Should we allow AI art?

Seeing how there's been AI generated content posted here I think it's time to think about if we should even have it here. I'm personally against Ai generated art on the basis that it most of the generations require the AI to basically plagiarize other artist content in order to craft a work that doesn't look like an unholy abomination and second it would open up a floodgate where most of the content ends up being self upload and AI generated. This isn't to say that AI art isn't pretty to look at but it just has no business being on Danbooru.

EDIT: AI-generated posts are banned. See forum #223144.

It's currently listed under the Borderline Content section, but I'm on the side of not allowing it at all.

forum #221669

I'm with Unbreakable for this one. I always click/tap "No Interest" whenever I see one posted/flagged.

I believe uploading ai-generated art is anathema to the stated goals of Danbooru.

Veradux said:

I believe uploading ai-generated art is anathema to the stated goals of Danbooru.

Which is... archiving high quality art?

I am also in favour of banning 100% AI-generated art. Such art is only going to become more prevalent in the near-future, and it'd be better to nip it in the bud early.

AI-assisted art should be considered on a case-by-case basis as is currently done, being not dissimilar to existing photo background posts, where the focus is on the hand-drawn elements.

I'm afraid that AI art could end up polluting the uploads on Danbooru a lot in the future, or even pollute art itself. At least, it shouldn't be encouraged imo, and like VR-Man, I never approve AI art.

nonamethanks said:

Which is... archiving high quality art?

Yes, because AI-generated content is neither art nor high-quality.

What worries me about hard-banning it is that at some point it will become very difficult or impossible to distinguish AI art from human art. There have already been multiple instances of someone upping/approving AI art without realizing, and that will probably only get worse in the future.

Talulah said:

Yes, because AI-generated content is neither art nor high-quality.

What worries me about hard-banning it is that at some point it will become very difficult or impossible to distinguish AI art from human art. There have already been multiple instances of someone upping/approving AI art without realizing, and that will probably only get worse in the future.

post #5710900 is better than 90% of what goes through the modqueue every day. And as you said, good luck figuring out whether something is ai-generated or not in a year's time.

nonamethanks said:

post #5710900 is better than 90% of what goes through the modqueue every day. And as you said, good luck figuring out whether something is ai-generated or not in a year's time.

It's absolutely gorgeous but it doesn't belong here. Anyone can recreate this the moment they figure out the prompt that was used to generate it and I guarantee you that the image used another artist as a base to create that work. Also I honestly think we should stop creating artist tags for these generators and just put these works the generator that was used, like for example if it used stable diffusion and leave it at that.

iori98 said:

Also I honestly think we should stop creating artist tags for these generators and just put these works the generator that was used, like for example if it used stable diffusion and leave it at that.

Yeah. But the problem is those users rarely said what tool they did use for their AI arts.

Reading that linked post, I find it rather hilarious that an otherwise perfectly fine art piece is suddenly considered poison the very second the notion that it was created by an AI came up.

This giant boogeyman of "We have to defend art from the AI's!" somewhat confuses me, considering the effort that goes into figuring out these things. Reminds me of when Koikatsu and other things that let people mess around with models without needing to go arse deep into programs like SFM or MMD started popping up. Some spam appeared, some really good things appeared, and artists continued making art regardless of the common-man getting some better toys.

I say keep it at borderline, if only to satisfy the notion that its easier to ban the bad stuff when it tries to sneak in. No reason to stick up our nose at good looking art because those "filthy machines" produced it. We aren't an organic-produce grocery store.

(Disclaimer: i'm arguing as a user here, not as an admin. At the end of the day the decision on whether to allow or forbid AI art rests solely on evazion, I have as much say on it as anyone else in this thread.)

iori98 said:
I guarantee you that the image used another artist as a base to create that work.

I'm going to drop a hot take here: That's how real people produce art too. A sizable amount of content on this site consists of poses straight-out lifted from other pieces. We even have a tag for the most blatant cases: derivative work.

Also I honestly think we should stop creating artist tags for these generators and just put these works the generator that was used, like for example if it used stable diffusion and leave it at that.

You're conflating multiple different models and programs together. Something like Midjourney will take text prompts, while something like img2img allows you to actually draw the general outline before the AI draws over your shapes. See for example this part of the Wikipedia article on Stable Diffusion. At which point do we say that content has enough human input? How would we even verify that? It's a nightmare.

As much as I dislike the idea of it, I'm not quite in favor of banning it yet. Let's see if this is just a fad for now (which I doubt), but such posts should be held to very high scrutiny. It becomes a problem if the site is flooded with AI posts, at that point you may as well just make an AIbooru. I'm curious about what to do with artist tags though, up until now we've been tagging them with whoever posted them on pixiv/twitter etc. But is that really the way to go? The 'artists' in question didn't actually draw these.

RingyThingy said:

Reading that linked post, I find it rather hilarious that an otherwise perfectly fine art piece is suddenly considered poison the very second the notion that it was created by an AI came up.

This giant boogeyman of "We have to defend art from the AI's!" somewhat confuses me, considering the effort that goes into figuring out these things. Reminds me of when Koikatsu and other things that let people mess around with models without needing to go arse deep into programs like SFM or MMD started popping up. Some spam appeared, some really good things appeared, and artists continued making art regardless of the common-man getting some better toys.

I say keep it at borderline, if only to satisfy the notion that its easier to ban the bad stuff when it tries to sneak in. No reason to stick up our nose at good looking art because those "filthy machines" produced it. We aren't an organic-produce grocery store.

It's worth noting that the 3D engines you've mentioned have a very high deletion rate here for perceived effort/quality reasons - post #2517506 is a good example. I can see AI art being treated in the same way, since it pretty evidently takes less time than conventional artwork even when done well, and when done poorly it also leads to recognizable artifacts.

The plagiarism angle mentioned by some... less so, when we do have a lot of very literal plagiarism on the booru already. If tracing one post isn't considered a big deal, processing hundreds of different posts and spitting out something vaguely resembling all of them certainly isn't either.

feline_lump said:

It's worth noting that the 3D engines you've mentioned have a very high deletion rate here for perceived effort/quality reasons - post #2517506 is a good example.

That is exactly my point.

For all the hub-hub that they received once people figured out they existed, they don't really go anywhere. They didn't overtake art despite the fact that people without "pure" artistic talent could do things with them. Those without talent had to develop completely different skills than those of the art world, and for the most part, those programs can be summed up in two ways: The people creating the high quality stuff from scratch, and the people nabbing a scene/card from whatever website they can find and trying to make things off of that.

Everybody is freaking out because they learned that a couple of tryhards have been plunging the depths of what they can do with these new tools, and then applying that level of effort to every random wannabe that learned what the bots name was. Spam will exist, yes, but that same spam comes from pretty much anything.

It's better to spend our time figuring out what the quality bar is and getting that set up, rather than meandering around and missing out on the good stuff.

Your reasoning makes sense, but with 3D stuff, what we ended up deciding is "eh, this isn't really our wheelhouse". That could very well happen to AI art, which has all of its own quirks separate from traditional art and a lot of approvers that actively dislike it.

feline_lump said:

Your reasoning makes sense, but with 3D stuff, what we ended up deciding is "eh, this isn't really our wheelhouse". That could very well happen to AI art, which has all of its own quirks separate from traditional art and a lot of approvers that actively dislike it.

Actually, the decision with the 3D stuff was "Toss out the blatant low quality stuff, and keep anything that looks really good". Koikatsu still gets approvals even with the higher standards imposed on it, all one has to do is look at the dates on the uploads on that tag.

I did notice that StableDiffusion is classified as an artist, not as something else/the tool. Should this really be the case, though?

It's like classifying photoshop as the artist, in my opinion.