(Sorry for the bad drawing lol, it’s my buggy bean Insomnia, designed by @-CaramelKittens-) …………………………………………………………………. I have a LOT to say about this. This will probably be a rant, and will most likely get removed, but that’s fine. Summary: Its going to suck lol …………………………………………………………………. I haven’t been involved in Scratch very much lately- I kind of lost interest, no one was looking at my stuff, so I turned to other websites to share my art. I come back every once in a while to post some art and check my notifications. So, today, I logged on and checked out one of the people that I’m following, and I saw an anti-AI project posted on their page. So, I clicked on it, not expecting to learn that SCRATCH MIGHT BE INTRODUCING AI IMAGE GENERATION. I was like, /what/?! I actually thought it was a joke until I saw the official Scratch post they had screenshotted in the project. Besides art related issues, this could cause SO many problems. I’ll list the positives first, because it’s the shortest. -> could help with designing games or coming up with a setting to put a game in -> could produce backgrounds for games that otherwise wouldn’t be clicked on because the coder isn’t an artist -> could help the artist community come up with designs/ideas for art And yeah, that’s all I could think of. Of course, AI has many more benefits than this, but I’m limiting the pros and cons to the things applicable to Scratch. Considering that Scratch doesn’t really care about its art community, which is another issue that I’ll talk about later (maybe), that’s basically only two pros. Now, I’m going to list the cons: -> it could produce images that aren’t appropriate for Scratch. (note: slight trigger warning for this bullet point, it mentions objectification in art, but I don’t go into detail ofc) Since all AI image generators are based on millions of images from online, considering that a large portion of art portrays females with extremely oversized br3@$*$ and thighs and wearing skimpy clothing, as well as portraying males with giant muscles and no shirts, (not to mention the sexually explicit art that is also pretty prominent), it would be way too easy for a kid to put in a wholesome and innocent prompt (for example, girl sitting at the beach), and get a completely lewd image out of it (i.e., the girl wearing a bikini that barely covers her with overly exaggerated female anatomy) because it’s not possible to filter the examples used for an AI image generator. Also, it could be used to intentionally display those things by older Scratchers, which is a totally different problem in and of itself. -> It could encourage kids to cheat on their homework assignments by using the Scratch image generator. AI is AI, if you ask it for answers it’ll give them to you. This is really prominent in things like Character AI- if you ask it a complicated math equation, it’ll totally break character and give you an answer. -> Because it’s a computer system, it will use any art examples possible. This includes the art right here on Scratch. Since it’s using the images to teach itself, texturing art to protect against recolouring and adding watermarks to prevent stolen art is useless. If Scratch does introduce this AI, I would suggest taking down all of your art and moving it to a platform like DA where there is a “NoAI” option that blocks your art from being used in training models for image generators. Obviously, not everyone can do that- people with comics especially- which brings me to my next point. -> Image Generators especially “prey” on artists that post art on smaller, more niched art sites, or sites that aren’t made for posting art. Scratch fits into this category pretty perfectly. A lot of big art sites like DA and TH are coming up with ways to prevent AI art theft. For example, the “NoAI” feature on DA, as well as incorporating perma-bans for anyone claiming AI art as their own. Other sites that don’t have those regulations are putting their users at risk of getting their art used in AI image generation without their consent. -> Obviously, the issue of kids claiming AI art as their own. There’s no way to get around it, but on Scratch it’s not a really big deal because it’s not possible to get commissions on here, so people can’t get scammed out of their money. And Scratch doesn’t care about the art community anyway, so that’s whatever. I could keep going and getting more specific, but I’ve listed the stuff that’s the most problematic. Of course there are more issues than this, but they’re pointless to add because the Scratch team doesn’t really care about properly crediting artists (they have more important things to do, I don’t mean it in a bitter way). The incredible backlash from the art community will be impossible to manage. If the scratch team is reading this: good luck dealing with that. Genuinely. It’s going to suck for all parties involved. The only reason that I’m not leaving Scratch is because I want to start a comic.
