Why I Don't Support Generalized AI Bans

[unspeakablehorror]

In light of Pillowfort's recent decision to ban AI art, I thought I would write up some reasons I don't support generalized AI bans despite having major issues with companies that make software like ChatGPT. I'll also state what kind of AI ban I do think is reasonable.

* AI is a very general term that whose usage has only recently been focused on this particular type of software. It has widespread applications, including in digital art and photography (there's AI software built into digital cameras on phones even). This is not just an issue of semantics, either, but could get into tricky questions of which of these applications is "not the kind of AI we're talking about" in terms of functionality as well.

* Disproportionately punishes the harmless, does nothing against the companies creating the AI software or the companies using it to harm creatives (like those news articles putting up AI-generated art instead of paying an actual artist for their work). My impression is that this will mostly punish the people who are not making any money from this grift but just generating and posting it for their own entertainment. I don't think most the artists actually selling their work on Pillowfort are actually AI-generating it.

* Undermines fair use. Having a position that AI is bad because posting excerpts or works based on other works is stealing is to have a position that fanworks and even general fair use is theft. This is a position that megacorps like Disney have historically been very much in favor of supporting as a means to disenfranchise regular writers and artists like the kind who join platforms like Pillowfort. These megacorps are not friends to creatives and engage in contant theft and exploitation of their workers, whose work is *their* IP, and not owned by the creatives themselves.

So, what kind of ban on AI would I support? For me, this would be a ban similar to the spam ban a lot of sites implement, possibly customized to address specifics of these types of AI's. Obviously anything becomes a problem if it is being used to spam a site. 

I also very much support sites discouraging AI scrapers by altering their robots.txt (I was happy to see that Pillowfort had done this) and giving their users the option to make posts site only. These measures aren't an AI ban on the site, but rather put up some roadblocks against the companies who are creating this AI in order to try to generate profit for themselves at the expense of all of us.