Wouldn’t it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner

I hate it when AI is used to replace the work an artist would have been paid for. But uh, this is a random open-source forum; there's no funding for artists to make banners. Rejecting AI art -- which was voted for by the community -- just seems like baseless virtue signalling. No artist is going to get paid if we remove it.

But like if you want to commission an artist with your own money, by all means go ahead. You'll still most likely need another community vote to approve it though.

How else would someone have been able to get all those chipmunks in one photo?

Honestly, it's because it went in early days.
When ML generated art was a novelty, and people hadn't had a chance to sit down and go "wait, actually, no".
And it's an absolute arsepain to replace, because you'll get 1001 prompt engineers defending slop.
feddit.uk banned generative AI content to make this process easier, and still needs to sweep through and commission new art for a few communities.

There are a lot of talented artists here on lemmy.ml and I think it would be wise to ask them if they were interested in providing a banner image that is not ai generated, surely someone would take up the offer.

You wouldn't necessarily even need to comission someone. There are plenty of Creative Commons licensed pieces of art that could be used.

Intellectual property is made up bullshit. You can't "steal" a jpeg by making a copy of it, and the idea that creating something based on or inspired by something else is somehow "stealing" it is quite frankly preposterous.

The sooner we as a society disabuse ourselves of this brainworm the better.

Edit: I have very mixed feelings about so-called generative AI, so please do not take this as a blanket endorsement of the technology - but rather a challenge on the concept of "stealing intellectual property," which I unequivocally do not believe in.

In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture.

I don't think AI is inherently bad. What's bad is how we (or well, the corpos) use it. SEO, vibe coding, making slop, you name it.

About training material being stealing: hard agree here. Our copyright laws are broken, but they are right about AI - training is strong in a retrieval system, which is infingement. Shame they aren't enforced at all.

What fascinates me is the similarity between AI and photography. That is, both are revolutionary tools in the visual medium. Imagine this thread being an opinion column in an 1800s newspaper, and replace all instances of 'AI' with 'photography'. The arguments all stand, but our perspective to them may change.

it's just a crappy and lazy image regardless of origins, but the fact it is AI makes it crappier

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the tech itself. Your issue is with capitalist relations and the way this technology is used under capitalism. Focus on what the actual problem is. https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/a-marxist-perspective-on-ai

Though this is about Lemmy.world I think sh.itjust.works has a similarly sad story.

We had a vote for the banner when sh.itjust.works started where a bunch of artist came forward with art for the banner and some AI guys came in with art as well. This was clearly stated by the AI guys, with no trickery. The community voted in the agora to reject the art of its users in favour of this stable diffusion slop.

I think you can tell I dispise AI art. The reason for it here though is that the community voted for it over real artists time, dedication, and love for the community.

If someone really wanted to change it though one could create a discussion post in the agora, our community voting community, to have it changed. They'd likely need to provide new art which, as an artist, I'm unwilling to do. The community has shown it cares little for the time, effort, and skill involved so somebody with an hour and stable diffusion would win out over the multi-day process of making something meaningful

You should definitely support artists! You know how good it feels to support someone you know? I'm personally going to give my music away for free. I think intellectual property is meant to be shared, but I do recognize that we gotta eat in this parasitic system, yo. How about this? We support artists with our commonwealth? It's fucking important, man. Culture matters. No need to shift the blame to the individual when it's the system that's rotten. Two more ideas, then I'll fuck off. Guaranteed dignity in death, and defensive, non-coercive, no entanglements protection of holy sites. I'm a deterministic atheist through and through, but man, we gotta heal our fucking souls.