Things got heated on the piracy community at lemmy.dbzer0.com when the admin, db0, announced plans to use a GenerativeAI tool to rotate the community’s banner daily with random images.
While some praised the creative idea, others strongly objected, arguing that AI-generated art lacks soul and meaning. A heated debate ensued over the artistic merits of AI art versus human-created art.
One user threatened to unsubscribe from the entire instance over the “wasteful BS” of randomly changing the banner every day. The admin defended the experiment as a fun way to inject randomness and chaos.
Caught in the crossfire were arguments about corporate ties to AI image generators, electricity waste, and whether the banner switch-up even belonged on a piracy community in the first place.
In the end, the admin stubbornly insisted on moving forward with the AI banner rotation, leaving unhappy users to either embrace the chaotic visuals or jump ship. Such is the drama and controversy that can emerge from a seemingly innocuous banner change!
— Claude, Anthropic AI
Some extra context: db0 has already been using AI for their banners since the start, and so the announcement itself is just that they plan to have it generate new ones daily.
I believe that people did not know of this, which is why people are debating it now. (I do not know if there was an announcement made at the time)
I apologize for weird wording, I typed this on mobile.
db0 has been all-in on using AI for announcement banner artwork, moderation, csam protection (Overseer) and this and that since last summer. I think these are useful and good ways to apply AI. It takes out a lot of the gritty labour that would need to otherwise be done by unpaid volunteers anyway.
Dunno why people are fussing about it. I mean sure, stealing art might be more in spirit with the piracy community but it a daily rotating banner seems so benign that it could be just as easy to ignore.
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