1d ago

Announcing a new rule: "no generative AI content"

A while ago we had a post with a comic that was a bit controversial due to it being generated by genAI, but we did not explicitly have a rule against it.

We wanted to discuss this and ask the community, but this apparently had already been a topic on feddit.uk for awhile and they have made a instance rule about it (announced in this post).

Since buyeuropean community is on feddit.uk, the feddit.uk rules apply to this community and therefore I wanted to announce this new rule so it doesn't come as a surprise.

Copy of the post body text from the announcement of this rule on feddit.uk:

So no:
AI generated memes of images
AI generated answers to questions
edit: this applies to feddit.uk communities, we won’t block AI art communities on other instances or sanction our users for posting on them.

45 comments

How will you possibly enforce this?
- Well, like any other rules. The community helps a lot with this.
  Most of the time it's clear and OP doesn't hide the fact - in those cases we hope OP checks the rules before posting and then decides not to.
  But, let's say some popular post gets a lot of comments, one of the comments is just two lines of harmless AI text so no one pays attention or knows it's genAI and therefore no one reports it: we wont notice and the comment that technically breaks the rules is staying. The commenter has either not read the rules or, if they have, is celebrating their victory at home for passing the great mod filter wall.
  Mods are just normal users part of this community and volunteered to moderate this community when they can. Mostly we have been acting on reports by other users of this community and we filter out troll posts and comments that are just e.g. racist, transphobic, etc.
  We don't have some fine modding tools that parse every post and comment, if no one notices / reports rule breaking content then it won't be acted upon.

How will you know ?
- Simple, if you can't tell, then it's a good image and removal is unwarranted
- For images, text can be inconsistent and different parts of the image that would make sense to be copied would be unique
- On the cryptography forum(s) I run my rule is that all use of LLM/AI must be declared, including the prompt.
  Wouldn't mind banning it completely, but I think it's better to not discourage people who are genuinely trying to learn, while getting an opportunity to show them where LLM will go wrong.
  If the point about teaching doesn't apply to your forum (like one about memes), I don't see the usefulness of a disclosure rule and thus you might as well ban it completely.
- For this community specifically I somewhat answered your question in this comment chain.
  TLDR: we won't probably always know. We trust that this rule is a clear guideline and hope people read rules before posting.
- If you can't tell; does it matter? I imagine the rule is there to filter out noise.

Thank you for announcing it, I never noticed any AI generated content here, but still better safe than sorry
- Yeah it seemed like community had some thoughts about it and better to have a clear entry about that in the sidebar.

Good rule!

First community to actually do something about this 🙏

I want to mention I'm personally not against AI generated content, and don't know why so many people seem against all forms of AI, especially when it comes to images, but i am against wrong information and low effort crap so it will just say you do you feddit.uk and good of our community to follow the instance.
- I'm against it because of the questionable ways AI gets trained (stealing art or books for example) and also because of the environmental impacts.
  With the unethical training habits and energy consumption from megacorps, in addition to just being brain-killing slop, AI generated content should have no place in social media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice
  
  I agree those two are bad things, but it is to me not enough reason to ban it entirely.
- Yeah my main interest in this community is the topic, and thankfully this doesn't really affect this community dramatically since the content that people post is generally not related to AI.
  And anyway, good to have clear guidelines. There are plenty of communities where the focus is AI (or anti-AI) and for feddit.uk users who want to participate still can (the ban is about communities hosted on feddit.uk, they are not defederating or banning AI on remote communities).
  
  I think living in a democracy (and I consider this also as one, dispute there not being elections) is accepting I don't make the rules. And in that case I rather have clear rules I disagree with than vague rules that give me a desire to argue about my interpretation of them all the time.
  Also good that we follow the instance, since that means that if people have a problem with a certain rule than there is a set place for that discussion and we as a community can be free of arguments about them. Plus if I want to try and change a certain rule, I know where I need to direct my time and energy to.

oh why?
- The rule has been added because communities have to follow the rules of the instance they are hosted on and feddit.uk (buyeuropean is hosted on feddit.uk) has introduced this rule.
  If they had not introduced it we would have had to have a discussion about genAI rule anyway on this community, because it was a controversial topic as we saw on an earlier post here.
- because LLMs can't differentiate what's facts and what's fiction, which is quite important when trying to determine the origin of a product? and because AI generated content is, most of the time, low effort garbage?
  
  So basically we should stop funding le chat mistral ai and miss out on a market just like we did with smartphones?
  You think that's a good idea buddy? Not supporting our own products?
  
  In that case the rules should be a) no wrong information and b) no low effort garbage, if you ask me.
  
  What about if the text on an image is factual but the accompanying stock photography is just an AI generated one? what's the harm and/or who cares?

- @huppakee@lemm.ee already gave the perfect answer in a reply to you, but in general some content is just clearly AI generated and we didn't have a rule about that before.
  I'm not going to be trigger happy and label every suspected post as genAI and I don't have enough resources to check. This is mostly to give people posting here guidelines as to what is acceptable.
  The post that triggered this discussion in this community was not hiding the fact that it was AI and also OP wasn't acting in bad faith - they even stated that "the posting rules didn't prohibit AI content", which is fair enough.
- You're right you can't, but if there is a rule you have clarity beforehand instead of arguments after.

45 comments