Pretty good solution that’s also fair. Level 3 is doable by a real artist in any area and 3 scouts is doable if there’s effort on the uploaded part.

Great fixes, good luck with the moderation!

I believe that charging money for posting music to the audio portal is an unappealing idea. It is unlikely to prevent AI music spam and will deter potential musicians from entering the music sphere. Furthermore, it would remove the idea of a free sharing community. I believe that a stricter and more thorough scouting process would be a more effective solution.

Maybe drastic, but have you thought of making questionable uploaders post a screenshot of their work file for a mod to see? (Recorded live performances would be a little harder, maybe a gear pic or recording setup would be the analog analogue)

I completely understand the issue with moderation, and it probably would cut down on slop submissions, but limiting the audio portal to whoever can shell out as little as 3 dollars seems like kind of a temporary solution. For example, any kid can go to a store and buy a visa gift card to pay for supporter so that they can upload their slop. I don't know a whole bunch about hosting a public website like this, so maybe I'm completely incorrect. I can understand it from a business point and a convenience point. But even if you put it behind a paywall, slop submissions will still come in and they'll have more eyes on them as a result.

I don't usually mention my Hawaiian heritage, but as someone typing in English while (reluctantly) wearing pants and shoes and who hasn't taken part in cannibalism in ages: may I humbly suggest that sometimes you need to negotiate with the future on your own terms rather than fighting and having worse thrust upon you.

What about a site-wide AI filter that works exactly like the adult one? A big part of the moderation burden seems to be "is this AI", which the community can only help by flagging. If AI were "separate but unequal" as Adult art is now the mod burden would switch to "is this good or bad" and the community would mostly be in charge via the normal blamming and voting system.

I know many artist and musicians would lose their shit, just as they do about the adult content. Just like the adult content though, it would help the site live another day.

The music industry is truly fucked.

Allow AI, are you nuts?

The technical staff struggles to provide basic HTML features. The moderators are so overwhelmed they almost never even send mod mail regarding rulings. Do you realistically forsee NG being able to maintain a hardline stance with its current resources? Permitting it now would allow time for site specific cultural norms (as we have for porn) to form over time.

Not counting live action or illegal stuff, when was porn ever banned from NG?

Besides, if you're gonna allow AI just because the mods can't mod, might as well also allow live action, screen recordings, hate speech, Nazi propaganda, slideshows, and the lot. since the mods can't mod those too.

Sorry if my points were muddled. I'm not saying that the situation is completely analogous. I know porn has always been a part of the platform. I just think there's an opportunity to establish the same kind of stable relationship between AI and non-AI content as exist between porn and non-porn.

Sorry about not seeing this point. I think maybe you were editing while I was responding.

Those things are not on rise though? They're also not emerging social norms like AI is?

If we allow it, the biggest issue would be the authorship. That's one hell of a can of worms. I would rather keep NG AI-free for as long as it is possible.

I do, I'm just keeping greater politics to the now closed general board where it belongs.

In the context of the site itself, I've seen several moderators and staff complaining about the AI grind and none (so far) about how the Fourth Reich is making their day worse.

Thing when listening to audio that pretty much doesn't matter and only bothers me, is both name of the song and artist being linked to the song. It's not new, I just thought of saying it right now.

First, @Leavesz , thanks for getting back on topic. That was a strange sojourn.

However, I think I might need to restate my position as you seem to misunderstand.

1) My invocation of my Hawaiian heritage isn't to illicit support for "embracing the future", it's to evoke the position of a completely conquered people who's resistance was--in the perspective of history--absolutely futile. I'm not saying I love genAI. I'm saying it is inevitable. It has features similar to peer-to-peer piracy and bitcoin. The former was resisted by (at the time) the most powerful union on the planet. The latter was resisted by modern banking. Both were aided by the most powerful central government to exist in human history. Both are still around. genAI doesn't even require network connectivity. I don't think it is going anywhere and its likely to go everywhere.

2) My thinking is that by siloing generated content as its own category moderation will become easier as the moderation will become a matter of factors inherent to the work itself (ie your rule-breaking Nazi image) versus whether or not it has the right "ghost".

3) As to hosting cost, that's a ticking time bomb the site faces irrespective of AI and is a much bigger can of worms.

Maybe I'm wrong about #1. Certainly people hope I am. Maybe I'm wrong about the balancing cost of hosting versus mod time (my intuition is that human attention is always the main cost). The fullness of time will show things one way or the other, but I swear I bear you nor any other artist ill will. Okay, maybe the kids at SCAD. And RISD. Yeah, I definitely dislike everyone at RISD. You get my point though. I'm just putting out there what I think helps the site long term.

I believe the biggest reason the few of us who are here choose not to leave NG for the big social media platforms like everybody else has, is specifically because of Newgrounds' culture of lifting up independent creators. A big part of that focus involves the fact that real human creativity is valued above all else here. That we are not made to compete with a gigantic plagiarism machine that constantly spits out an endless torrent of soulless content. Artists are respected here, whilst everywhere else we are having our work fed into the gruesome machine that is built to replace us, without our consent.

If NG were to allow GenAI, we would be losing a big part of what makes NG unique and a better place for artists. "Separate but equal" is not a good solution because this is not a content moderation issue, it's about resistance to something entirely contrary to our community values. We're facing what is possibly the greatest threat to artistic integrity in history, with our humble home as one of the small remaining bastions to be free from GenAI's nearly inescapable proliferation.

Sad to hear AI is even trying to ruin the NG Audio Portal these days. Good to hear though that NG is trying its best to not let AI take over this place.

Mods do request this at times when things are uncertain. It probably won't be long before AI can take a song input and generate an image like that, similar to how there are already artists who use AI to generate their "progress" sketches.

I've had people who use ai music send me "plausible" project file screenshots

My personal (as well as my indirect) encounters with people who upload AI generated tracks to the Audio Portal is that a 3 scout requirement would not be a deterrent. Over 95% gets caught and filtered way before the scouted stage. Not to throw an entire community into the same pot but a lot of them are kids who do not have a concept of what "scouting" means to begin with - they just want their s*tty AI noises scouted to "build a level in Geometry Dash with".

They would not even read the rules if their life depended on it - and they do not communicate with each other, so every one of them does the exact same things. "Getting scouted is harder now" will have zero effects on their behavior and will not reduce the number of stolen/AI generated tracks submitted by them. (Most of these are basically cases of lack of parental supervision. Those kids should not even have NG accounts [or access to the internet] to begin with. "If I could talk to their parents for just 3 minutes..." ...and so on... ;) )

At the time of writing, the number of actual audio artists who are crazy enough to risk their NG account over the use of largely AI-generated tracks seems rather small. (Audio Portal Moderators might correct me on this. I have to go by what I see as a regular user.)

Requiring to be scouted by 3 different users would only be an incentive for kind-hearted audio artists to scout more users "because it has become so hard nowadays" or think "Ah, they are 'kind of okay(-ish)' right now. I'm sure it will be fine if two others scout them later in earnest" - and then having the two others think and do the exact same thing.

I know that having more safeguards for scouting sounds safer, but I expect it would backfire. Plus: Many if not most audio artists, at the time of writing, seem not very adept at identifying AI generated tracks by ear. (Linked article/guide written by @Quest.)

my idea is that if somebody wants to upload an audio for the first time, they need to go through an "approval process" where they have to link a video of their song in their music maker (FL studio, Beepbox, etc.). moderators would be able to see the queue of songs, and able to approve or reject the submissions.

• approving would make the audio public and allow the artist to post songs without having to go through the approval process again, unless they get banned or have their audios removed later on (but its not the same as being scouted)
• rejecting would keep the audio private, but allow for resubmission in most cases.

this is why i think a writing portal would not work for newgrounds. not to mention most search engines nowadays have AI chats to assist the user (i only ever used them for tech assistance, not sure how good they are at storytelling)

-

also, you know that giant banner thing that pops up for guests from time to time prompting them to create an account? how about we put a similar thing for non-scouted users who try to upload art and audio informing the things that are not allowed, along with representative illustrations?

example:

DO NOT UPLOAD:

AI GENERATED CONTENT (image of sad robot holding a picture with a red X overlay)

CONTENT YOU DID NOT CREATE (image of a sad kid holding THE Mona Lisa painting with red X overlay)

also, make the above banner a 2 page thing with a 3-second cool down to move on. that could help weed out the more innocent rule breakers and give the mods a fair reason to be extra harsh to deliberate rule breakers, as they were warned that they were breaking rules in crystal clear terms.

from what people showed in screenhots all over this site, it seems the mobile version of newgrounds provides no easy links to the rules to people uploading content and that's a serious design flaw that needs to be fixed.

Whoa, did not know that that was the state of this stuff. I suppose asking for video would be too much of a hassle for the people who are the real deal? IDK what percent of people know how to do a screen recording (or if that will be easily fakeable as well)

Nice updates with the playlists/player.

Tricky issue with influx of AI content... I wonder when we'll be getting more regulation on AI generated content though. Seems very similar to how it was with piracy and copyright overall in the heyday of the Internet, and overtime regulation's very much changed the landscape there. For any new innovation that potentially impacts traditional means of profit there's bound to be great incentive for regulation, just hope the regulation we do get is useful; doesn't attempt to abolish the use of AI entirely, it's great for some things...

Would be a shame to restrict any content here only to those who can pay for it otherwise, but worst case not a bad way to both increase profitability of the site + greatly limit resource use at the same time...

Seems a bit like the OG Review Request Club? ;)

https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1072042

Maybe the two could co-exist hmm, it's a fun idea. And the aforementioned crew's not all that active these days, so maybe a different kind of structure for what to review would give better incentives with that too... could definitely use more reviewers.

Didn't even know a review club was a thing - would be neat if that were still active and did what they had outlined in the post there. Maybe even a reboot of what that group aimed to do would be beneficial for some of the issues outlined here & ofc beneficial for smaller and newer users to get more feedback. I gotta say @FutureCopLGF is one of the most consistent users here that gives great detail and feedback in all his reviews which only really hit the monthly game nominations, so something for smaller hits (or anything for movies, audio, and art) would be cool to see.

I suck at reviewing art and audio (I can tell if something looks pretty, or if something sounds nice) but maybe could at least contribute some more time to reviewing what goes through judgement for movies and games... This may have just motivated me to try for that in the new year.

To me, it seems piracy completely won. The Napster set got exactly what it wanted and forced media into the iTunes/Steam model and then the streaming one. Media has never been cheaper or more quickly available. Even on the pirate front now you're just one click away from a pirate stream site for basically everything.

Meanwhile the only regulation on crypto has recognized it as a legitimate commodity and let it be traded on the traditional exchanges.

Since your comments have been nothing but bangers recently, I'm genuinely asking: what specifically are you thinking of? Where one of these emerging technologies has "lost" to regulation?

@alsoknownas1 I don't think your proposed solution actually solves anything, if AI generated media gets its own portal or category or whatever, that doesn't solve the problem of people claiming AI generated media wasn't made by AI and trying to sneak onto the non-AI portals. Which I imagine they would probably want to do, to have their images/music/whatever out of the designated slop dump and get more recognition in the less saturated non-AI portals/categories.

I think Tom already found the best solution with the paywalling, which I don't think anybody really wants but it's a lesser of two evils type situation

I see what you're saying but I think there are two distinct moderation problems:

1) People posting AI and mods having to remove it

2) People posting AI and claiming it isn't AI

I think--even now--#1 is a larger problem by both volume and time.

People want to post to NG because of its large edgelord pervert audience. People with "that NG aesthetic" think their work will be well received here AI or not. That's why I draw the analogy to adult content. The adult creators for the most part want to post to NG because of the (notorious) taste of its userbase and don't care about any of the things the forums do.

I'd imagine the biggest pent up demand for posting AI is people wanting to post AI porn "in the NG style" not people wanting to sneak into the circle jerk that is the monthly voting. If AI is allowed people can do that without lying, mods can stop wasting time tracking down *every* AI piece and I'd imagine the mod load from "fakers" would quickly become similar to the time spent arguing M vs A ratings, which is the analogous case.

In terms of a paywall, I don't think that's practical at all. By Tom's own admission the site struggles to pull "indie VN on patreon" numbers, hovering at 8k for forever. I don't see a scenario where the (even if temporary) drop from going all pay doesn't finally force the looming bankruptcy.

Plus, I'm not sure what the Paywall accomplishes in terms of people lying? Surely someone willing to lie for clout would be more willing to lie for clout and $3 a month.

A paywall can make it easier to permaban someone but that depends on the technical implementation of billing. I highly doubt that the site is built to allow the mods to know the actual billed party in transactions as that would be an insane PCI DSS liability. So just card another $20 gift card and you're gold. Plus, such blocks are actually legally binding because money is involved. It's one thing to ban people posting illegal porn (or even pirated content) because those parties are not going to file counter action and it's another to ban users for subjective violations that no one can dispute but if the mods play as fast and lose with bans over objective facts (AI vs not) as they do everything else, the site is just a few false accusations away from being sued into nothing.

Or is there an angle to the Paywall thing I'm not getting?

I feel GenAI (art, music, and such) should've capped at 2023.

Good enough to get the idea across, iffy enough to be identified as AI.