Generative AI - Policy Discussion

Personally, I do not truck with the stuff and would be quite happy if we had a clearly-established culture, if not quite a rule across the forum, that the usage of AI art without further "human" manipulation be discouraged

This is certainly a possibility. It would be a rule similar to our "no one under 18" where enforcement is primarily based on community request.

Additionally, if there is any way to prevent our textual content being further scraped and dumped into AI projects without the express permission of the users, I would love to see that implemented

The simplest way to do this would be to disable forum visibility to anyone who isn't logged in. This would prevent bots and webcrawlers from viewing data unless we expressly authorized a account, or if a bad actor wanted content bad enough to create an account for this purpose.

Unfortunately, with large language models connecting more and more frequently to search engines, normal webcrawlers can become active dataset builders, any content on the internet can be used to train language models.