♣ Parsifall ♠

I'm firmly anti-ai (for theft reasons, for environmental reasons, for many, many reasons), and I fully believe in calling out and even shaming people who use it, BUT: Unfortunately it makes posts that look good! That post had like, 400-500 notes. The reason cutietrait was using ai was to make their posts look good so they could get notes.

I fully agree that genAI is a plague upon planet earth, but unfortunately, it actually does make cool-looking things. And that's why it's tempting to people who want the praise from Making Something Cool, without having to Put In The Work.

There's a reason people keep putting ai images on their character inspo boards, using it for character art (TTRPG community, I'm looking at you) or using it to texture cc. These people want to make things that look nice, and (as much as I wish it weren't true), AI can do that.

So part of it is not just educating people about the horrible costs of genAI (that is important, but unfortunately a lot of people don't care), but also changing the culture about creation. As someone said in a post yesterday: this is a community. You should be participating out of love for the community, not just for attention.

I don't fault anyone for wanting attention/validation, that's a natural part of the human experience. But you have to be willing to put in the work. So it's multi-pronged issue:

People want validation/attention (natural, okay)

People equate validation with self-worth / have generally unhealthy relationships with creation or social media (extremely and depressingly common, even among people who do make their own work)

Certain types of art/creation (e.g., detailed and realistic sims edits, certain styles of art) are valued more than others (also unfortunate but common)

People want that attention, but don't want to go through the effort of learning the skills that create those kinds of art.

Personally, the reason I want comments/reblogs/any kind of validation is because I spent hours of work on my creative work (writing, edits, etc.). But the problem is when people 1) have an unhealthy need or desire for attention, and 2) are using stolen work to get that attention.

So they turn to AI.

A part of me was thinking about something along the lines of what you’re saying yesterday but I’m dogshit with words. I hope you don’t mind me adding some tag-on thoughts. I apologise if some of this is repeating something you already said, I have a hard time picking up on repetition…

Even more so now than it used to be back when I was actively creating in the community, the focus is always on the closest to ‘perfect’ that people can get with pictures. If you don’t use ReShade, GShade, after-effects-type editing, poses and CC, SWRE and the like, and if you don’t do renders, the likelihood of you getting reblogged is incredibly slim. And whilst people laugh at the whole ‘number go up’ thing, like Morrigan says, it’s normal to want some level of validation.

To help combat people dipping into AI usage, I believe another thing people still active in the Sims community need to start doing is reblogging unedited screenshots, vanilla gameplay, in-game screenshots, stories that don’t use poses, etc. if you care so much about creators then be sure to support them even if they are not heavily edited, and not just the top 5 editors, CC creators and storytellers. It might only be a small change but supporting those who don’t use AI will make people realise that people actually DO prefer human made stuff.

My point in this paragraph is an issue across the board and definitely not community wide. But people are too busy saying ‘fuck AI’ and writing paragraphs about how much they love creatives to actually reblog from creatives and support them. You can’t say you’re anti-AI because it harms creators and ‘People are FAR better at creating stuff than AI!’ if you don’t reblog people’s creations.

Yeah. This really is the heart of it. People say “you don’t need to edit your screenshots, just have fun and do what makes you happy!” but for a lot of these people what makes them happy is getting notes. It’s unfortunate, but very common, and like I said, a somewhat natural human thing.

So maybe making simblr feel like more of a community and uplifting others would do more than preaching about the evils of AI. (And it is evil. But that’s not gonna convince anyone.)

Train with butterfly || Sims 4 Loading screens

✧ Replacing plumbob with a butterfly from "Life is strange" ✧ Three version: without text and tips, with the inscription "This action will have consequences" and with just ingame tips

Download: Boosty || SFS