Linking to AI generated content sites

[NatalieBayer]

Hello friends!

As some of you may have noticed there is a distinct rise in AI generated content on the internet, and since this site exists on the internet we have also noticed a rise here as well. The admin team had a little pow-wow and have decided that we will be not only disallowing AI generated content, including images, stories, and other content to be hosted here as well as linked here.

What this means:

We understand that sometimes it's tough to tell what is or is not AI generated. We'll be doing our best to review content and remove it, both going forward and existing content. If you notice a thread that links to AI content, do us a favor and report it and we'll review it. If you have posted links to AI content, do us a favor and take it down.

Of course, there will inevitably be discussion about this. There is a thread specifically for AI discussions, but if you would like to reach out directly to the admin about it, that's also perfectly fine. My contact information is in my signature and I'm usually very available for chats.

[Condor621]

Well, I can read a room...

[//_Lilith_//]

Well, I can read a room...

I'm late to the previous thread but I just wanted to offer a word of encouragement and highlight a distinction. I think everyone's main issues is with the *tools*, and not the ideas or your creative skill. Not trying to downplay the impact but I thought it'd be a shame if you became discouraged from making art in general from this.

I wanted to offer advice as to maintaining the use of AI in the process but not the final product, but I also don't want to come off as self-righteous or patronizing.
The monetization makes things complicated (but i don't have anything new to add).

I hope you keep exercising your creativity in whatever capacity it ends up as! <3

[Chevy Monza]

I can appreciate that you're not looking for feed back.

Nor are you looking for discussion on what I'm sure you believe is a firmly decided topic, but alas; here I go.

This is weird vendetta against 'tools' will only fracture what is already a small community. It will silence those who are already quiet, a number of respected old time creators have dipped their toe into the forbidden pool. Taking away an outlet for their expression, won't drive them from the forbidden technology, but from here.

This isn't a war you can win and this isn't the place to fight it. If you have strong opinions, by all means reach out to your respective elected leaders; that's where change and regulation will occur.

It's only my 2 cents, from somebody who remembers the internet before HTTP. Perhaps it's time to retreat back to the news groups.

[ProchazkaJBG]

If someone is using these tools to create content specifically for themselves and others here to enjoy, what is the problem again?

[TheShoveller]

I appreciate your thoughtful comments, Condor, but also as someone who's an old hand on the internet, and as the forum owner, I can guarantee you 100% this is, actually, the place to fight it, as this is the space I control and where I can say what is and isn't good.

I am not against AI in all forms - ethically-sourced (for lack of a better term) sound samples provided for the uses of AI voice generation, from people who do so willingly and were paid to do so, is fine. AI generated art sourced from people who agreed to have their art used for those purposes is fine. However, in their current forms, it is extremely hard to verify that all samples used in your favorite AI engine are 100% "ethically sourced," unless the company specifically uses only their own generated stuff for their own content (Elevenlabs is one place that does this with the samples they provide, and warn you against using others from sources you are not allowed to pull content from - it's against their TOS, and if found breaking it you will be punished accordingly.)

I also fully agree that this is an issue for lawmakers, as are many, MANY that have come about since the digital age began (I personally think consumers' rights in regards to digital goods and services are lacking severely.)

Again, these are tools, like any other. You can give a man a hammer and he will build a house. Give another man a hammer, and he may very well use it to bludgeon the first man's head in and simply take his house. The first is a good use of the tool, the second is not - but the tool can be used for both purposes.

You are free to create content with whatever you want, however you want. However, if you want to post it here, on this forum, then you need to abide by the rules set forth, or not post it. These rules may change over time as admins see fit - we are human, we can only make up our minds with the information we have available and with the laws and such that affect us. If those things change, the rules will change accordingly.

Thank you.

[//_Lilith_//]

I can appreciate that you're not looking for feed back.

Nor are you looking for discussion on what I'm sure you believe is a firmly decided topic, but alas; here I go.

This is weird vendetta against 'tools' will only fracture what is already a small community. It will silence those who are already quiet, a number of respected old time creators have dipped their toe into the forbidden pool. Taking away an outlet for their expression, won't drive them from the forbidden technology, but from here.

This isn't a war you can win and this isn't the place to fight it. If you have strong opinions, by all means reach out to your respective elected leaders; that's where change and regulation will occur.

It's only my 2 cents, from somebody who remembers the internet before HTTP. Perhaps it's time to retreat back to the news groups.

Maaaaaan, I just wanted to offer some encouragement to someone who already expressed feeling discouraged, had a thread quarantined, got dog piled, and likely felt targeted by the announcement.

I only used the word "tools", when Natalie hadn't, because it was a quick way of trying to shift negative feelings away from the actual personality/creativity behind it.
Not a fan of getting lumped into this sanctimonious culture war BS because I tried to do a nice thing and didn't deftly navigate through everyone's beliefs on rapidly-emerging tech.
Figured my quadruple use of the word "but" signaled my apprehension to definitively take *any* stance, other than to not give up and that Condor is appreciated.
Especially since I didn't get a chance to express my sympathy towards not receiving the amount of likes/attention you'd want when releasing content in the disappeared thread.

[Saya]

I'm going to some of the comments I am seeing from the pro-"AI" camp, coming here from a long silence, because a lot of what I am seeing I have seen elsewhere and in my own dealings with site administration.

Get ready for a long one, because there are a lot of bases and a lot of arguments made to refute.

Speaking as a content creator who has dipped her toes in AI generative systems, both as a writer and in image generation, I can tell you right now that while a useful tool, Generative Model tools are at best imprecise, at middling useless, at worst a scam.

Generative Model works often come off as stiff, muddled and blurry, since many people opt to just generate things without taking the time or effort to refine them. It not only demands people to churn out low-quality, low-effort derivative products at a rate which overwhelms other forms of content generation, making moderation borderline impossible, but the already poor quality of these works means that the overall body of work of an "AI artist" just blends into a muddy soup, further devaluating any body of work it attempts to emulate.

If you've seen one work produced by a generative model, you've seen them all. The only variable is whatever source it takes its data from.

That brings me to my next point.

Generative model content is theft, pure and simple. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has admitted as much in open testimony (https://www.salon.com/2024/01/09/imposs ... hted-work/ ).

Regardless of your moral standpoint on the issue, the fact remains that these products often take the works of both independent creators and corporations and generates works that would be never authorized by the content creators themselves.

This creates a bevvy of legal issues ranging from copyright law to breach of contract to consent laws, and places the end user in an unenviable position where anything they use to generate their work is under constant scrutiny and a perpetual legal limbo. It exists within a loophole that is just waiting to be closed.

If you're wondering why you can't use 15.ai to have Rick May as the TF2 Soldier spam the word "gazpacho" from beyond the grave for sixteen minutes straight, this is why.

The inevitable response to this - so oft repeated - is that "manipulations are basically the same thing". They categorically are not.

Manipulations are transformative works of publicly-shared media, which utilize a combination of spliced and original assets (depending on the creator) to modify existing images. Legally speaking, this would likely fall under parody or satire laws. It is an unspoken understanding by the majority of us here that manipulations are also not wholly original creations, since any attempt to do so otherwise would be blatantly self-evident as a lie. The community also encourages acknowledgement of the original work, either linking to the artist or model.

Generative model works are more akin to those bad celebrity photoshop porn manips where a celebrity's head is pasted onto a nude model's body: They are works attempting to pass themselves off as wholly original content that were generated without the consent of the artists or models whose work they aim to depict, often feature said model expressing views or making statements that they would be offended by and routinely without acknowledging where the media it is based on came from. In some cases - although thankfully none that I've seen come out of this community - the aim is quite literally to deceive the viewer for malicious purposes.

Which brings me to my final point: It would be irresponsible to promote the use of generative model works because so much of the landscape is rife with fraud and bad business practices.

Generative model content is almost entirely put behind manipulative paywalls, often with outrageous prices attached. I have seen several AI sites use blatantly duplicitous and manipulative methods to get people to pay as much as $400 dollars for annual fees using the same tactics as freemium pay-to-win mobile games and shady credit card salesmen. And this is all for what is effectively the same thing across all platforms: Almost all of these sites use either ChatGPT or OpenAI as the basis of their work, and charge so much partly because the cost of hosting generative model systems is simply unsustainable.

On top of this, many "AI Artists" charge exorbitant fees for utilizing what is effectively a publicly available service, the media and software equivalent to charging $30 dollars for a bottle of rebranded tap water. You could, for the price of a single generative model commission in some cases, purchase a subscription to the same generative model hosting site the artist used and generate thousands of your own images.

And this is before we even address the numerous horror stories I've heard of generative websites stealing credit card info, having ties to sketchy sites and services, and generally defrauding their users and leaving them in a lurch.

Many of these sites are also poorly run, badly optimized, routinely crash and have poor security, opening them and their users up to data breaches with less effort than it takes to steal a credit card.

This is ESPECIALLY true of any site that permits "unrestricted" or adults-only generative content.

Finally, I'd like to address a specific comment from one of the posts above.

This is weird vendetta against 'tools' will only fracture what is already a small community. It will silence those who are already quiet, a number of respected old time creators have dipped their toe into the forbidden pool. Taking away an outlet for their expression, won't drive them from the forbidden technology, but from here.

This community has for years worked to support its content creators in various forms due to its relatively small size and niche nature. We are, to put it bluntly, one of the smaller fish in a very big pool of fetish content, ranging from everything including foot fetishism to hardcore guro vore. The people who create content for us are greatly appreciated by most of this community. We've had our bad actors on both ends, but for the most part, we have done what we can to support manipulation artists, 2D artists, 3D modelers and adult film creators. I have seen every range of support imaginable come from this site, from proverbial one-man independent artists to full on collaborative effort studios.

"AI art" will kill this. It discourages original work not just by happenstance but by design. Its creators envision a world where the artist is outmoted and their companies have a monopoly on creative expression. Its evangelists routinely state their desire to "overthrow" the "tyranny" of people who create original content in a misguided or jealous belief that artists are some kind of exclusive club of the elite.

The widespread use and acceptance of generative model works has had one singular effect on every single site that has tried to implement it: The mass exodus of creators who find themselves drowned out by a handful of artists generating thousands of near-identical works in what was already a competitive space with very little in the way of returns. Any media hosting website that hosts "AI art" downs under the torrent of boring, derivative content.

Furthermore, while FC has been the spoke of the wheel of this community, it is no longer the only option. ASFR content creators have spread out to a number of media sites as diverse as the aforementioned DeviantArt, Twitter, Pixiv, FurAffinity and Discord.

The fetish would not die here if FC were to suddenly vanish overnight, although it would be a great personal loss to me and I imagine many other people. This site is not a walled-off fortress, but a waystation to a wider community. But if FC were to die, allowing generative content to become the norm would only hasten its demise.

Now pardon me while I get a bit melodramatic, but I feel this conclusion must be said this way:

You are not being judged, here. I do not think any less of anyone for using generative models to produce things, since it would make me a hypocrite as I have used them in the past myself, although in my case purely for entertainment purposes.

But if you get what you think you want, this site will slowly die as the images of anime women with misshapen faces and dead, blurry eyes pile up and become the only content available, signal to original artists that this place is hostile to them while those that "create" these algorithmic outputs throw more and more money into an ever widening pit in service of an unstable "industry" that continues to struggle to find a marketable purpose and is perpetually teetering on the edge of being litigated into oblivion.

"AI art" will not save Fembot Central. It will damn it to death and irrelevance.

[ProchazkaJBG]

So I am someone who thinks the level this topic can get discussed about around here shoots up for 2 to 10 very quickly, so I want to come off as well as remain as middle-ground and level-headed on this topic as possible. I apologize ahead of time if I have failed to do so.

That being said I just wanted to say 2 things:

Number 1 is that the salon article referenced above does not exactly correlate with "Generative model content is theft, pure and simple. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has admitted as much in open testimony". What the article actually states is ""It would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials ... Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today's citizens," OpenAI said in its evidence filing, adding that the company believes "legally copyright law does not forbid training". To me there is a difference between these AI models straight-up stealing passages or art, and using something as a learning tool.

Number 2 is that I feel the divide here is specifically between 'authors/artists (who feel 'threatened' by this new service)' and everyone else. I could be way off with this, but it's just my observation.

[Saya]

the salon article referenced above does not exactly correlate with "Generative model content is theft, pure and simple. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has admitted as much in open testimony".

""It would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials ... Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today's citizens,"

What Sam is saying here, in less flower-y terms is

"My business model relies on violating copyright law".

He then tried to justify that with

adding that the company believes "legally copyright law does not forbid training"

"My business exists in a legal loophole and I don't think I'm breaking the law (possibly maybe)????"

It's about as close to "yeah, we steal copyrighted material for our business" as you can get without getting sued into oblivion the instant those words left one's lips.

[FaceoffFembot]

Number 2 is that I feel the divide here is specifically between 'authors/artists (who feel 'threatened' by this new service)' and everyone else. I could be way off with this, but it's just my observation.

I support this ban, and I don't feel like I'm about to be overtaken or drowned out by the competition, far from it. I've got my blog, I've got my self-worth, I've got my love of doing things myself. I'm rolling over dime a dozen sci-fi clichés that look smothered in vaseline and break down into nonsensical details after a few seconds of scrutiny, or talking heads squiggling along automatic answering voices endlessly droning name-brand action scripts. None of this slop can touch me.

What I do think fear for is being able to see what other people are doing. I want to be able to go to FembotWiki and see what people are doing with their own two hands, no matter how technically or artistically flawed. I want to see what they're experimenting with, instead of what's happening on DeviantArt, where the endless churn of grifters blindly tweaking prompts and endlessly spinning the slot machine is drowning out any genuine craft.

Now, if Fembot Central/Wiki is making a historic mistake, so be it. Time will tell. If people disagree, they could get a blog going. Create a Discord server. Start an alternative forum. That's what the Web is about.

[BA2]

Well this debate has certainly heated up a bit!

I too support this forum’s current stance, mainly for the following reasons:

1. While I’ve contributed some content over the years I have never lifted a finger to help run FBC or the Wiki. I am immensely grateful to those who give their time to provide a service which I value very much and so am happy to support their position on what remains a matter of opinion.

2. I do think AI has something to offer and is here to stay. Some people are leveraging worthwhile content out of it which this forum misses out on, however, other people are using AI to produce huge volumes of generic output. This risks overwhelming quality with quantity and I don’t see any realistic way to differentiate and filter-in only that AI that is ‘worthy’. I trawl through DA from time to time and there are AI images there worth looking at. Some users are clearly working hard at this tool and also filtering their output but they’re damn hard to find amongst the millions of ‘one button’ generic images which presumably feed back into the same applications to deliver more self-reinforcing sameness. I’d had to see that tide of sameness here.

I don’t have strong views on the ethics of AI ripping off artists, I can see both sides here. I have seen AI output which clearly draws on my manipulations and I’m fine with that, interested to see what it produces, but then this is a hobby for me and not my livelihood!

I’m sorry to see people departing the board over this. There are other places to share AI content for those that want to (DA for one), albeit none so fembot centric. Not having it here, though annoying for some, doesn’t detract from the good content we do have.

[ProchazkaJBG]

Number 2 is that I feel the divide here is specifically between 'authors/artists (who feel 'threatened' by this new service)' and everyone else. I could be way off with this, but it's just my observation.

I support this ban, and I don't feel like I'm about to be overtaken or drowned out by the competition, far from it. I've got my blog, I've got my self-worth, I've got my love of doing things myself. I'm rolling over dime a dozen sci-fi clichés that look smothered in vaseline and break down into nonsensical details after a few seconds of scrutiny, or talking heads squiggling along automatic answering voices endlessly droning name-brand action scripts. None of this slop can touch me.

What I do think fear for is being able to see what other people are doing. I want to be able to go to FembotWiki and see what people are doing with their own two hands, no matter how technically or artistically flawed. I want to see what they're experimenting with, instead of what's happening on DeviantArt, where the endless churn of grifters blindly tweaking prompts and endlessly spinning the slot machine is drowning out any genuine craft.

Now, if Fembot Central/Wiki is making a historic mistake, so be it. Time will tell. If people disagree, they could get a blog going. Create a Discord server. Start an alternative forum. That's what the Web is about.

You think people who like to draw are just going to stop becuz AI?

[Uncom]

Way to miss FoF‘s point.

As an artist, I am also not worried that I‘d get replaced by AI. I‘ve got a decently large following on Pixiv, Twitter, and DeviantArt for somebody who almost exclusively makes android content.

What I am worried about as both an artist and a consumer, and what I assume most artists are worried about, is being drowned out by the floods of thousands of AI images being submitted to image boards as we speak. Pixiv has an option to disable AI art from appearing on the feed, which, in my opinion, is the only viable option, aside from banning it outright.

DeviantArt has no such function. A third of my feed is subsequently occupied by the same type of content: AI images of either A) a blonde white woman wearing latex or B) a black-haired Asian woman wearing some kind of Sci-fi robot suit, or C) AI art of a celebrity in sexual scenarios, or D) all of the above. I keep hitting DeviantArt‘s „show less like this“ button, yet AI images keep appearing in my feed. And they all look the fucking same, despite being made by different „artists“.

Showing a more extreme example, there is one (unnamed) user on DeviantArt who makes AI fembot content. This user joined the page 5 months ago. Guess how many AI images this person has submitted to DeviantArt in 5 months. A couple dozen? A hundred? Two hundred?

Eight thousand AI images. In five months.

Said user is offering subscriptions too, and has a following of 2.2k on Deviantart. For AI slop.

If one single person can generate almost 8,000 AI images in what is only a couple of months, I wonder how long until DeviantArt‘s amount of AI images exceeds the amount of actual art that people slaved hours on.

Artists aren‘t worried about AI replacing them, artists are worried about being drowned out by the absolute sea of AI spam. And consumers that don‘t like AI art (most people who see the bigger picture besides what makes their dick hard), will only get more frustrated as more and more AI images flood their feeds.

Funnily enough, AI image spam will hurt AI generation too. In fact, it‘s already happening.

https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ai-models/

So no, it‘s not elitist artists being mean to you for no reason.

[Spaz]

My two cents.

As a customer, I hate seeing all of this crap appearing on Clips4Sale. https://www.clips4sale.com/clips/category/1410/FEMBOT

This 'studio' just dumped all of this stuff in less than 24 hours, completely burying higher quality studios.

AI has it's uses when used moderately, but we don't have that right now...we have people abusing it to make a quick buck.

[DukeNukem 2417]

DeviantArt has no such function. A third of my feed is subsequently occupied by the same type of content: AI images of either A) a blonde white woman wearing latex or B) a black-haired Asian woman wearing some kind of Sci-fi robot suit, or C) AI art of a celebrity in sexual scenarios, or D) all of the above. I keep hitting DeviantArt‘s „show less like this“ button, yet AI images keep appearing in my feed. And they all look the fucking same, despite being made by different „artists“.

Showing a more extreme example, there is one (unnamed) user on DeviantArt who makes AI fembot content. This user joined the page 5 months ago. Guess how many AI images this person has submitted to DeviantArt in 5 months. A couple dozen? A hundred? Two hundred?

Eight thousand AI images. In five months.

Said user is offering subscriptions too, and has a following of 2.2k on Deviantart. For AI slop.

If one single person can generate almost 8,000 AI images in what is only a couple of months, I wonder how long until DeviantArt‘s amount of AI images exceeds the amount of actual art that people slaved hours on.

Oh, it's not just A.I. fembot content that's getting spammed. The "work" of some "artist" who apparently has a fetish for latex and superhero costumes has been in my Recommended for the past few months: people in Batman or Robin suits shackled to chairs or otherwise restrained and being hypnotized while a villain looks on, or (in their latest bunch of crap) women in full latex body suits standing near Daleks. One recent piece had a Dalek with human female arms...and breasts. No, I'm not kidding. And I click "show less like this" every damn time, but every day, another piece from this "artist". And like the example Uncom cited, this fool has locked some of their content behind a subscription.

It's ridiculous. And that's just for art. I'm STILL working on Writing As We Go, Book 2, writing it a little bit at a time every day. At no point have I ever considered letting A.I. generate any text, because the minute I do that, the story is going to stop being what it started out as. Every character has a voice, an identity. If I hand that over to some story-generating A.I., they're going to become pale imitations of who I wrote them as, and that's something I refuse to allow.

A.I.-content-generating "artists", in terms of the visual or the written medium, are just churning out a whole lot of...I'd say "tofu", but even tofu has its uses. The stuff created by A.I. is fluff of the worst kind, especially if it's trained on the work of actual people. Let artists draw, paint, sketch or however they prefer to express themselves; let writers write. Let them create without fear of their work being co-opted by a bunch of algorithms that churn out "content" with no soul behind it. And let artists and writers congregate in places like this without fear of their work being drowned out by a flood of mass-produced, soulless crap.

[N6688]

I have to agree with what most people (and that includes Saya) have said here.
The moment you open the A.I. tap it is hard to close it and it would drive people that work hard on mannips and 2d/3d art away.
I personally make maybe a couple of mannips a year nowadays because honestly, i feel discouraged.
I'm scared to post my art anywhere else but here (and maybe two discord channels) because i wouldn't have to worry that my "art" (i would hardly call what i make art) will be buried under industrialized mass produced A.I. content or have to worry about it getting stolen/scraped.

[JeffCapes]

We do have an A.I allowing robot girl discord in robocopgirls HQ. But as the title suggests it's primarily for RoboCop girls.

https://discord.gg/JUS4vRJk

Morals aside, I'm loving the A.I. content even if it's getting very hard to filter out good content.

[toysher]

Discussions should include both pro and con arguments.
and this discussion doesn't seem to be

So what's the point of this discussion?

I know I've already announced that I'm against AI content.
I don't think it's necessary for this discussion to continue.

[NatalieBayer]

the real answer is that there is going to be discussion around the topic of AI, we can't stop that, nor should we. That being said we should try and keep it organized in one place so that we have a coherent dialog instead of a dozen disparate conversations scattered across the forums.

[toysher]

I've been coming here for 12 years

And I don't like to see sloppily made Manips and poorly plausible Role Play on here from a very long time ago.

The amount of content produced related to female androids is very limited. Sometimes we get what we want at the expense of other creators, but other times it's less than satisfactory.

AI can be a great tool to fill that void.
The naysayers here seem to be wary of an unchecked upload of weird content that doesn't handle AI well.

In my honest opinion, well-crafted AI content creates a better experience than poorly crafted Manips, poorly written Role Plays, and terrible GINO videos.

But if you're afraid of losing what you've come to love, then you're right that AI will continue to be limited in Fembot Centra.

You'll just have to keep doing that.

[foo]

I appreciate the nuanced discussion that has happened here. I don't entirely agree with the decision to effectively ban even talking about it, but at the same time it's not completely unreasonable to disallow generative AI, and I understand why it's been decided this way. This place is, after all, supposed to be a safe space for the fetish, and there's a lot about the current AI space, morally and ethically, that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable.

There is one very specific argument I have to take issue with, though. This is absolutely, unequivocally, categorically wrong:

The inevitable response to this - so oft repeated - is that "manipulations are basically the same thing". They categorically are not.

Manipulations are transformative works of publicly-shared media, which utilize a combination of spliced and original assets (depending on the creator) to modify existing images. Legally speaking, this would likely fall under parody or satire laws.

Nope, this is just a convenient lie we like to tell ourselves. Manipulations are direct derivatives of identifiable copyright-protected works. Unless they're produced with the explicit consent of the owner, they are absolutely, categorically unauthorised derivative works. There is no grey area here - legally speaking, they are copyright infringement, plain and simple. (Unless you're somewhere like Russia, where piracy of foreign media was effectively legalised a couple of years ago.) As for "parody or satire laws", simply taking an existing photo and making a derivative for a fetish group to, uh, entertain ourselves with, isn't doing either of those things. It's not a parody of anything, and it's not satirically passing comment on anything, least of all the base photo being used. For the "fair use" test in the US, you're looking at the wrong end of at least two of the four limbs. Strictly speaking, it takes a court to decide definitively, but nobody here is going to volunteer to test that.

It is an unspoken understanding by the majority of us here that manipulations are also not wholly original creations, since any attempt to do so otherwise would be blatantly self-evident as a lie. The community also encourages acknowledgement of the original work, either linking to the artist or model.

Respectfully, this is no different from the mental gymnastics you see people doing on YouTube with "credit to the original authors, no copyright infringement intended". Legally, it holds no water whatsoever. In reality, we consider it in the interest of the group to allow a bit of casual copyright infringement when it comes to manips, because that's a relatively inexpensive way to get material.

Realistically, what manippers here are doing and what Sam Altman is doing are more similar than some would like to admit. The main difference is that he's doing it to vastly more people and getting paid an awful lot for it.

This is not to take away from the moral and ethical considerations, just to correct what is a very common and very widespread misunderstanding about copyright. I've done my fair share of sailing the seas under a black flag, so I'm not going to judge as long as people are honest about it.

[BA2]

Thanks Foo, that matches my understanding and is why I’ve never considered trying to monetise this hobby. I do have permission from a few owners of the base images for my manips (credited in the image) but most are simply harvested and used without the owner’s or model’s knowledge.

You seem fairly knowledgeable about this. Some of my more recent efforts have used images from free stock sites. Obviously pornifying these images is not legit but am I right in assuming that using them to create ‘work safe’ manipulations is okay?

[N6688]

There is one very specific argument I have to take issue with, though. This is absolutely, unequivocally, categorically wrong:

The inevitable response to this - so oft repeated - is that "manipulations are basically the same thing". They categorically are not.

Manipulations are transformative works of publicly-shared media, which utilize a combination of spliced and original assets (depending on the creator) to modify existing images. Legally speaking, this would likely fall under parody or satire laws.

Nope, this is just a convenient lie we like to tell ourselves. Manipulations are direct derivatives of identifiable copyright-protected works. Unless they're produced with the explicit consent of the owner, they are absolutely, categorically unauthorised derivative works. There is no grey area here - legally speaking, they are copyright infringement, plain and simple. (Unless you're somewhere like Russia, where piracy of foreign media was effectively legalised a couple of years ago.) As for "parody or satire laws", simply taking an existing photo and making a derivative for a fetish group to, uh, entertain ourselves with, isn't doing either of those things. It's not a parody of anything, and it's not satirically passing comment on anything, least of all the base photo being used. For the "fair use" test in the US, you're looking at the wrong end of at least two of the four limbs. Strictly speaking, it takes a court to decide definitively, but nobody here is going to volunteer to test that.

Foo......... Handmade transformative art is protected under US and EU law.

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Foo......... Handmade transformative art is protected under US and EU law.

Did I stutter?