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AUP Changes, or does this Slope feel Slippery to you?
3 years ago
I'm a bit troubled. It's not going so far as to say I am "concerned" yet, but I am a bit troubled.
I'm going to start off by stating a basic fact, which anyone who has run a Discord server knows and which we have been reminded of very much recently thanks to a certain unnamed formally-wealthiest man torching two of his companies and his personal wealth all at the same time: Content Moderation is HARD. You think it would be simple, but you can measure in hours it will take until you encounter an edge case, and will be forced to dance a very delicate dance with your rules, and failure could mean effectively undercutting your own authority by being too permissive, or turning into a capricious dictator and driving users away. If you're an especially talented fuck-up, you can accomplish both. Because of this, I tend not to be too quick to criticize moderators since their job is difficult and thankless, despite how important it is.
But that doesn't mean I don't keep an eye on them, and one of the things I pay attention to is how they word their rules. Back when Furry Life Online was getting started, I had set up an account, but I started getting the willies when I was reading through the rules and decided not to follow through with setting up an account there. Considering how that site collapsed (an impressive feat considering how Weasyl is still going,) I feel like I was justified in my suspicions about the people who were running that place. When you're telling your users to report people who are "making outrageous claims about site staff," that's a red flag big enough to march through Beijing.
I bring this up because I am getting the willies again.
I have objections to two of the changes, and I am not sure which to start with.
I want to make clear up-front that I am very firmly in the anti- part of the current "AI Art" culture war. I had been meaning to go in depth at some point, but my feelings are it's not art, and the people who promote it tend to be both greatly ignorant of and contemptuous to the artistic process, and are invited to stick their dick in a computer's power supply if they are so confident in their programs. I put it so bluntly so you understand the gravity of what I am saying when I think FA's AI ban is draconian.
It's one thing to be vigorous in wanting to make sure real artists are not being drowned in a sea of only-somewhat-less-random than RNG content on your art site, and quite another to forget that the reason it has taken off the way it has is because it is difficult for the casual viewer to tell it apart from regular art. It steals from human artists, so therefore it looks like human-made art. Because of that, any zero tolerance policy is inevitability going to catch innocent parties. A zero tolerance is impossible, and so obviously impossible that I am disturbed by anyone who even entertains the possibility that is. FA staff has assured me directly that they "have ways" of telling whether an image is generated or not. Considering their track record, I don't really believe them. Site-runners always "have ways."
However, it doesn't stop there: they've expanded it:
Content made using AI, machine learning, or similar generators is not allowed, including derivative works created from it (e.g. stories, audio, backgrounds, paint-overs, using one's own content to generate new content).(emphasis mine)
The actual fuck? You can't even write stories based on an AI image? It's one thing to be against AI art, but another to be so against it that you can't even draw any inspiration from it! I mean, they probably meant not to upload a story that has the AI image as a cover image, but that's not how they phrased it, and we know phrasing is very important to them because of one of other changes they made:
Minors may not have detailed bulges or outlines of normal or hyper genitalia, clothed or otherwise. Minors may not be fetishized. Minors younger than 13 may not be depicted as pregnant. Minors are defined as real or fictional humanoids with a childlike body or younger than 18 years old, and any adolescent animals.
Changes to section 2.7 are highlighted in bold. This change was made to close a loophole some individuals were trying to stretch past our initial intent.
What does this mean? What did this change? Exactly what kind of content was slipping past the rule before that doesn't anymore? Why would you even need this specific wording, since at least everyone who reads this has at least one story of a FurAffinity staffer who took down a submission based on an overly-broad interpretation of a rule? Are you afraid that you would get sued in FA Court who would FA Overrule your takedown and reinstate content because you wrote the rules on your own site which you own and control incorrectly? I have two interpretations of this, either
1.) It's the state of being a minor, or the appearance or the things associated with the state of being a minor, that cannot be fetishized. Essentially, any kind of ageplay is now banned, whether the characters are actually minors or not. Sucks to be you, diaperfurs.
or
2.) You're not allowed to do any fetish art involving minors, which has multiple problems.
I have a personal distaste for the "-ize" verbs (fetishize, sexualize, normalize, etc) that contemporary intelligencia have become accustomed to using. Whenever I hear someone using those words, I am roughly 60 seconds away from concluding that the person would more valuably exercise the use of their time by taking a break and pouring themselves a tall glass of Mind Your Own Business. It's a weirdly nihilistic way of looking at things, as if the thing cannot have innate trait but only the traits that can be imparted to it by others. But, let's entertain it for a bit, and break down what it means.
A fetish, used in the modern psychological sense, means a non-sexual object or act that is the subject of a sexual fixation (the technical definition actually omits even acts but I'm correcting for what seems to be an oversight.) That means when you fetishize something, you are imparting a sexual characteristic that didn't exist before. That's a problem for this rule because the objects and acts presented in fetish are inherently non-sexual and are typically used in non-sexual ways, so, how do you tell the difference? There is such thing as balloon fetish: does that mean we're no longer to make art that has both a minor and a balloon in it? If that seems nit-picky to you, I remind you that I'm not the one that started the nitpicking. This is legitimately concern of mine, because do I have to worry that someone is going to my slice-of-life piece about a father having to explain what a polysexual relationship is to his young daughter because she saw her mother aggressively making out with a family friend, interpret this as "fetish art," and squeal to the mods who will take this picture down, which, again, the mods here have a bad habit of doing? This meaning seems to me to be facilitating to abuse of power than doing anything useful.
And if by "fetish art" you just mean "sexual art with unusual themes," then it was already banned so why did you make the change?
A few months ago,
RickGriffin got one of his pictures taken down because he used an AI image generator to generate a small part of the background. Not even the whole background, just the very backscape of it, roughly 20% of the image IIRC. He speculated that he got pinched because he said that he used one in the interest of transparency, and not because of any of the "ways" that staff said they had. In the discourse we were having on Twitter at the time, I managed to get the ear of one of the policy makers of FurAffinity. I won't say who it was, but we went back and forth for about a day, and I left that conversation feeling that I had been conversing with a moron, a person who is impulsive, uncareful, and, while not openly hostile, was dismissive of negative feedback, specifically when I was explaining that I had perfectly predicted that a case like Griffin's would happen and staff had ignored me. As tempting as it is to try to write this off as "Oh, Furaffinity..." again, the interaction had left me with a very dim opinion of the rule-makers for this site, and that bothers me when they start drafting rules as overreaching as these.
I'm going to start off by stating a basic fact, which anyone who has run a Discord server knows and which we have been reminded of very much recently thanks to a certain unnamed formally-wealthiest man torching two of his companies and his personal wealth all at the same time: Content Moderation is HARD. You think it would be simple, but you can measure in hours it will take until you encounter an edge case, and will be forced to dance a very delicate dance with your rules, and failure could mean effectively undercutting your own authority by being too permissive, or turning into a capricious dictator and driving users away. If you're an especially talented fuck-up, you can accomplish both. Because of this, I tend not to be too quick to criticize moderators since their job is difficult and thankless, despite how important it is.
But that doesn't mean I don't keep an eye on them, and one of the things I pay attention to is how they word their rules. Back when Furry Life Online was getting started, I had set up an account, but I started getting the willies when I was reading through the rules and decided not to follow through with setting up an account there. Considering how that site collapsed (an impressive feat considering how Weasyl is still going,) I feel like I was justified in my suspicions about the people who were running that place. When you're telling your users to report people who are "making outrageous claims about site staff," that's a red flag big enough to march through Beijing.
I bring this up because I am getting the willies again.
I have objections to two of the changes, and I am not sure which to start with.
I want to make clear up-front that I am very firmly in the anti- part of the current "AI Art" culture war. I had been meaning to go in depth at some point, but my feelings are it's not art, and the people who promote it tend to be both greatly ignorant of and contemptuous to the artistic process, and are invited to stick their dick in a computer's power supply if they are so confident in their programs. I put it so bluntly so you understand the gravity of what I am saying when I think FA's AI ban is draconian.
It's one thing to be vigorous in wanting to make sure real artists are not being drowned in a sea of only-somewhat-less-random than RNG content on your art site, and quite another to forget that the reason it has taken off the way it has is because it is difficult for the casual viewer to tell it apart from regular art. It steals from human artists, so therefore it looks like human-made art. Because of that, any zero tolerance policy is inevitability going to catch innocent parties. A zero tolerance is impossible, and so obviously impossible that I am disturbed by anyone who even entertains the possibility that is. FA staff has assured me directly that they "have ways" of telling whether an image is generated or not. Considering their track record, I don't really believe them. Site-runners always "have ways."
However, it doesn't stop there: they've expanded it:
Content made using AI, machine learning, or similar generators is not allowed, including derivative works created from it (e.g. stories, audio, backgrounds, paint-overs, using one's own content to generate new content).(emphasis mine)
The actual fuck? You can't even write stories based on an AI image? It's one thing to be against AI art, but another to be so against it that you can't even draw any inspiration from it! I mean, they probably meant not to upload a story that has the AI image as a cover image, but that's not how they phrased it, and we know phrasing is very important to them because of one of other changes they made:
Minors may not have detailed bulges or outlines of normal or hyper genitalia, clothed or otherwise. Minors may not be fetishized. Minors younger than 13 may not be depicted as pregnant. Minors are defined as real or fictional humanoids with a childlike body or younger than 18 years old, and any adolescent animals.
Changes to section 2.7 are highlighted in bold. This change was made to close a loophole some individuals were trying to stretch past our initial intent.
What does this mean? What did this change? Exactly what kind of content was slipping past the rule before that doesn't anymore? Why would you even need this specific wording, since at least everyone who reads this has at least one story of a FurAffinity staffer who took down a submission based on an overly-broad interpretation of a rule? Are you afraid that you would get sued in FA Court who would FA Overrule your takedown and reinstate content because you wrote the rules on your own site which you own and control incorrectly? I have two interpretations of this, either
1.) It's the state of being a minor, or the appearance or the things associated with the state of being a minor, that cannot be fetishized. Essentially, any kind of ageplay is now banned, whether the characters are actually minors or not. Sucks to be you, diaperfurs.
or
2.) You're not allowed to do any fetish art involving minors, which has multiple problems.
I have a personal distaste for the "-ize" verbs (fetishize, sexualize, normalize, etc) that contemporary intelligencia have become accustomed to using. Whenever I hear someone using those words, I am roughly 60 seconds away from concluding that the person would more valuably exercise the use of their time by taking a break and pouring themselves a tall glass of Mind Your Own Business. It's a weirdly nihilistic way of looking at things, as if the thing cannot have innate trait but only the traits that can be imparted to it by others. But, let's entertain it for a bit, and break down what it means.
A fetish, used in the modern psychological sense, means a non-sexual object or act that is the subject of a sexual fixation (the technical definition actually omits even acts but I'm correcting for what seems to be an oversight.) That means when you fetishize something, you are imparting a sexual characteristic that didn't exist before. That's a problem for this rule because the objects and acts presented in fetish are inherently non-sexual and are typically used in non-sexual ways, so, how do you tell the difference? There is such thing as balloon fetish: does that mean we're no longer to make art that has both a minor and a balloon in it? If that seems nit-picky to you, I remind you that I'm not the one that started the nitpicking. This is legitimately concern of mine, because do I have to worry that someone is going to my slice-of-life piece about a father having to explain what a polysexual relationship is to his young daughter because she saw her mother aggressively making out with a family friend, interpret this as "fetish art," and squeal to the mods who will take this picture down, which, again, the mods here have a bad habit of doing? This meaning seems to me to be facilitating to abuse of power than doing anything useful.
And if by "fetish art" you just mean "sexual art with unusual themes," then it was already banned so why did you make the change?
A few months ago,
RickGriffin got one of his pictures taken down because he used an AI image generator to generate a small part of the background. Not even the whole background, just the very backscape of it, roughly 20% of the image IIRC. He speculated that he got pinched because he said that he used one in the interest of transparency, and not because of any of the "ways" that staff said they had. In the discourse we were having on Twitter at the time, I managed to get the ear of one of the policy makers of FurAffinity. I won't say who it was, but we went back and forth for about a day, and I left that conversation feeling that I had been conversing with a moron, a person who is impulsive, uncareful, and, while not openly hostile, was dismissive of negative feedback, specifically when I was explaining that I had perfectly predicted that a case like Griffin's would happen and staff had ignored me. As tempting as it is to try to write this off as "Oh, Furaffinity..." again, the interaction had left me with a very dim opinion of the rule-makers for this site, and that bothers me when they start drafting rules as overreaching as these.
Also, what's your point? That we should accept pedos or something?
Newsflash: SPIKE IS CANONICALLY FIVE YEARS OLD!
Yeah... the new AUP changes are unintentionally going to HAMMER Bronies, and hammer them HARD.
Scalies like myself are going to have to be VERY careful...
Seems like I can't win for losing.
They are cucks, who jump on any modern US social trend without even thinking about it, that's why FA Twitter has every single modern populist slogan and every single flag to accompany it, that is why the SUPPORT TAB has a BLM link and this is why the website has a rainbow logo
The staff are impulsive, brainwashed, mentally ill nobodies who have weeded out any sane person from their mod group
The only reason for any policy they implement is EITHER to make a "socially acceptable" statement (this time it was AI), regardless of what would actually be the best decision for the artists or audiences, OR monetize their platform, since they are running out of funds
I personally just want this platform to die, fade out of existence, it's a bad platform, I am only posting here because I care about my supporters, no matter who they are, but other than that, nothing is keeping me here
Mods are ill, upload functionality is abysmal, messaging system is outdated, its a bad platform and its getting worse update by update