AI Art & Attribution

we have always given strikes for (known) art theft. it is the unknown part that we are being more thorough with now.

This is the part that I take issue with, just to clarify. Receiving a strike for something that could be an absentminded mistake is not simple, casual, or fun. It is stressful. I think that's all I have to say on this. Thank you both for the discussion.

I know I am on my phone which is not my best writing device, and tone can be hard to read over text, but I wanted to address this comment and another concern earlier voiced by Harvest because I don't want either of you (or anyone reading) to be worried about this revision. When the CM team says we didn't consistently enforce the pre-existing rule, we meant that we have been aware of (and at times, alerted to) people who forgot attribution on a profile. Despite the language saying this was a strike-able offense, we did not auto-strike because we recognized there are fringe cases where someone can be human and simply forget attribution.

That is why to date, no one has ever received a strike for the honest mistake of missing a credit on art that isn't made by them. But it has created a dichotomy when someone who has stolen art sees that there are (other) profiles with no art credit given. It has also become increasingly difficult to know, intuitively, who is the original artist of a piece as our memberbase has gotten larger and new (to us) artists join the site.

We've addressed this by firming up that all art requires credit (regardless if it's your own), and given everyone a grace period in addition to only addressing accounts active as of today's date going forward.

This is precisely why we have taken steps to enhance the clarity of this rule and why we specify this is for active accounts, so members don't need to worry about a forgotten attribution in an ancient/long dead profile landing them a strike.

Our intention is to minimize the use of strikes whenever possible, but it is important to note that art theft remains one of the few offenses that results in an instant strike per our Guidebook policy. Preserving the integrity of artists within our community is a priority for us, as we are a community composed of artists. Providing attribution to your art on your profile is a simple way to denote you are the rightful owner of that art, as the CMs can then research the artist to confirm rightful ownership. Without credit, it becomes increasingly challenging for CMs to verify ownership of artwork. In such instances, we may be compelled to take action based on the information available to us and assume that the artwork is stolen. However it is worth noting that to date, Community Managers have never issued a strike for artwork that was not genuinely stolen. In the unlikely eventuality that a strike is issued for artwork that belongs to the rightful owner, the strike will not be enforced if proper evidence is provided to validate ownership. I hope this helps dissipate any concerns you or anyone reading has about this revision, and I do appreciate you guys feeling comfortable enough to voice your concerns.

I don’t know how to say this without sounding petty but this is literally the only example I can think of. This is like when Netflix used to let everyone password share, and then suddenly stopped letting us all do that, and then when people got mad about it they said, “Password sharing was always against our TOS.” Like, yeah, but you always ignored it up until now, and therefore, so did everyone else.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t be punished for legitimate art theft, but an automatic strike seems like complete whiplash considering you never enforced the grey area before. This is why I still think a warning before a strike would be better. Even in real life, people who steal copyrighted material (knowingly or not) are given a DMCA take-down notice beforehand. They’re not automatically sued.

So. I’m not saying I disagree that art theft should be addressed. I’m saying it feels like you guys went from 0 to 100 immediately and therefore I am now too scared to put any art anywhere on my profiles in case, somewhere down the line, I change my avatar or something and forget to credit the artist.