Generative AI

❗Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

Notice: This Article Requires Additional Expansion

---

This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. Issues may include:

• This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
• This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
• More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
• The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
• The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content

How You Can Help:

• Add documented examples with verifiable sources
• Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
• Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
• Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
• Flesh out the article with relevant information

This notice will be removed once the article is sufficiently developed. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, visit the Discord (join here) and post to the #appeals channel, or mention its status on the article's talk page.

Generative AI, also referred to as GenAI or simply AI, is a program whose existence is to generate pieces of media based on a simple prompt (e.g. "How long do I heat popcorn for in the microwave?" or "bowl of buttery popcorn, realistic, artstation, pretty") with various and random results. GenAI over its currently short existence being accessible to the public has garnered large amounts of concern across the various fields it has been applied to.

General controversies surrounding generative AI

Controversy	Brief Description	Related Article(s)/Section(s)
Training data collected without consent	Various platforms have scraped data ranging within the petabytes concerning content created by users and potentially owned by companies, without first obtaining an adequate license to use this data. This has gone so far as to not even request consent or even notifying users in advance that their content was used to train AI-powered tools.
Replacing skilled workers with AI	Due to its generalized nature, jobs across fields from digital art to writing and programming have had experienced staff replaced by lesser-paid (and often lesser-experienced) employees who would be tasked to use generative tools to do their work. To remain relevant to the wiki's purpose, the usage leads to the detriment of product quality for consumers, such as representatives replaced with chatbots, or products being sold by companies use poorly-generated content that may harm the consumer.

Specific controversies involving generative AI

Reddit - Training AI on user-generated content

In late 2024, Reddit announced the release of 'Reddit Answers,' a large language model (LLM) that was publicly stated to use content created by users to train the tool, without requiring prior consent or prior public notice.

DeviantArt - DreamUp

While more speculative, it is reasonable for users to assume that when DeviantArt initially automatically opted all users into allowing their work to be training data for generative AI, that all content uploaded to DeviantArt was used as training data for their DreamUp tool, however according to statements from DeviantArt CEO Moti Levy, DeviantArt did not plan or intend to train their tool based on user-generated works and that any user-generated works that were used in their model, were introduced by StabilityAI. Regardless, the introduction of DreamUp to the art sharing platform has both stirred controversy on the platform, and also fractured the platform into 2 parties, those for generative AI (typically those who hold newer accounts) and those against (typically users who have existed on the platform for far longer.) Due to the introduction of DreamUp, the platform has been cluttered by AI generated images, and staff have historically, frequently, and intentionally featured multiple users who exclusively upload GenAI content or post content that uses generative content as a base, with a majority of featured creators being ones who nearly or exclusively upload AI generated content.

LAION-5b training database

Many users have had their content scraped by LAION to power their training database, and the only way they can opt out is via a third party.

StackOverflow - Overflow AI training data based on user generated content

In Late July, 2023, Overflow AI was released by StackOverflow. The content used to train this AI was built off of questions and answers left by the StackOverflow community. This action essentially subverts an existing policy from StackOverflow, where users cannot generate AI responses for answers. The only way users currently have the capability of not having their content scraped for Overflow AI is to manually delete all posts and topics before deleting your account, however the effectiveness is questionable considering their Get Out Clause, which allows them to retrieve content that was deleted.

Microsoft - GitHub CoPilot trained on free user repositories

Labeled on the FAQ for GitHub CoPilot, users who pay for either a Pro or Enterprise tier plan do not have their repositories (repos) scanned for the purposes of training CoPilot. This can be considered a form of racketeering, as consumers are forced into paying if they wish to not have their content be indirectly profited off of by Microsoft. There are theories that private repos may not be used for training purposes,^{[citation needed]} but it is unable to be verified at this time. Users on this platform have shown some backlash since this has eroded trust in GitHub.