So, I’m a programmer and my thoughts here apply to AI generated code and ChatGPT writing as well.

I think these kinds of modern generative AIs create derivative works based on their inputs. Which means that the training data should consist of only public domain materials or other works that give you an explicit right to use them for training purposes. Blindly scraping the internet for training data without regard to the owner’s wishes is immoral and IMO should be copyright infringement.

Also, I don’t care how legal it is, but if you are a big social media megacorp and start charging money or putting restrictions on “your” training data, I hope you get a special place in hell. Thinking of Reddit, Twitter, DeviantArt and Microsoft here.

I can’t think of any justification that isn’t emotional to say that AI generated art isn’t “art”. Writing a prompt is I guess technically an artistic expression. However, I wouldn’t classify it as “digital art”; it’s its own thing. To me, it’d be like taking a photograph, and then claiming you painted it. It should be marked as “AI generated”, and categorized separately.

Ultimately, IMO it shouldn’t be banned across the entire fandom (if such a thing were possible), but I would not feel comfortable interacting with a place where AI material was not marked as such, or a place where they reserve the right to use your media for training. Even then, if I were given a choice in a place where I frequented, I would say “no” to allowing AI art.

Personally, I’m very negative about AI generated media, and try to avoid it where possible. Maybe that’s because I’m old and grumpy, or maybe it’s just because I’m scared of it. But I wouldn’t willingly use these tools for anything creative I’m involved in.

I think this AI thing has effects on all of society, not just the furry fandom. The proliferation of AI has its tendrils on many places of society at the moment, and could have drastic changes on many of the ways we live our life. And, of course, nobody really has any idea on how to deal with this, and it’s controlled basically by megacorps. I could go into detail about this, but it’s… A bit bleak.

This is unironically one of the things that gives me a lot of anxiety and stress.

To answer the original question though, I think in its current form and without massive societal change, not only the furry fandom but society in general would be strongly negatively impacted.

… Of course, I did get a bit curious, and maaay have asked ChatGPT to clean up a first draft of this post, just to see how it all works. I wonder how good people are at noticing things like that?