Generative artificial intelligence

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Main article: Artificial intelligence

Generative AI, also referred to as GenAI or simply "AI" in colloquial English, is a program or service with the purpose of "generating" pieces of media (text, code, videos, images, et cetera) with a text prompt as an input (e.g. "How long do I heat popcorn for in the microwave?" or "bowl of buttery popcorn, realistic, artstation, pretty") utilizing a captioned dataset, and various/random outputs. GenAI, over its short existence and rising prevalence in online communities, has garnered large amounts of concern across the various fields it has been applied to.

General controversies surrounding Generative AI

General controversies surroundng GenAI

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.

Major media platforms with controversies relating to Generative AI

Major media platforms with controversies relating to GenAI

Platform	Controversy	Specifics	Related Article(s)/Section(s)
GitHub	Racketeering; scraping all users' public code repositories without prior notice nor consent for a large language model (GitHub CoPilot), then locking the ability to opt-out behind a subscription service	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 have shown backlash, and the ordeal has eroded public trust in GitHub.
DeviantArt	Training on all users' published content without prior notice nor consent for an image-generation model ('DreamUp); publicly rewarding users who uploaded exclusively AI-generated art, including art generated with the model'	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 stirred controversy on the platform and fractured it into two distinct groups; those for generative AI (typically those who hold newer accounts) and those against the usage of such algorithms on an art forum (typically users who have existed on the platform for far longer.) Since the introduction of DreamUp, the platform has been cluttered with 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. The majority of featured creators on the site are ones who nearly or exclusively upload AI generated content.
Twitter/X	Training on all active users' data without prior notice nor explicit consent for a proprietary large language and image generation model (Grok); leaking over 370,000 private chats with Grok over Google search results without prior notice nor user consent	Sometime in mid 2024, X Corp's platform of the same moniker quietly changed its Terms of Service to allow all user-generated content submitted through it to be used to "Train artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type", specifically with a permanent license for said content granted to the corporation and without any form of monetary compensation. Though there remains an option to opt-out in the platform's privacy settings, users were opted-in by default. The following is speculative, as X Corp and sister corporation xAI have been almost entirely silent about the specifics of their methodology, but it's reasonable to assume that all users' available Content (as defined in the platform's Terms of Service) was scraped and introduced to xAI (and possibly other third-parties') datasets when the change was established. In addition, users' private conversations with the chatbot, which are shared through saved links, were/are accessible to search engines like Google and showed up for the first time in publicly accessible search results in August 2025.
Stack Overflow	Training on all active users' content without prior notice nor explicit consent for a large language model service (Overflow AI)	In late July of 2023, Overflow AI was made available by Stack Overflow, a Q&A forum for programmers. The information used to train the LLMs provided by the service was taken from questions and answers left by the StackOverflow community. This action subverts one of the website's existing policies, wherein its users are disallowed from AI generating responses to answer forum posts. The only way users have the capability to opt-out currently is to manually delete all posts and topics before deleting their account. The effectiveness of this method is questionable, however, considering that StackOverflow's "Get Out" clause may allow the service to retrieve content that was previously deleted.
Reddit	Training on all users' content without prior notice nor explicit consent for a large language model (Reddit Answers)	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. Reddit's Terms of Service explicitly allows the platform to scrape user-generated content for the purpose of training "AI and machine learning models", though this is likely limited to Reddit's proprietary dataset; it has legally discouraged third-party services from scraping the platform as per the Reddit Public Content Policy.

Other controversies involving generative AI

LAION-5b training database

Many users have had their content scraped by LAION to power their training database. Currently, there is no way to opt-out or request a removal of one's content from it or any successor database, as the service which previously allowed individuals to request the removal of their data is defunct.