Literally this.

At the same time I also realized "fuck!" I didn't complete the sentence you just quoted.

And it's not even the worst I've seen online. Outside of Newgrounds, antis have implied slurs, created death threats, and have falsely accused legitimate artists without a hint of nuance or checking when they started uploading, to the point that arguments

Lemme me fix that.

.... to the point that arguments against AI, look worse than they actually are.

Totally did not improvise just now.

I've been accessing the Guidelines by clicking the "Terms of Use" link on the bottom of the page next to the copyright text, then going to that Portal's respective Guidelines. Works fine for me, just two clicks.

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Here's a suggestion, and tell me if you like this. Perhaps if there's a third link there titled "Portal Guidelines" that explains in the simplest terms that what content is acceptable on the site is determined by separate Guidelines for each Portal, as well as buttons to the 4 sets of Guidelines. It'd be the same amount of clicks, but in a way that is easier to understand for newer users.

That could help assuming it's clearly visible to the average user imho.

Well one thing is for certain generative art AI when it got out of it's primitive state, has introduced The Thing scenario with how good it's gotten. Everybody trying to figure who is the Thing and who is not. Which has lead to legitimate artists being accused and harassed for supposedly using AI. Thankfully that shit quickly dissolves by simply looking at their art history or the artist showing their layers and WIP stuff/files of said piece.

But the fact that issue exist at all right now in it's early stages is pretty concerning. Especially when going into the territory of AI being used to generate deepfakes and eventually getting good enough to render any sorts of media evidence obsolete. But that part is a bigger fish left for a bigger lake to discuss.

Should probably take that to this thread. (Been meaning to use it to air out my own gripes)

probably best to go scorched earth for now and not allow any of it. theres still a lot to benchmark with genAI and having some arbitrary ruling like "your submission needs to be 80% real and 20% AI at most" would just blow up the portal with drama from shitters

i wouldnt mind a cartoon that uses AI voice synthesis personally, dont see how its different from TTS which from my understanding is fine aswell

Most people can understand that "majority" roughly means more than 50%. and "minority" is roughly less than that.

I estimated in my first post that putting an exact percentage wouldn't go so well (which is why I gave a margin of error of ~25% in my own estimation for DF).

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Anyway, even trying to put an objective label (like my AI-meter) on the contents of any given video for the sake of moderation can be subjective, and probably resource/time heavy too, so take it with a grain of salt.

But you kinda contradicted yourself by stating it's best to "go scorched earth and not allow any of it", but later admit AI voices are OK. You're either all-in or you make clear exceptions, can't have your cake and eat it too.

As someone who works in the professional design world, AI has been explored. However, we make it 100% clear to not use it for a project that is made to be seen by the public.

Why? Because with the ongoing lawsuits over copyright, it is a huge risk to dip your toes into using a tool that scraps other creators resources, and results in more liability.

If there were any exceptions to allow it, sure, but as of now, I'm on the outright banning AI side of things. It is ONLY to protect NG from infringing on copyright via AI usage on some submissions, especially at this time.

you'd be surprised how far people would extrapolate percentages of their workflow to try to fit the allowed metrics; the moment it's questioned people would start going "actually i spent a lot of time & effort on the backgrounds" to justify a submission that is clearly unabashed AI slop. that's about why i'm wary of it. i'm sure a portal mod would have good judgement when it came down to it, but it'd see a ton of additional pushback that i don't think they want to deal with.

re: the second part, ur going a bit debatebro on me here. let me lay my take out more clearly for you:

-> i don't think genAI (letting it do basically all the work for you) really has a place on the portal, it'd kinda defeat the purpose of the website, and also flood it with a lot of garbage, considering the speed at which you could crank an AI animation out in these days. this is the scorched earth part, but;

-> things like voice synthesis that are very reminiscent of pre-existing aspects of an animation that have already been okayed don't seem like a problem to me. i've seen that most animation software also have some kind of AI-powered assistance tools now that remind me of tweening, although i'm not sure how accurate the comparison is.

Oh my god, I'm not encouraging it. Chill out with those reactions.

That is called plagiarism.

This is called 'paintover' and believe or not, most AI bros don't care enough to do that nor do they want to waste their time actually drawing something, even if it's drawing over AI slop. Aaaand, the people who do choose to put the energy to draw something, very likely won't choose to paint over AI shit, cause most of them can draw their backgrounds from the grounud up anyway. Think about it. Doing a full AI Art paintover still requires the time it takes to draw a picure. So, the AI Bros that want to "save their precious time" with the "help" of GenAI wouldn't do that.

From my experience, the only cases where I've seen folks do that sort of paintover bullshit are scammers. So, @Anamonator has a point. Interesting observation.

Pro AI or Anti AI banter is irrelevant. Digital interaction and data scraping without consent is blatant plagiarism.

Tangentially related but I have noticed from a couple of years now that there seems to be this strange whole network of art scammers who go in public discord servers, DM random people to offer commissions. They actually deliver it but seeing samples or their socials make it very apparent that it's traced, with a bunch of watermarks covering it to difficult reverse search or whatever.

What is interesting to me though is that like all of them have the same kind of samey looking bios, profiles, even banners. They also keep discussing with you if you accuse or ask something about scam but will be deadly silent and not respond to you anymore if you suggest the possibility that they aren't working alone/are working in a group. Their socials also tend to follow each other for some reason. I've always wanted look further into the subject but never got the time to do so.

To be honest most people don't read the rules of a site or just ignore them. This is why we see the same thread topics of "unpublished, unscouted, etc." I do see the Read Rules text when clicking the upload button. Could make it more obvious by adding a link to the wiki rules in the upload page.

I've been contacted by some of them.

Gave me Deviantart flashbacks.

Any idea what's their game?

Copyright has pretty much been iffy on Newgrounds. Being a company with limited funding, avoiding legal trouble is a must. But even then they also allow you to make fanart of Mario and Pokemon, even if that's technically copyright infringement, and plenty of those have been frontpaged. Save for specific examples where a specific game gets DMCA'd, in which case the game is taken down and no further pressure. So they still make exceptions.

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Then you have copyrighted music. Major record labels are notoriously litigous, hence NG has been on a huge crackdown to prevent them from breathing down our necks, redirecting to .

Then there's AI. Legally speaking, most litigation I'm aware of targets the AI models themselves, not the users or their results. If it's a copyrighted character, then IP holders like Nintendo and Disney can sue Midjourney and block OpenAI all they wany, but they never crack on existing prompts existing unless they're blatantly misusing their image (in which case, NG probably wouldn't allow it anyway, AI or otherwise).

In the case of artists getting their art scraped for a custom model, you can DMCA the model in question, but individual pieces made with said model can't be copyrighted because you otherwise cannot copyright an artstyle.

Otherwise, if a piece contains generic or original characters and settings, it is unlikely for someone to copyright claim that result, or it'd be closer to fanart in terms of copyright infringement.

I feel what's missing here is that AI doesn't just scrap peoples or companies character art, but rather, everything outside of it like photography, graphics, assets, etc are all scrapped too. That's really what most places, including my job, are trying to avoid, taking the risk of using the models, even if its just a small graphical scrapped from the seas, we'd rather recreate it than to directly take it. Saves us from lawsuits and also helps encourage us to be creative.

Instead of recreating said works from the sources, it takes and takes and takes. If having to rework the copyright rules in this website has to be done to make up for how horrifically unethical AI takes from the source material, so be it. Anything to protect the artists on this website.

My main hypothesis is that it's a bunch of people working under a single person's command, kinda like tech troubleshooting antivirus scam centers. Each one manages one or more accounts and they all work under someone managing the operation.

It could be that it is a bunch of people is doing it on their own but with how many patterns and similarities there are between them, it's difficult to believe every single one would follow the same script given to them, so I don't think it's that

It could also be the same person managing every single account but I feel that's also logistically unlikely, thus I like to believe it's a group thing.

I have no idea how we would be able to identify or find who is behind everything

While I think it's safe to say the majority of us here on NG are anti-AI, some of our reasons for feeling that way are very different. I think this is the primary cause of the discourse we're currently experiencing in our community.

I believe I can identify three key points on which anti-AI opinions are rooted:

Ethics, Quality, and Artistic integrity

Ethics

Those of us who are primarily concerned about AI use on the basics of ethics will probably disagree with use of Gen AI to any degree. The Gen AI that people are currently using was trained on data scraped without permission, and without any option for artists to opt out of having their art used in that way. Against our wishes, our work is fed into a machine that is intended to replace us. In our eyes, there is no way to tolerate even minimal use of AI assistance, as there is not any way to do so while getting around this consent issue. And it also increases demand of AI usage and brings profit to AI, expanding its growth.

In the context of Newgrounds: When we upload our works to the portal, we are given the choice of how we want to permit our works to be used, and if we choose not to, there is a clear notice. "You may not use this work for any purposes."

Now what does that matter when it's ignored by scrapers that don't care and dump it into AI training sets anyways?

Allowing Gen AI content on NG offers a way to bypass what little control we've been given to what our hard work is used for.

Regarding use of the older TTS applications: if it really is true that the original voice recordings that were used for voice synthesis in a way that the voice actors disagree with, there is a similar ethical concern there, but there are some important distinctions to make:

• Whether those voice actors had a right to choose what the recordings were used for is impossible to say without knowing what exactly was in their contracts.
• Primitive TTS was very robotic sounding. Unlike the modern Gen AI voices we have now, classic TTS was not used in a way intended to replace human actors, because it was not able to. In the case of the Clock Crew stuff, it was deliberately used for comedic effect because of how shitty it was at replicating a natural human voice.

Quality

Next we have people who are bothered by the lesser quality of content created using AI assistance when compared to handcrafted works. We all see how other platforms have become inundated with this type of stuff, and it's where derisive terms like "AI slop" come from.

Tom can correct me if I'm wrong about this or putting words in his mouth, but looking at his words and judgments, this area seems to be his primary focus on moderating the Gen AI stuff coming in. He doesn't want the portal flooded with large amounts of low-quality, low-effort content.

It makes sense that he would want to treat things this way since it's in line with how things have been handled it the past before AI. It follows precedence and has parallels to the concept of "fair use" of not needing permission if your work is transformative enough. (Although that raises the question of whether transformation utilizing a machine is the same as a human with creative drive taking inspiration from, or remixing, source content.)

I think some of the people we have here who are more concerned about quality than ethics dislike AI content just because they're tired of seeing it everywhere, so they're the ones who will readily give a pass to AI use when it is incorporated in a way that mocks or satirizes AI.

Artistic Integrity

On the area of concern of artistic integrity, this becomes a bit more philosophical. We value independent creators and what they do. We want human talent and merit to be recognized. We see Newgrounds as a place where these things are held in high regard when compared to other platforms where algorithm pandering has long been the norm. As a community of artists supporting each other, it makes sense than many of us would see the rise of AI as a threat to that. We don't want the same thing to happen here, in our safe haven, that is happening everywhere else.

For a personal anecdote as an example: In my own experience in the furry fandom, I have seen things change in a way that deeply saddens me. It used to be a place where artists were appreciated and respected. Before AI, almost all the furries who I knew, or ran into in the community, either were artists who drew art of their own characters, or paid artists to draw their characters for them. But now, everywhere I go, where I used to see profile pictures commissioned from artists, or people sharing cool art that they found and sharing a link to the artist's page, I now very often see AI generated images instead. And these images get shared around without people knowing that its AI, or whose art was plagiarized to make it. I've seen it to be true that AI is capable of copying an independent artist's style and taking clients away from them.

Thankfully at least Fur Affinity has an AI ban, but the state of furry fandom on social media and the other furry sites? It's been changed forever.

All that said,

I think it should be no surprise that so many of us will vehemently express our opposition to AI.

A lot of us are going to be unhappy with seeing any amount of Gen AI allowed on NG, because many of us come here specifically to get away from the AI generated content that has flooded the rest of the internet.

When my peers ask me why I post my art on NG and not on more popular social media platforms, I point to NG's anti-AI stance as one of the primary motivators.

But I'm starting to question if I can honestly say "AI generated stuff is not allowed on Newgrounds" since that's not really true when it is allowed in some capacity.

If things continue as they are it will be a never ending debate of where the line should be in this vague grey area of how much AI assistance is okay. And I predict will result in continued... community policing, so to speak (bullying)

I personally would much prefer if NG were to implement a complete ban on use of Gen AI, to any degree.

But even with the partial ban we have now, I'll probably still stick around, since it's not like there's any better alternative. I might be reconsidering supporter status though.

Damn it, I laughed all over the house when I heard the Suno AI track here.

I honestly consider myself highly against generative AI. That being said, seeing all of that behavior from people who are against it too over the past couple of months has made me sick... the obvious racism when making words to clearly replace slur especially so, it's like a really obvious dogwhistle... Not to mention generative AI has been used to push racist ideas as well, so sometimes I don't know if a lot of these people actually believe what they're fighting for. Guh.

I think to avoid future precedents this incident made, Tom should unpublished Abdragon26 Dearest Friends Ep 1. I can see this incident could be use as a reference for future arguments/debates by actual malicious AI gen users to defend their blatant over use of AI in their animation or art. Besides Abdragon26 should redo the cartoon without using AI and encourage him to avoid relying on it.

I agree that it may be for the best that the movie in question be removed.

Whether people are neutral at minimum or against it, I would have my concerns in this creating more problems than its worth.

Either there needs to be strict regulations, OR just ban it all together and end it. I do not think that Dearest Friends sets a good standard and given how Tom and the rest of the staff feel about the short I think there was more confliction involved in trying to be fair about this.

I do not think theres a win win situation either way. But taking it down at least nay address some concerns.

This! 👏👏👏👏

That Dearest Friends movie has now become a bit of a "poster child" for shady AI usage on Newgrounds. You can tell that the most recent ratings on it are less about the movie itself and more about the idea of allowing such gray areas in the Portal as a whole.

Yeah. I was looking at the AI Art Rules and it looks pretty balance view to what most people would agree is not okay to use AI but also okay to use AI. One thing I see that Abdragon26 may have broke according to the rules: "There are cases where some use of AI is ok, for example if you are primarily showcasing your character art but use an AI-generated background. In these cases, please note any elements where AI was used so that it is clear to users and moderators."

He did not note any elements where AI was used and my previous comments I said he didn't AI tag his animation. That's a solid reason to have his work unpublished.

I've been following this thread since roughly the day after it was created, and among the almost 6 pages worth of replies, this might be the most the well written post. You have good evidence to back up what your saying.

I also appreciate how you point out how not all anti-ai users have the same beliefs. I consider myself pretty open-minded when it comes to AI's use in art, but I learn towards the ethical aspect since I consider scraping without consent to be appalling.

While I overall disagree with you, I respect the effort you put in writing this and consider it infinitely more thought provoking and intelligent than most of the discussion this topic usually entails, including in this thread.

I personally do not get that vibe from them. Their stuff is pretty good at shitting on AI, and I imagine is one of the only reasons AI usage was even allowed here at all. It's the only reason I'm not entirely gung-ho about it, but at the same time, with AI generation being bad for the planet with every prompt, I would be fine with the animations being gone from the site if we had to do an "all-or-nothing" sort of deal, or we could even just leave these sort of exceptions up to the community maybe?

I kinda liked the first "ironic GenAI" video by ActiveObjectX not as a high quality animation but more like a decent social commentary. But when the following episodes came out, the shtick had already run its course and I personally didn't like any of them. :|