, also vote-cheating alts.}
you can't just make shit up or say stuff without giving an actual example and then sidestep the instant any pressure is put on the claim because the thing _you_ brought up was now off-topic.
I just manually looked through every banned user with more than 80 uploads or 800 tag edits, there's only two that have no ban reason, both banned nearly a decade+ ago, there were three other users of note; one was an actual child predator, one was a russian shill, and the other was Aurali, every other user either has several negs+neutrals, or were one of the reasons I had previously stated.
random samples of banned users with fewer edits/uploads were almost all just vote-cheating alts, ban evades, or really obvious trolls.

fishyvap said:
It's a very long story that I'll almost certainly get a negative note/ban for dredging up in public. You can DM me if you really want the details.

Re

fishyvap said:
Rather than hating the tool for what people can do with it, you should hate the malicious actors that choose to abuse the tool for nefarious purposes. A diversely-trained AI will not copy an artist unless you try really hard to force it to.
If a someone gets stabbed with a steak knife, would you rather jail the perpetrator or ban the use of steak knives?

counter argument: don't hate the player, hate the game

fishyvap said:
Rather than hating the tool for what people can do with it, you should hate the malicious actors that choose to abuse the tool...

I never said the tool itself is the problem. It's always the people who are the problem.

fishyvap said:
It's a very long story that I'll almost certainly get a negative note/ban for dredging up in public. You can DM me if you really want the details.

if you're not going to post a source publicly don't make a claim publicly.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you're probably talking about Tiamat5, then. or some other user whose actual impact on the site was negligible, pretty much only notable for having made comments on posts.

dubsthefox said:
I never said the tool itself is the problem. It's always the people who are the problem.

I completely agree with that.

darryus said:
if you're not going to post a source publicly don't make a claim publicly.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you're probably talking about Tiamat5, then. or some other user whose actual impact on the site was negligible, pretty much only notable for having made comments on posts.

It was a counterclaim to a general statement that I've seen to be false. Again, if anyone wants to know more, they are more than welcome to DM me. It's not that hard. Why are you so set on getting me to break the rules?

dubsthefox said:
What are you talking about? They would probably get a neutral flag for that, if they do it only once.

fishyvap said:
I know people who have been permabanned for far less with no prior record.

dubsthefox said:
"I know someone who has done something, and they got banned, but I won't tell who and what it was", is a weak argument. Without any evidence, I doubt that.

fishyvap said:
It's a very long story that I'll almost certainly get a negative note/ban for dredging up in public. You can DM me if you really want the details.

I know what fishyvap is talking about. Be careful what you say in the DMs, admins can read them.

fishyvap said:
It was a counterclaim to a general statement that I've seen to be false. Again, if anyone wants to know more, they are more than welcome to DM me. It's not that hard. Why are you so set on getting me to break the rules?

it's also not hard to not post claims without a fucking source. either you post a source or you don't say anything.

electricitywolf said:
Be careful what you say in the DMs, admins can read them.

Nice misinformation there. Admins can only read dmails when they are reported by the recipient.

fishyvap said:
If anyone tried that with an art piece created by a human, they'd would've been immediately canceled and DNP'd.

fishyvap said:
I know people who have been permabanned for far less with no prior record.

fishyvap said:
It's a very long story that I'll almost certainly get a negative note/ban for dredging up in public. You can DM me if you really want the details.

electricitywolf said:
I know what fishyvap is talking about. Be careful what you say in the DMs, admins can read them.

If it's such a minor thing that occurred, and occurs with such frequency as to be noteworthy in this discussion, why would it be such a big deal to mention it when trying to make a point? After all, the point you're going on about is people tracing and getting "immediately canceled and DNP'd", or "permabanned for far less". Unless you started talking about something completely different that's actually a bigger deal than you initially tried to say, and is thus irrelevant to this discussion.

earlopain said:
Nice misinformation there. Admins can only read dmails when they are reported by the recipient.

if admins did this without it being reported it'd be breaking the law, no? I'm not sure how the one-party consent thing would work regarding private messages sent via a privately-owned website, I'd assume that since there's an assumption of privacy between both parties it'd function as any private conversation.

darryus said:
if admins did this without it being reported it'd be breaking the law, no? I'm not sure how the one-party consent thing would work regarding private messages sent via a privately-owned website, I'd assume that since there's an assumption of privacy between both parties it'd function as any private conversation.

Keep in mind this site is subject to the laws of the State of Arizona, by default. Reminds me of the ancient email cases where they treated it like post cards. Where a judge basically says "If you want it private, use an envelope (encryption)!" XD