Get rid of or disclose use of AI generated images

[nasso]

I'm a long time fan of pnpm. It's my go-to package manager and I recommend it to all my friends and colleagues.

However, I am deeply disappointed to see the use of AI generated images on the new homepage design, without any disclosure. Artificially generated "art" is harmful to real, human artists, whose hard work is being massively stolen to train giant power-hungry models for the profit of wealthy tech companies and startups–not the artists who made this possible in the first place.

Ideally, it would be preferable to replace all AI-generated assets with human-made art. But at the very least, a disclosure below the picture (e.g. "image generated using AI") would be acceptable in the meantime (I tried opening a pull request for that but this requires changes in code outside of this repository and I have no idea how bit works).

[zkochan]

I don't understand. How does the disclosure help the "human artists, whose hard work is being massively stolen to train giant power-hungry models for the profit of wealthy tech companies"? If we add a disclosure we will give free advertisement to the tool we used.

[nasso]

hello! im glad you are asking these questions! let me give you a couple reasons why disclosure is important:

1. because you didn't make it

disclosure is a way to communicate "i didn't make this". if a human made it, you would credit them (to give them visibility, but also as a way to say "not made by me!", which is what people might assume by default). same thing here, you (the pnpm team) did not make these illustrations. an AI model did (by stealing art from millions of human artists worldwide). disclosing it is acknowledging that fact

Note

no, "prompting" doesn't count, and isn't a form of art in any way shape or form. i regularly commission artists, and im not pretending im the author just because i gave them instructions about what to draw

2. because you aren't pretending it has the same value as human-made art

one way artists are being actively harmed by generative AI is by people misleading others into thinking they created "art" when they really just had an AI model generate an image. AI-generated content and human-made art do not deserve the same level of appreciation and do not have the same value. someone using AI to generate images cannot be put on the same level as a human artist who spent years mastering their craft. disclosure makes it very clear that you are not pretending to be an artist, and aren't undervaluing the work of real artists

3. because you want to let people choose to boycott this stuff

some people might decide against using or supporting projects that make use of these technologies, be it in solidarity with real artists or because of the insane environmental impact. knowing this, disclosing that you are using AI-generated assets is just a matter of transparency which helps the pnpm team build trust with its community: "yep, this is AI. we aren't trying to hide it or lie about it"

Note

of course, the style of these illustrations screams "AI-generated" already... im sure most of us nerds will correctly guess that it was unfortunately AI-generated, but that is very much not everyone. most people are very bad at telling when an image was AI-generated, and we can't really blame them for that—the tech got incredibly good in a very short amount of time 😓

Tip

the website being open-source, you can even invite human artists to contribute a real piece of art! as i said, the BETTER fix for this issue is to use real art instead of AI slop. that would send strong message to people like myself about the values of the team behind the project. it would make us more likely to continue supporting the project and encourage our peers to use it 😊

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also of course we don't want to give free advertisement to any of them big hungry models. so of course you shouldn't specify which model you used. "AI-generated image" would be enough 😄

hope that helps!