Sci-Fi Reddit Community Bans AI-Art for Being ‘Low Effort’ Posting

Several artistic communities and platforms that host user-generated content have taken a stand against AI-generated artworks in recent weeks. Animation site Newgrounds, art site Inkblot, and furry fandom art platform Fur Affinity have all announced bans on art made with generative systems like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney.

But as the AI-generated art scene continues to explore, individual communities on Reddit are declaring art made by neural networks as simply too low-effort to stay.

Moderators of r/Dune, the subreddit for fans of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel and subsequent works in the Duneiverse, announced on Wednesday that AI-generated art has no place in the 233,000-member community.

“This applies to images created using services such as DALL-E, Midjourney, StarryAI, WOMBO Dream, and others. Our team has been removing said content for a number of months on a post-by-post basis, but given its continued popularity across Reddit we felt that a public announcement was justified,” moderator Blue_Three wrote. “We acknowledge that many of these pieces are neat to look at, and the technology sure is fascinating, but it does technically qualify as low-effort content—especially when compared to original, “human-made” art, which we would like to prioritize going forward.”

They suggested that anyone interested in sharing Dune-themed AI art move to the newly-created r/DuneAI instead.

A central premise of Dune revolves around a war in which humans regained their freedom from “thinking machines,” or artificial intelligence, that once enslaved humanity. “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind” is a major commandment in their bible. It’s only right, then, that the humans of r/Dune ban this forbidden technology from within their walls.