Hey m@tes, as y’all know, this instance has been anti-corporate GenAI positive since it’s creation and as such we’ve typically allowed such content to be posted freely. However in the last few weeks we’ve had a bunch of drama from GenAI haters who insist on coming into our comms and starting slap-fights. This caused us to vote on a new rule to have the mandate to clear out this constant friction. This worked to an extent, but I think we can help foster a better community with the larger threadiverse.
One issue a lot of anti-GenAI people keep bringing is that while they can block dedicated comms like [email protected], they don’t have an easy option to avoid GenAI content in random other /0 comms as there’s no way to filter it out. This kind of content has been seen to cause a lot of strife, because people complain about its existence, while /0 admins and mods based on the above rule, tend to sanction those complaining. This then causes drama loops with /c/YPTB and /c/FuckAI etc.
There is a good point to be made here that while we don’t mind GenAI content in /0, there isn’t a reason to not help others avoid it. So we want to institute the following soft rule by now:
Simply tag your posts which consist of primarily GenAI content with the [] tag in their title. Not only will frontends like Tesseract will natively parse this as a tag and display it accordingly, but people who dislike such content, can simply filter it out of their feeds. Eventually lemmy will add tags which will make this tagging more seamless, but for now a manual tag in the title will suffice.
This rule only applies to posts in non-explicit GenAI comms. The assumption is that people can simply block those comms completely anyway.
As I said, this is a soft rule for now. Soft in the sense that you’re not going to be sanctioned for forgetting it, but we hope people will remind you to do so. This is a good-faith attempt by us to co-exist and help others avoid what they don’t want to stumble onto, much like [NSFW] tags. So I hope you’ll add do a good faith attempt to help us in this. Furthermore, people who come to posts tagged as GenAI explicitly to scold and start slap-fights, will give the admins and easier justification to clean up, since they could have just filtered out that content in the first place.
Cheers
Most AI image generators that generate images add EXIF metadata indicating that the image is AI-generated. This helps people who want to identify AI-generated images readily.
In the case of ComfyUI, it even includes the entire workflow — like, another ComfyUI user can just grab the image, drop it onto their ComfyUI Web UI and they’ll be right where the generating user was.
Unfortunately, EXIF metadata can contain location information — some cameras and such add it — and this metadata led to people posting images at places like Reddit being doxxed after they didn’t realize that they were posting their GPS location and maybe real name, stuff that some cameras attach. As a result, a number of image-hosting places simply strip all metadata, to prevent users from from accidentally leaking this information.
Pict-rs, the software package that Lemmy hosts run to permit image uploads, does this. Unfortunately, it means that those “this is an AI-generated image” tags get stripped off.
So, for example, on my system, with ComfyUI, using ImageMagick:
$ identify -verbose output/ComfyUI_00312_.png“Properties:prompt” has a JSON encoding of the workflow.
Sample images generated by various AI image generators are readily-available on civitai.com.
For this generator that generated this image on civitai, it looks like the parameter is “Properties:parameters”.
I believe that there are a small number of such tags today.
It would be technically possible to just not have pict-rs strip that particular tag (or tags, if there are multiple that a given generator adds?) off, have a list of “AI-generated tags”, then have Lemmy add some visual indicator that an image is AI-generated. I’d suggest that this is probably a better longer-term route to indicate that an image is AI-generated than manually-tagging post titles, for a couple of reasons:
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Spiders that index images on the Web will know that the image is AI-generated and can flag that for users and let them use that as a filtering criteria (e.g. Kagi Images permits for this). They aren’t going to understand tags in post titles, but the metadata tags are somewhat universal.
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Doesn’t require manual effort if an image can have some indicator or flair or whatever put on it automatically. And I guarantee that some users are going to get this wrong just by accident, because different instances have different rules. Easier to change how a computer works than to change human behavior across-the-board.
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Works on all instances.
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The information remains attached to the image even if downloaded.
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Works for images that aren’t just the subject of single-image posts and don’t have an associated title.
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Speaking purely for myself, I kind of like the open-source, collaborative aspect of sharing the workflows or prompts, since it helps other users see how an image was created and learn from it; it’s something that I’m glad to see the generators include, and I’m kind of sad that we strip it off on the Threadiverse.
exif is stripped when uploading to lemmy, I believe
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What about that mod banning people from ai communities before they could block the community?
Then people who hate ai should be grateful, because they don’t want anything to do with that community anyway. :)
However, it doesn’t feel good to have it happen. Especially since db0 is an instance against the abuse of power. You go about your day and see a comment you disagree with. You downvote it. The commenter winds up being a mod somewhere else and bans you from their communities.
That doesn’t seem fair, does it? And using the excuse of “preemptively banning an AI downvote troll” is not a very good one. If they had been banned after they had gone in to just downvote everyone talking about AI in a community, okay. But you shouldn’t be able to “Minority Report” people.
Som of the bans were used as a form of disrespect. You can’t tell me some of the bans weren’t done just to piss the other person off because they were pissed off, no matter which way you sugar coat it. If you don’t like being downvoted, you probably just shouldn’t comment or post on any platform with that mechanic.
I have never even looked into how to see who’s downvoted me. I don’t want to. That person had an opinion that didn’t align with mine. That’s it and that’s all it should be. The act of viewing and banning who’s downvoted who should really only be used when there’s an obvious troll in the community who’s already mass downvoted everything in the community.
see a comment you disagree with. You downvote it.
That’s much different than see a comment you disagree with, then go to every single post and comment the person has made and downvote it. Then create a fucking bot to downvote it. Which has happened and been documented plenty of times on Lemmy.
I’ve been banned from communities I never even heard of, much less visited. Seem like places i don’t wanna be anyway then.
It’s why I dislike the entire voting system. Too many people abuse it and try to generate narratives.
On the other hand, I’m not THAT passionate about it. It’s fucking Lemmy. No one has even heard of Lemmy, few people are here, and internet points don’t mean anything in the real world. People take all of this way too seriously. They can change the voting system or not, I’m not that invested in it either way. We’re already starting to stagment, and I think we are actually going to start getting smaller or start growing way slower.
It’s too much for normies to figure out when it comes to joining. So only the nerdiest of nerds and many with compulsive/society issues join here. So it gets overly political and and overly passionate about the smallest things.
After that point it becomes harassment, yes. What I’m talking about here is that not everyone is mass downvoting and they still get banned. Some people are scrolling through sometimes completely separate communities, downvoting a couple things, and getting banned from totally different, unrelated communities. That’s the part that shouldn’t be okay.
And I agree with you. I think the whole voting system is literally a dopamine chase for most and honestly not really relevant to a constructive debate. It seems Lemmy overcomplicates this by letting people see votes, though like I said, I haven’t gone about finding out how. The only thing I like about voting is that it lets me know that people have read what I’ve written.
Its good that you have that view of being banned, but others can be genuinely hurt, which starts shit like this (this whole fiasco isn’t just about AI), and then the whole instance gets dragged into it. Back when I was on reddit, I asked a simple question in a sub. A mod came in and started being completely rude to me for no reason, no matter how much I tried to discuss things with them. It got heated on both sides. The mod changed all his replies to nice, friendly ones and banned me so I got left looking like a clown.
People like that mod are people that do get too passionate about things like reddit and lemmy, and they can be hurtful to others. I’m not just saying that its db0; its mostly power-crazy mods, no matter which instance.
It seems Lemmy overcomplicates this by letting people see votes, though like I said, I haven’t gone about finding out how.
Yeah. There’s a very active Lemmy poster who actually screenshots people’s history of how many downvotes their comments have. He posts it to make his point. Bad form and he only does it to try to shame people and says variations of “See? We can’t take this person seriously, look how many downvotes he has on his record. Obviously people disagree with him! So you should too!”
That right there is how downvoting is getting weaponized. He’s done it to me. Several times. And the posts are still up. The fact that that guy, and several others, will look up how many of your comments have been downvoted, screenshot it, post it, and tell everyone how much you are unliked, is pure bullying. And he takes so much glee in it.
Another reason that I think voting should be done away with. If “views” wanna be tallied it up but we can’t vote up or down, so we know how active something is, that’s fine. But too many people weaponize downvoting/upvoting here.
Yeah, it just seems like an all around bad idea that had good initial intentions of transparency. I’ve thought about this a lot, honestly. Something like “views” won’t really work. I sort of started thinking that a pair of glasses might do. That’s it, nothing else.
The glasses symbol would count as a “Read this!” which can be construed as “I read this” or “you should read this”, preceeded by the number of people that read it. Heck, just getting rid of downvotes would work. I usually save my downvotes for extremely hateful or prejudiced posts/comments, not comments I disagree with.
In the end, downvotes are the most abused. At least a “# read this” tag would denote the most useful or contributing comments. Sure, people will abuse it for their own benefit, but at least it can’t be used to shit on people or communities.
Its not the best solution, but I agree that downvotes and upvotes are becoming archaic relics of a bygone era. There must be a better and more modern solution.
The arguments against preemptive bans feel petty and are coming from a place of someone who hasn’t moderated. You’re basically saying that as a mod if I see someone being a troll, or brigading, or saying (threatening) they’re going to that I should just sit by and wait for them to do so. Especially when a large proportion of these trolls are willing to go above and beyond to be hurtful and spiteful.
This is what we’re dealing with here:
Yeah, those dipshits outright impersonated and bullied me saying weird and gross crap like this.So no I’m not going to sit by and watch people from the sidelines until they target me and my community and no one else should either. People want to be shitheads they should expect to find themselves banned from places they never heard of for being shitheads. Don’t like it? Stop being a shithead. And yes that does include obvious forms of brigading like going to someone’s profile and downvoting every comment they posted, or downvoting every post in a community, or downvoting all the comments under a post.
There’s no easy solution to this, because people who aren’t doing stupid shit like that are still getting caught in the crossfire.
I don’t envy your position. Its the main reason I haven’t started a community, even though I’ve had the itch to make a proper modded minecraft and kratom communities.
I do get it. You have to protect your community first and foremost… I just wish there was a better solution. I’ve been thinking and thinking about it and coming up empty, tbh.
I don’t really see the issue with that, its just a mod doing that, no admins.
I don’t think anyone annoyed about being banned from there wanted to engage with the community properly anyway.
If they don’t want to see the AI communities anyway, is that really a problem?
One person said they can’t block communities that banned them
Why do you need to block something you are banned from?
So they don’t see it
I think this is a nice gesture but I also think it’s way too charitable for the Anti-GenAI people currently complaining. Their issue isn’t that they want to avoid it, they want to stamp it out, they want it gone. They’re not going to hide posts or keywords, they’re going to brigade them. They already brigade and harass explicitly GenAI communities and don’t block them. They’ve harassed me multiple times, told me to die in DMs and even impersonated me for running such communities. Tagging isn’t going to help, they’re just going to use it to hunt down people who post it and brigade the posts or target the users, because they aren’t angry that they are seeing it, they’re angry that it exists and they wish to stamp it out, no matter the cost.
In short this is a good solution with good intentions but it assumes a level of good faith that just isn’t there. I’d agree with this if the problem was really people just not wanting to see it, but the problem is much deeper. I’m sure that once people start doing it, the goal posts will be moved and they’ll just stop using “untagged” as a reason for complaining.
not to downplay these issues, the impersonation is fucked and weird. but i guess trolls gonna troll and whack-a-mole is the only solution…
idk what else would you have in mind?
I think that the AI friendly nature of our instance needs to be clearly written in our instance sidebar (@[email protected] and @[email protected] can help with that) which would help out since the instance sidebar is visible in all dbzer0 communities which are remote. It should probably also be included in the application prompt as a disclaimer, since I’m seeing a lot of dbzer0 people who signed up and are complaining about AI (guys what the fuck are you doing here on an AI instance if you hate AI).
Also moderation, moderation is the only real way to deal with the Anti-AI brigading and trolling. Preventative moderation can also be used as well if things get bad enough and/or don’t improve.
We’re not an so Ai focused that we need it on the sidebar and the application instructions
What about the rule change we voted on a while ago maybe even if it’s not AI specific that should be included there.
imo you’re giving in to a loud minority that aren’t looking for reasonable solutions. They hate ai because of propaganda, and they want it gone. They’ll keep pushing for more censorship every time because the genie won’t go back in the bottle, but damned if they won’t try anyways
if they want it gone, in what way does just tagging the content give in to this crowd?
It’s doing extra work and allowing other people to dictate how we use our space, for people that are going to break the rules anyway.
!lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.comhas been running on this philosophy for ten months now. The sidebar even says:Our community has bots making regular posts showcasing best content from communities in given categories to help promote them. Each category is assigned to it’s own bot to allow users blocking posts from unwanted categories and tailor the feed for their preferences without the need to block the whole community. Here’s the current list of bot accounts:
Yet look at all of Best_of_ai_bot’s posts. Immediately and heavily downvoted every time. The people doing this won’t care, and use the tags to target content.
People should do this for stuff they generated with llms too. Realistically English needs evidentials, like tenses that explain the source.
Much unintentional disinformation would be cleared up if people stated the source. E.g. “I remember learning…” “Someone I trust told me…” “I heard an expert say…” “a statistical text generator emitted…” “a random internet comment said…”
You remember where you learned things? That’s remembering like, twice as much stuff! I’m pretty sure my brain is just making up plausible memories to fill in the gaps.
Wait till you get to be super old like me. The shit my brain makes up aren’t even plausible memories!
Good, AI art fucking sucks.
I know, those are my favorite use cases 😏
Is AI porn better for the women or does it take away the jobs of context creators?
So do your opinions.
Well it looks like a majority here agree with my fuckin sucky opinion so that’s cool at least
This ain’t a popularity contest, you neckbeard redditor.
Lol you’re the one instigating, you could have said nothing
Can’t be art with no artist, just ‘generated illustration’
Can I ask what compelled you to join db0 after reading the sidebar? Honestly curious. If I hated AI that much, after seeing the tagline, I would have noped out.
As someone who feels similarly about AI art, but joined db0 anyway: I like the other things they got going on and I’m not stupid enough to whine and complain about the one thing I don’t like. (I guess, technically this is doing some of that but shut up xD)
It’s like if I went to a bar that has a bunch of games in it, and one is a bunch of pool tables or something and I really hate pool, I’m not gonna throw a fuss demanding they remove it? Some people like it even if I think it’s not that cool.
I don’t think it was a prominent feature when I joined, AI imagery in general wasn’t quite as popular or sophisticated at the time. And even if I disagree with that point, it’s not a deal breaker and db0 is still far better than many other instances.
FYI: The “Generate Art” part of the sidebar tagline was there since day 1
![New Soft Rule: Tagging posts as [GenAI] when they contain Generative AI](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/c81b8a67-68a5-468e-ad45-7b846e838270.webp){kind=link}
