I would note that, no matter what patreon's official policy is on AI referencing, it still violates copyright and remains illegal unless a specific artist consents to it. The outcome of this poll will not affect what the law thinks of that.

Well yeah though people are using AI to plagiarise currently on Patreon anyway, from feature-extraction all the way to editing existing images and calling that AI. Despite the recent influx in law changes, Patreon is "asking" instead of outright banning so they don't seem to care for the law. Patreon also only banned other things in the past "by poll", they are more interested in money and PR. This is really a PR poll.

You have the Unstable Diffusion thing, pirates sites like Civit AI, etc, which all use unpermitted sources and then sell their stuff on Patreon, Etsy, etc and it's hurting artisans already. Patreon hasn't always cared about the law so what they contend to here is more a reflection of the overall user and uploader base. While anything criminal can increase the stocks of a company, failing to align with the anti-plagiarist user base would be detrimental. It would allow plagiarists to temporarily benefit from AI while killing off Patreon as a source of revenue for the original artisans.

So Patreon failing to ban AI right off the bat is going to hurt everyone on the site, many artists like fine artists don't earn money yet get stolen and those people stealing it make large sums of money. That is all while the AI exploiter says that the original artist "wasn't worth anything anyway and that's why they weren't earning". The reason these original artisans don't always earn is due to exposure and the fact artisans spend time so tend to have less variance than someone acting like a art supermarket. Consumers tend to roll with shops with quantity due to ease of access, same goes with how many people follow conglomerate image groups on social media rather than the individual artists because they don't want to spend the effort finding the originals.

Artists need protecting from these sick-minded bad actors. Then you have the people feeding pre-generated stuff back into the AI claiming that now the content was "generated" it is no longer a violation so you get plagiarism of plagiarism, further distancing the author from their authorship.

It should always violate Copyright & should be a Zero Tolerance policy & written in the terms of service code of conduct everyone's work should always be protected by Copyright you can apply for copyright online. but i do not know what is the best one to Go with i advise you please do your own Research before applying for one to find one that suits you Best to protect your artwork. If this is helpful to anyone copy & paste it Edit to improve it to your preference to help as many artists in the furry community.

Copyright is automatic in my country and protects labour not just end works while DMCA only files for end works so even in my country you have to go through the copyright office to file against AI currently. Some countries only have half copyright automatic, for example USA handles it via copyright.gov for infringement but other countries stealing automatically protected work don't see to care despite the Berne Convention. Another country stealing another country's individuals' work is seen as international copyright violation, and if those countries keep allowing such then that country can be sanctioned. But ever since corporatism took a hold, people don't care about such things unless you make them.

So yes indeed, USA people for example should file it via the copyright office.
https://www.copyright.gov/registration/

I didn't know that but I have found The British Copyright Council not sure if its treated the same way but the good thing is we know we can go to them is there's any issues we might encounter and we all can help each other if we get stuck or in a pickle

Yes, well the right wing wants to push laws "to protect AI copyright" while the centre and left want to strengthen protections of labour. The former isn't put into law though and is just put down as guidance to protect any "augmentation" to AI while dismissing the original source of the AI. YouGov polls show that literally no one supports protecting AI generation though which is good from a democratic point of view, but nothing has passed in parliament (yet) in UK and govs care less and less for democracy. Plenty of people have sued successfully already for corps, so it's just a case of waiting and see so because the poor simply can't afford doing these lawsuits, we need proper protections.

Taking the high road for someone using an AI generated profile picture.

And has AI generated backgrounds, and AI assisted progression in their work.

I don't use AI in my art. I also started making WIPs because I've been false claims before by pro-AI trolls.
Good art doesn't look like AI, AI looks like stolen, good art. You have it the wrong way around and from your tone, must be supporting AI plagiarism.
https://www.instagram.com/inathefox/