None of the options is compelling. For stories, I'd prefer no images. A cover image is fine, and AI art might even be a good choice unless you commission a drawn image. The style would depend on the kind of story. Personally, I don't like AI-generated stories, though I don't mind if authors use AI as a tool. While there are certainly issues created by the rapid speculation-based growth of the industry, it seems the arguments are often rather emotional and incomplete. I'm rather sure that if I spend an hour creating AI images, I would use up less energy than gaming for an hour.
The answer is... it depends. I don't care what tools you use. I need to like the content and believe that you spent some of your own effort and had artistic vision. Merely generating some slop and posting it... We can generate some slop for ourselves. Please, stop. It may be hard to differentiate lazy copy-pasting of outputs from genuine work that uses LLMs... but it means you failed to produce something better than raw slop. Oh, and the environment argument is silly. Gaming on top settings or watching a stream in 4K also consumes a lot.
Its fair to use whatever is available in art. There's no point excluding tools that dont meet whatever are the pre-defined standards for the sake of purity of the product. If we did that we'd all be listening to classical music and nothing else. I dont really see the difference between reading works with AI generated imagery to complement a story narrative and people who prefer comic books / GNs / Manga to written literature. I read both.It enhances variety. (Proud to have story of the week this week with AI images with text inserts to enhance the narrative, not claiming its high art / literature, but it offers something different)
The first option has been phrased in a way that is a little too leading for an impartial poll! I use AI generated images in my stories and see no issue with that on a literature site where nobody is claiming to be an artist (apart from the occasional spam bot) I dislike story text that is purely/mostly AI generated being posted on here. I feel like that is the equivalent of me typing a prompt into ChatGPT for it to draw a picture of an image I've thought of then submitting it somewhere like DeviantArt among the work of actual digital artists, who have put hours into their creations and spent a great deal more time learning their craft. In fact, since I can generate a picture in minutes, I can quickly become far more prolific than any of the real artists and swamp the site with my 'art'. On DA, there is an option users are expected to click on (though it isn't mandatory) to declare when their art work is AI generated/assisted. I wonder if something like that could be implemented here for AI generated writing? No reason why people who might not feel able to write a story shouldn't be allowed to use AI to work up their ideas and share them, but personally I have no interest in reading anything that was produced by AI. It's not just snobbery, the continuity is so often off and I find the AI's writing style has a technically fine but slightly soulless feel to it.
This is a great point, and it's crystalizing my opinion on the subject: the core aspects of your art should be human-crafted. If you're just asking the machine it make it for you, then I can ask the machine to make it for me just as easily, cutting out the middle man. But if you've written a story and find you need a cover image, then to me, using AI to make that is a very different proposition than the one above. I don't read your story for the cover, I read it for the story. There are still issues with that (for example it may make your story appear cheap or low quality), but they're issues that affect you (the writer), not me (the reader). I like this idea, although I'm not sure how enforceable it is. I for one have a much easier time recognizing AI-generated visuals than AI-generated prose. And there's an incentive against it, too: if you admit using AI in your writing (more than a little), some people will just not read your story. I for one won't. So if you just "forget" (oops!), you'll get more readers.
That's very true and it can never be anything more than an honesty based system. How DA deal with that issue is to have two tick boxes, one to confirm using AI and one to confirm not using it. That at least gives those of us who are writing all of our own words the chance to confirm that. While some people may 'forget' to tick a box, out and out lying is hopefully beyond the ethical boundaries of most people here. It isn't a perfect system. there probably isn't one. However, AI writing is clearly becoming increasingly prevalent on here and, as you say, it is not always easy to tell the difference. If nothing else, it would be quite nice for those of us who don't use AI to write to be able to confirm as much to our readers.
