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.
I like that idea - the use of tick boxes to confirm / deny the use of AI. I had already put an "author's note" on the front page of my last story advising of the use of AI images in it. Until the site has these tick boxes as a standard, I should maybe make it a clearer disclaimer on page 1, something like "This story contains AI generated imagery, however there's only me to blame for the written content".
People are being expropriated so that power lines can be run throughtheir land to feed a new AI data centre in Georgia. AI steals people's content to train itself. Make of that what you will, hard nope on AI use for me.
If you don’t want to post AI-generated pictures, you can also commission a good artist to create your own NSFW artwork based on your imagination and use that instead.
I feel like ticking a box might be too simple of a solution for the collaborative formats that CHYOA supports. Public stories have no way of preventing someone from posting AI-generated images or text in a branching chapter, and even Moderated stories have room for human error in determining AI-generated content. Requiring a checkmark for each posted chapter might do the trick, but then comes the problem with labeling. If one small branching path of a massive story is AI-generated, how should the story as a whole be labelled? If the branch is far down the line of a human-written story, should the whole line be marked as "some content may be AI-generated" until it comes to a clear split where one branch has none and the other has all of it? One solution might be to just have an account setting that hides chapters that contain AI-generated images or text from the reader, but I can see this causing people using LLMs to intentionally be dishonest in order to avoid losing visibility. On the whole, it's probably a harder problem for site admins to solve at a logistical level than it looks like for the average writer or reader, which is probably why there isn't a concrete solution already implemented.
I don't think it needs to be that complicated. When you first submit a story you have to tick a box to say, for example, whether it is 1st/2nd/3rd person. You don't then have to do the same for every subsequent chapter and nor should you, whether the perspective is changed by you or another author in a later chapter or not. For the vast majority of stories on here somewhere between most and all of it will be written by the story owner, but I think it would be understood that on a public story the OG author has little to no control over what others add. The same can be said now if contributing authors add more controversial content to a story than was originally set out and don't tag it. As for people lying, yes that happens of course. However, I'm not saying the box should be mandatory. This isn't about naming and shaming. If people want to openly state their story is primarily/significantly AI generated (I see some authors doing this anyway, much to their credit) then great, but it should also be fine to leave the box unchecked. What I would like is a way to confirm everything I write comes from me. I think that is important when I have put hours of work into something and it is clear that AI writing is hugely on the rise everywhere and, as others have said, not always easy to distinguish. I don't think AI images are an issue. As I mentioned elsewhere, this isn't Deviantart where genuine digital artists are now having to compete with ChatGPT. It will be taken as read that the vast majority of pictures that accompany stories here will either have been AI generated or found on Google Images/ a porn site. It's usually pretty easy to tell which is which, but I doubt on a literature site many people are as interested in that as they are in whether the writing is completely authentic or AI assisted/generated. To be clear, this is not a dig at people who write with AI. They are perfectly entitled to do that. But for those of us who don't, it would be nice to be able to confirm that to our readers.
