I require clarification from the staff on the policy the site has on AI art. This is less like a question and more like an essay, but please do take the time to read it.

There was some discussion on the hub a few months ago about AI art and what the ethics of posting it here are.

At that time, it seemed the side I was on would turn out on top(it did), and people said everything I could have said. I didn't think I could contribute, so I didn't.

I think my position is fairly common. AI art is far easier to make than the alternative, with the bulk of the work handed over to a computer. It's highly derivative, with models taking the work of countless artists by scraping the internet with bots to create varyingly homogeneous image soup.

The idea some people had, of putting that on the same level of respect as artists who work with pen, paint, or digital tools and create by hand, is laughable. And yet another group who Cheered that ai art would replace all the artists(even though...uh, ai generation as it exists today is fully dependent on those artists to create anything) are acting ghoulish, and really should get their empathy checked out.

And so it was that ai_art got its own tag, and people who make it are marked as _(generator)s. Some of that is because outright banning it would be a hassle, but the overall goal is for them not to receive the same amount of respect as other creators would. Frankly, they Shouldn't. Jolly good. I thought the matter was settled.

Esccc is an artist/generator. He used to pose 3D models for their work. Recently, he transitioned to ai generation. You can check out his work on pixiv, or here on the 'hub, I think it's quite good. Hubgoers seem to agree.

While uploading their images the other day, I noticed he lost access to his fanbox. It's not uncommon for platforms to boot people off of their livelihood for arbitrary, poorly explained reasons. "Hot take": That's a bad thing.

With him being from Japan, Fanbox could be the lion's share of their income. I thought that sucks, so I made some posts on the images I uploaded that day, urging people to support a creator they seem to like.

I don't know if that did anything. If people listened, they didn't tell me, and that's fine, it's not why I did it, and not the point of this post. The point is the response I did get. The only one. It's from mindwipe. And I quote:

" I was subscribed to ESCCC's Pixiv Fanbox for a month. My subscription ended literally right before he switched to doing nothing but AI art. Dodged a fuckin' bullet on that one. "

...It's important to note that Mindwipe was/is part of the staff in some capacity. I remember him making staff posts way back when I was just lurking. When I began to contribute here, I got instructions from him on proper artist tagging. Far as I am concerned, he is on some real level 'the boss' here.

A generous interpretation of what he said is 'I used to support this creator, but I no longer agree with what they do. I will not support them financially in the future.'

But that's not really what he said, is it? It's less about what esccc is doing, and more about what Mindwipe is doing. 'Good thing I didn't pay any money to support That thing' is how it reads to me. Like even accidentally giving money towards that would be tainting him somehow.

..You guys do understand this is still Work, right?
It costs time and resources to make. This guy's resources just got decimated, and a person associated with the staff responds with 'I'm sure glad I didn't give him a dime for this, even by accident?' What Is Happening Here?

This site got its start with text only image manipulation. You put took an image you found, didn't ask anyone for permission, slapped your own horny fanfic around it and called it a day. This is not a condemnation, I did that, you can find it on the site right now, it's just a fact. Way back then it used to be you couldn't even tag the original artist since tags could only be added by the staff. This is some High ass horse Mindwipe rode in on.

I also find it curious that what esccc used to do was to take 3D models, that somebody else made, make small adjustments, fiddle with their position, and upload what looked good. What they do Today.. is take art that somebody else made, make small adjustments to the dataset, fiddle with their prompts, and upload what looks good.

I'm not saying the three are Identical. If you write a good story to match an image, that's commonly understood to be transformative work. The creativity involved with posing is more direct, while the creativity of choosing the right ai images for your collage is more trial and error. But I am saying they are very similar. It's pretty Interesting that one Mindwipe made himself, the second he liked enough to put money towards, while the third he does not want to touch with a ten foot pole.

Is this a common opinion among the staff? Is it an official position?

Because if it is, you guys Need to ban AI art from the site. It doesn't matter how hard it would be. Anything else is just hypocrisy of the highest order. "We can Upload it, we can Enjoy it, we favorite it, discuss it and masturbate to it. We get the traffic, we get the ad revenue. But god forbid you put Any Money towards making it possible."

When I was tagging generators, I thought I was helping clarify a line in the sand. Artists who work with their hands are at the top. People who generate images derived from their work are at the bottom. If you want the same respect as the artists, learn how to create your own art. A hierarchy, based on merit, with a clear path to upward mobility. I understand that. It's fair.

Apparently, though, what I was actually doing, in the eyes of some people at least, was marking them as undesirables, whose work we can Exploit, but not even consider the possibility of giving something back in return.

I may be blowing things up out of proportion. And I Hope I am. I hope that somebody, please, tells me this is just the opinion of one guy who feels slighted by a creator. Not just something everyone else has felt and I just missed with my childish naivety.

Because, the alternative...that's just not right.

I'm not part of staff, so I can't say what policy the hub uses. However I would like to comment on the other points you made.

Mindwipe's position is most likely not the official position, just their own. Esccc's fanbox being banned is regrettable but even if it's not banned, Mindwipe could still had cancelled their subscription when they found out. You are not obligated to financially support a creator, especially when you don't like that creator's works anymore.

The purpose of tags are two-fold. One is to make searching things easier, as it is mostly used. Two is to make blacklisting things easier, for images you don't want to see. There are people on the side against ai art, so would naturally blacklist it. I know of at least one artist who even went on dnp because of ai art being allowed on the hub. I appreciate the work you put on tagging generators. You aren't "marking them as undesirables", but rather letting people choose what they want to see, and if they like, find other works that creator had done.

Agree with this 100%. The tagging system works to facilitate the navigation for users around the site, and it also, indirectly, helps avoiding unnecessary drama from anti-AIs towards us AI users when they stumble upon our work and leave a mean, nonconstructive comment under them (I'm always open to critics... insults? Nah).

I also agree with Operation regarding the stance of Mindwipe: no one is entitled to receive anything, so they can decided to cut Esccc supply of donations for even the most moronic reason, and they would still be 100% in their rights to do so without being in the wrong: their wallet, their choices. I also believe that a person can hold strong opinions regarding something and still be capable of doing their "job" in a professional, neutral matter on the subject: hate what they do, not what they think, one could say.



Except what you are referring to right now it's what is called a simple Txt2Img (you prompt the text or copy it from another generators, click a button and *boom* done) and, in the AI community, it's referred as low-effort (it is NOT shunned upon, mind you). StableDiffusion is a tool that allows to do much, MUCH more than a simple one-click button, and many artists out there (myself and others included) do not stop at that. Some of us add new things with other tools in the main program (inpaint, img2img), some of us use 3D skeletons (that, sometimes, we posed before) to recreate the pose we wanted using Controlnet, which is a very useful tool with a considerably steep learning curve... hell, I personally use Krita to fix fuckups or to add new things, and I'm currently considering to buy myself a graphical tablet for sketches.

What I would like to say is that

1- Many people outside of the AI world do not know the work that can be actually done on the generations because, sadly, low-effort spamming is a thing, so their brain thinks it's all that there is outside. (while there are things like this: civitai.com/images/9372692). Rest assured: while the majority of us do tend to stop at the low-efforts, some of us keep going making this much more long and complicated than what you may think it is.

2- If we follow this logic of "merit", then we should straight up consider a the lowest scale all the "spiral eyes" manipping on the site, because those are the lowest of all efforts, right?
WRONG.
It is true that, to the basic work, you just need to create a layer in Photoshop\Krita, add an effect (spiral) with the tool after you selected the area, and call it a day. Yet I see some people out in the Hub going forward with this: they add lighting, they add shadows, they add a more "wet|glossy" effect on the eye to simulate the wetness of it, etc.
That stuff takes more than simple basic knowledge of Photoshop\Krita, and takes definitely more work.
Does that, in any way, change the views on the material I'm beating my meat upon? It shouldn't. The hub is not here to make contests, or to rate the efforts of an artist over another, it's here so we can enjoy our kinks while we fap. But to introduce a "scale" out of efforts, instead of, perhaps, a scale out of "how much people like my work" is an effective to say "fuck it, not worth it" and moving to another platform, maybe a more enclosed one; this is called "gatekeeping", and it's literally a high-horse argument, IMO.

What's next? We shall call out the ones doing the most basic sketches+coloring because they are "low efforts" compared to other works, while maybe they are just at the bottom of the learning curve (like me right now with text manips: I generate my own images and, sometimes, I write stories behind them, but I feel I'm still bad at it, so I take my time and I select only the few I'm confident enough to expand. Hell, I'm currently reading "How to write Erotic Short Stories that sell" from Christina Palmer exactly to improve this aspect of mine... so, yeah, low effort)?
It's also impossible to define how much knowledge comes from other arts forms that are not directly shown in AI art. A personal example of mine is shadows and color blending: I studied intensively these two aspects way before AI art was a thing, and I still use this knowledge when I work with Krita\Inpaint... and this came out because I was serious in improving my miniature painting skill, a hobby I still spend time and money on after 20 years (I'm planning to release a fully painted model on the hub, since it's a hypno NSFW one). Sketches are too my bread and butter, because I drew some very basic mangas and comics when I was in middle-high school, and I wasn't studying art in there.


How about we simply consider how much one contributes to the collectivize, instead of valuing their works based on the time\resources spent behind?

Thank you. That is kind of you to say.



Now, see, if I didn't explicitly mark them as generators, I'd still achieve the same thing, right? If I didn't make the distinction between esccc the artist, and esccc the generator, they'd still find his art. Hell, they'd find it more easily, because he did both, and now his work is split between two tags.

Some of this distinction is made specifically to distinguish those who generate art and those who draw it.



Again it seems I did not make my grievance clear. Obviously you should not pay for something you do not want to happen. That would be a silly thing to say.

There is a difference between a private person paying for what they want, and someone in a position of authority responding to a call to help someone out of a tight spot, by saying that not only he is Not helping, but he is glad that he didn't help out by pure chance.

It sends a very different message. It's the difference between ignoring a charity drive, and walking up to the podium to tell the crowd how much you hate the person who'd be getting the help.

And I want to again highlight, the site Tangibly Benefits from AI art being here. Dismissing the creator and their work's value is callous at best.



That's my hope, but if there is any chance that's not the case, it's worth drawing attention to. I find it immoral, and AI art being surrounded by dubious ethics does not relieve us from taking care with that.

There could be people who want to see more of esccc's non generated works. Of course searching for "esccc -ai_art" does the same but I'm following the precedent that someone could have separate tags as _(artist) and as _(manipper), eg "lillytank" and "lillytank_(manipper)"

So they can.



I admit I did not consider the benefits a generator themselves might derive from the tags in that way. It adds some nuance to the discussion I did not see before.

At the same time...It's much better to change people's minds than to cordon parts of the community off from each other and be Done with it, isn't it? I like a lot of AI art. I usually like when people see and enjoy similar things to what I enjoy. You can't do that if the tags divide the community in twain.



That's an unnecessarily binary distinction. How much work it took can be just as important for art and your appreciation of it, as the end result is enjoyed for its qualities in the present.

What I'm arguing for is not to Displace contribution from consideration.(I mean, my whole reasoning began with "people seem to Like this a lot, it should be supported").

What I'm arguing for is some baseline respect. That even if you think this or that artwork is trash, beating your chest over Not giving them compensation is more than a little harsh. And doing that in Response to someone telling you they are being screwed out of the money they Would be getting, from people who Want to Give it, is just awful.

The precedent for that Format was there, but the context is not the same. Manippers are the old guard on hypnohub. AI image generation is new, and controversial, and a lot of people do not understand it(see what R_of_Tetra is saying), and frankly popular to hate on.

A lot of what you can say is bad about AI you can say about Manips. Even if what differences there are contain the Totality of Mindwipe's objections, should there not be some basic recognition for how similar the two are?
And you can't really say that the staff thinks people shouldn't get paid in general for manips, cuz. That was the overwhelming majority of the site's content at one point, and it still had the same ads.

Oh yeah, I agree, but there comes a time when someone is simply done with it after spending a lot of time trying to do just that. I am one of them: spent so much time and effort trying to convey a message without insults, and while I convinced some (or, at least, did not change their minds but kept the discussion civil), many, too many were simply there to spew insults and... worse things. I prefer to spend my time improving my craft now: people seem to enjoy it so... fuck the haters, in a sense: at least I gave... 80(?) persons a good time instead of arguing.

I can understand that. It doesn't have to be your fight. I think I'll make it mine, though.


..so what's your opinion? There's a call to supporting a generator like yourself, who just lost their income, Under an image that person made, where such discussions belong on the site by your logic... then some dude hops in, going out his way to visit a page under a tag he clearly hates, to express his relief that he is Not helping?

's pretty Nasty, isn't it?o . o'

Fanbox has had a policy in place that bans AI generated content since July of last year, it sucks that they lost a source of income but I find it hard to be surprised when they were breaking the terms of service of the site.



They're really not. AI art has a fundamental problem with that it completely strips away any and all accreditation from the original artists whose work was used to train the model, regardless of whether or not they were okay with it in the first place.

The equivalent for manips would be someone going in and replacing the artists' watermark with their own, something we already very explicitly disallow and go a step further with since we don't allow for manipper credits to overshadow the original artists'

We also honor artists' requests to have their work (or manips utilizing their work, or AI art specifically meant to emulate their style) taken down for any reason whatsoever



There is no official position on people monetizing AI generated work, some moderators might feel more strongly about it than others but I'm not going to try and generalize those opinions across the whole team.

wow that post was one hell of an emotional rollercaster, like i read a paragraph and got mad at you and then i read the next paragraph and i was like "good point" and then calmed down, and got it like this so many times that i'm surprised this post didn't gave bipolar disorder



counter argument, how about we ditch the hierarchy to begin with, i mean do we REALLY need it?
sidenote: a meritocratic system only functions in theory because the second it collides with material reality (which is not meritocratic btw) it shatters like a glass that has been hit by a cannonbolt.

Yes, there needs to be a clear distinction between the person that produced the original image and the person that edited it. Including both with the same 'level' of accreditation is creating an unclear image of who did what and only including the person that made the final image is pretty close to straight up art theft.

Isn't what the specific tags (Generators) and (Mannipper) do, though? The image used for manips should include a tag from the original artist while, for generators, if a specific artist style was used in the generator, it should be credited in the tags as well (perhaps a sub category like "Artist style" instead of simply "Artist", to avoid someone thinking that the image was, in fact, created by them and not by recreating their own art style)?

biggest plot twist of 2024, cause i would bet my mom and sister you were

Seeing that he had two other payment methods ready to go, there was hardly a surprise.
And any terms of service that boots off creators based what they use to make their work as a dealbreaker, and not a thought to what it is Like, falls under any reasonable definition of 'arbitrary'.
We should not consider an unjust rule a mitigating circumstance just because it's Expected.

.

That is not fundamental so much as it is systemic. A bot, if one were to make it for, say, a specific site, could easily scrape the credits alongside it. Additional work, but not by Much.
To then attach the images used in a given generation to the final result would be a Challenge on the programming side, but Doable.

It's something people Chose not to do. Not something they Couldn't have done.

On the one hand, that makes it worse, not better. I do not agree with it either. That should have carried across from my first post.

On the other hand...that's what the Hub did. Remember? The Option existed to credit everyone, but it was often not done. Tags were closed, sources were sloppy, and the staff overworked. Some people went way back to fix this, but images from that era still tend not to have artist tags or proper sources after all these years. You can look at my first manips, they have no credits aside from myself. I linked to danbooru as a source for goodness' sake. Because I was a goober and I didn't know what I was doing. That was three years ago, they have 60 upvotes each, nobody thought to fix it.

Any condemnation of AI generation under these terms has to condemn the old Hub alongside it. And Hypnohub existed since 2013. You guys had a decade to figure that out. Image generation in its current form is two years old. You need to chill on the AI folks a little bit.



That is what I wanted to know, at least initially. Knowing that, I remain comfortable posting here and working with the staff.



That's just how getting to know people is, isn't it~? The world often looks very different to people from different places.