Generative AI

Generative AI, also referred to as GenAI or simply AI, is a program whose existence is to generate pieces of media based off of a simple prompt (e.g. "How long do I heat popcorn for in the microwave?" or "bowl of buttery popcorn, realistic, artstation, pretty") with various and random results. GenAI over its currently short existence being accessible to the public has garnered large amounts of concern across the various fields it has been applied to.

General Controversies Surrounding Generative AI

Controversy	Brief Description	Related Article(s)/Section(s)
Training data collected without consent	Various platforms have scraped data ranging within the petabytes concerning content created by users and potentially owned by companies, without first obtaining an adequate license to use this data. This has gone so far as to not even request consent or even notifying users in advance that their content was used to train AI-powered tools.
Replacing skilled workers with AI	Due to its generalized nature, jobs across fields from digital art to writing and programming have had experienced staff replaced by lesser-paid (and often lesser-experienced) employees who would be tasked to use generative tools to do their work. Often, these are detrimental to the quality of the product released by the company.

Specific Controversies Involving Generative AI

Reddit training AI off of posts

In late 2024, Reddit announced the release of 'Reddit Answers', a LLM that was publicly stated to use content created by users to train the tool, without requiring prior consent or prior public notice.

DeviantArt DreamUp

While more speculative, it is reasonable for users to assume that when DeviantArt initially automatically opted all users into allowing their work to be training data for generative AI, that all content uploaded to DeviantArt was used as training data for their DreamUp tool, however according to statements from DeviantArt CEO Moti Levy, DeviantArt did not plan or intend to train their tool based on user-generated works and that any user-generated works that were used in their model, were introduced by StabilityAI. Regardless, the introduction of DreamUp to the art sharing platform has both stirred controversy on the platform, and also fractured the platform into 2 parties, those for generative AI (typically those who hold newer accounts) and those against (typically users who have existed on the platform for far longer.) Due to the introduction of DreamUp, the platform has been cluttered by AI generated images, and staff have historically, frequently, and intentionally featured multiple users who exclusively upload GenAI content or post content that uses generative content as a base, with a majority of featured creators being ones who nearly or exclusively upload AI generated content.

Stability AI's mass scraping

When training their generative models, StabilityAI was frequently caught scraping massive amounts of the internet to fuel their training database. This has gone so far as to lead to Getty Images suing StabilityAI over using their content as training data.

LAION-5b training database

Many users have had their content scraped by LAION to power their training database, and the only way they can opt out is via a third party.