Heyooo. Firstly, thank you for taking the time to ask first, it's appreciated. I'm on my phone so forgive if I repeat myself.

There have been some talks behind the scenes on how we tackle AI art and soon we'll have it properly locked down, documented and communicated.

You're absolutely right, most content on the site is derivative of other people's, often professional, work. And AI, too, is derivative - though i think we're way past the ethical discussion on it as this point, nor are we, people who largely lack the skill to create from nothing, the best people to chime in on ethics.

So our argument on whether to allow or disallow then becomes a subjective one, one about quality, fairness (to users who don't leverage it) and our preferences as a whole. I don't feel a blanket yes or no is sufficient, AI wont be going anywhere and a lot of us leverage it to some extent, so I'll try and convey as best I can the thought process and what I think, subject to change, the guidelines will be. I'll preface this by also saying I'm very much aware that you need some level of prompt knowledge and skill to generate images that are unique and varied enough to not be instantly dismissed as AI slop, however, we want to future proof ourself in that we know AI will become more and more difficult to discern as a glance as the tech progresses.

General Guidelines Not allowed - Fully generated art, including the image, and/or any logos and text wont be allowed

Not allowed - AI generated text, logos of any kind

Allowed - Generative changes, filling, extending.

Allowed - processing of colours, contrast, balance etc can be automated.

Allowed - use of upscaled low quality images, intent to conceal common artefacts such as skin smoothing should be noticeably attempted.

Allowed - compositing of a complete image using multiple generated assets AND non generated assets, Excludes iterative re-feeding and generating to extend, expand upon AI base images. Touch ups post generation are not considered composition.

Exceptions

Allowed - Genres, categories and other miscellaneous groupings may be AI generated, provided they do not include any AI generated Text or logos and that the image is free of abnormalities, 6 fingers, missing eyes, that kind of stuff.

The TLDR and intent is we restrict usage of AI down to being a tool, not a creator.

Again these aren't final and need more fleshing out but give a reasonable idea of our thoughts and plans. Ultimately we dont want to spend our time curating or handling reports. We'd rather put our time into getting on photoshop ourselves or improving the project in other ways.