NO TO AI TRAINED ON UNETHICAL DATASETS

Important that we artists speak up about this.

The technology itself has uses, machine-learning algorithms are already part of many art tools. I get it. "Image recombination tools" might have their place in future workflows - but allowing these image generators trained off of unethically scraped & sourced datasets, this does not set a great precedent, and cannot be allowed.

Build this shit right.

Datasets like LAION-5B contain all manner of privacy-breaching data: medical records and other really concerning material. This type of stuff needs to be not used as the basis for new tools, and we also cannot allow companies to build for-profit software on top of research & data that is supposed to be open source & copyright free. This is incredibly scummy stuff - and this on top of the whole issue of using the copyrighted material of living, working artists, and all of the problems this presents.

And, in the end, even if this damn site doesn't care about the above - flooding a platform like AS with endless auto-generated crap will rapidly degrade the quality of the site. AS owners - you have every incentive here to not fuck this one up.

I will not be updating my portfolio on this site until this whole mess has been addressed.