Dear /c/writing community,
I just wanted to let you know that we mods put in place a new no LLMs rule now:
No LLM advocacy. Due to the many ethical problems of current LLM technology, we neither allow LLM-written posts in this community nor do we think discussing the use of LLMs for writing texts in any positive manner is appropriate. Don’t feed people’s works into commercial LLM services either.
Since we’re on a solarpunk instance, I assume most people here already found big LLM datacenters run at below cost and with high environmental damage to be too unsustainable. But I thought why not actually add a rule for it.
(I think it should go without saying that AI covers aren’t really overly welcome either, but since this community is about writing that seemed like the most pressing concern to address.)
See you around,
Ellie
This just seems sane and sensible. I give it all my support.
Subscribed to the community as well.
No AI covers should be codified as a rule. They are ubiquitous on many self-publishing sites.
On top of the ecological and economic harms, they are artistically worthless.
On a web novel site I use, pretty much every cover is AI. Male MCs all look the same (pretty much an issue with almost all human drawn manga as well) and the title fonts are flashy but difficult to read.
It is being able to judge a book by its cover. If an author can’t be bothered to generate a unique cover, their writing is probably also generic.
I know my writing is crap, but I paid US$25 for a real human to design a minimalist cover for my web novel.
I write for myself and I couldn’t bring myself to put an AI slop cover on my ugly baby.
If an author can’t be bothered to generate a unique cover, their writing is probably also generic.
I say this about everything. YouTube video has ai thumbnail? lazy… that means your video will be lazy as well.
i’d say it’s worse than lazy, it’s outright deceiving and insulting.
Lazy would be using clipart or making a crude drawing, it’s low effort but doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. Meanwhile AI is specifically used to make it appear like you put in effort despite not actually doing so, i don’t see it as any better than straight up stealing someone else’s creation.
Thank you for making this into a rule, I fully support it!
Good
Good stuff :)
I wonder, were there ever any considerations to have anything related as an instance-wide rule for all communities that reside on slrpnk.net? (I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good idea, just wondering.)
I guess I can see some people consider a purely local LLM as some sort of home assistant that’s only for personal use, as a slightly solarpunk’ish solution under some circumstances. But the big centralized proprietary services…? Perhaps there’s something there that would be useful for slrpnk.net as a whole.
I would love to see an anti-AI rule for slrpnk.net as a whole. Too many gross tech bros who think data centers guzzling water and spewing pollution is somehow compatible with protecting and embracing the environment :/
We already vet account registrations and so far there was just not really a need talk about a general LLM ban because people here seem to not be much interested in LLMs. Although we did discuss it in the admin chat before mostly in regards to removing remote GenAI communities from the all-feed.
But we already ban remote bot accounts that are clearly LLM driven and are spamming communities.
I wonder, perhaps it would be useful to have a rule banning AI training on any content posted on here? Not that I think it’ll necessarily stop anybody, but might as well formally voice opposition.
Hell yeah. Love to see it :D
Thanks for taking a stand on this issue
Wait this wasn’t already a rule? It just seemed like a well duh thing to have.
Meh better late then never
I am embarrassed to say I never before realized we didn’t have this rule and should probably have it. 😆
