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What about people posing AI "concept art", in mood boards for their 3D WIPs? To take one example, this thread has a bunch of ai images. https://polycount.com/discussion/237246/zbrush-how-do-i-sculpt-this 

How is this for a potential statement? Not final, just a proposal...

• We forbid ai generators from being used to make your own art.
• We forbid ai generators from being used on other people's art.
• We forbid ai-generated content for incidental props/layout/textures/animation/etc.
• We forbid ai-generated imagery as inspiration, there's plenty of human-generated concept art out there. 
• We forbid ai-generated feedback. For example, commentary provided by text generators like ChatGPT.
• Any use of ai systems or software must be stated clearly in your post.

Is this taking it too far? Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by preventing the use of potentially beneficial advances in software tooling?

What if there's an ai-aided system for generating UVs? Or making LODs? Or generating bones and skin weights?

OK so I'm seeing the overall sentiment is we want to discourage/forbid AI-generated imagery here on Polycount. And I personally agree with that, fits my own preferences to avoid promoting it. I think this makes sense, it doesn't belong here on Polycount. People can share that stuff elsewhere if they want, DeviantArt or Instagram or whatever. 

Democratization of tools (or skill) would be to provide access to those tools/knowledge and the economic security to practice that skill to underserved demographics who otherwise can't afford it.

This is not what ML is doing. That's just a bullshit argument and techbros know it. But at this point most things they say are bullshit (AGI right around the corner, anyone? 😂), so that's not surprising.

What they're doing is "socializing" the labour of an already vulnerable to economic downturns class, artists. You study, practice for years, build a portfolio, and they scrape it to avail themselves of the all labour that went into it, by force and without compensation. It's a parasitic approach that goes beyond copyright infringement or not: as an artist you're the one creating the data being used (otherwise they could just use blank pages, right?), the foundation of their business, you're just having no choice or compensation for the trouble. You're working for them for free. For staunch capitalists they sure love some corporate welfare.

The end result is further concentration of capital in the hands of obscenely rich corporations and their boards at the expense of workers. But this isn't as good soundbite as "democratization of tools", and it's easy to try to ride the wave of AI applications that try to actually help workers (eg better denoisers) instead of admitting gen AI is anything but a way further to exploit then replace them.

Even when a decision is made, it doesn't need to be final. It should be perfectly fine to revise rules if they're found lacking, for example, being more permissive in some aspects for now then adopting a stricter posture because too much slop made its way into the forums.

I feel a good approach is to orient those decisions around three key aspects, and these are my thoughts on them:

- Transparency
Full disclosure whenever ML tools are used and how they were used.

- Consent
Tools should only be used on others' work if they consent to it, and the best way to secure it is to ask.

That includes work by people in this forum and but also modifying work you're using as a concept, because wth, the artists don't stop mattering just because they're not present to see what is being done to their work. It's a shitty move to do this out of their sight so they can't defend their work.

And because this is a corner case for now, it makes no sense to force people to preemptively disclose whether they're okay with it or not, or worse, make it opt-out. At this point, imposing this obligation on people shifts the effort of securing consent away from the few people needing it to the entire community. If the situation changes and using such tools on other people's work becomes common enough, then having something like a field on the profile would work.

- Usage context
What's being done with it and the provenience of the training data matters. It being used as a true tool, aiding in technical tasks like retopo or something, is very different than using it to replace a person in the pipeline. Using it to aid in writing your critique because you struggle with English as a second language and want to improve the wording is different than requesting a critique from it.

Basically, is it being used as an aid or as a content generator? Using it as an aid not necessarily is the best course of action, but I feel it's still okay in most cases. Using it to generate content is lazy and goes counter the point of this place, which is about learning to create and getting better at it. If someone can't be assed to do this then what they're doing here? So generated works are definitively out, generated textures are somewhere between icky and out (if the texture work was the point of the piece or post and you outsourced it to a machine, then why?), and so on.