Where I stand on AI

I'm aware that AI is a deeply contentious subject in the art world – and I understand why. The models were fed with all of our work without anyone asking: our images, videos, comments, blog and forum posts, every kind of social media post there is. Now billionaires and corporations are trying to make money off them. On top of that, accounts show up that type in a few prompts, upload the results by the truckload and call it art – images, texts and videos built on the work of people who were never asked. By now every platform online is full of it.

That's especially frustrating when you've spent years learning your craft, practising, painting, drawing, writing – only to find that you're no longer seen or taken seriously, because you're buried under all that slop. Never mind that even before AI it was hard enough to hold your own against everything else in the feed.

What will apply on Conflavo

Conflavo is meant to be a place where you're dealing with people. So let me be clear up front: content that essentially falls out of a prompt and is left that way is not welcome here. It gets removed when it's spotted.

That doesn't mean AI is banned as a tool. If you use it for an idea, a reference or an intermediate step and then do the work yourself, you don't owe anyone an explanation. When you post a work, you'll be asked whether AI was involved – if it was, you just say so, and anyone who'd rather not see those works can hide them. The distinction that matters isn't tool or no tool. It's this: did someone do the work here, or did someone just place an order?

And now the honest part. I can't promise this can always be established. It can't be done – not technically, not any other way. Some of it is obvious and I'll weed that out on the platform, but absolute certainty is not available on this subject. (A more detailed article on that is coming.)

Above all, no detector will pass judgement on your work at Conflavo. Those tools exist, they're heavily marketed, and they get it wrong – particularly with cleanly scanned drawings and digital paintings. I'm not going to install anything that mistakes you for a machine because you work too neatly.

What does work: you can't verify a single image. You can verify an account. Anyone who's been around for six months, here or on other platforms, leaves traces that are hard to fake – works in progress, abandoned attempts, replies to comments, a style that visibly develops. That's exactly what Conflavo is built around:

There will be a cap on posts. Not because of AI, but because a feed where everything drowns is no good to anyone. I'll happily take the side effect: if you depend on volume, there's nothing here for you.
There will be a feature called Workshop – a place to show how a work came about, if you want to. Entirely optional. But anyone who uses it has already settled every conversation about authenticity before it starts.
Suspected AI content can be reported. When that happens, people decide – and in case of doubt, in your favour. If you can show how a work came about, that's the end of it.
And nobody has to show an ID for any of this. There will be no real-name requirement and no identity check; pseudonyms are normal in this scene for good reasons. Authenticity shows over time here, not through a passport.

This won't be perfect. AI content will slip through and there will be disputes. I'm not promising you that Conflavo will be AI-free – I'm promising you that nobody gets far here on the zero-effort approach, and that I won't let it slide. And if you can think of something that works better: I'm open to ideas, my contact details are below.

Protecting your work from AI?

Some platforms promise to protect your work from being used to train an AI model without your consent. The fact is: that isn't technically possible either. The moment you publish something online, it can be found, stored and fed into a model by scrapers and bots. Anyone giving you a guarantee here can't keep it.

What I can and will do: apply every technical trick that can be implemented with reasonable effort to make life as hard as possible for unwanted bots.

Two things, on the other hand, are absolutely settled and guaranteed by me:

I will not train AI models on the works you publish on Conflavo – and I won't sell them to anyone who does. Not today, and not through a quietly amended set of terms.
There will be no function on Conflavo that generates works, images or text for you. No "generate image" button, no assistant that writes your review. If I ever do use AI behind the scenes – for translations, alt text or spam defence, perhaps – I'll say so openly.

Full transparency: I use AI

I've been building web portals since 2009, and I'm now finding out first-hand that my manual programming work isn't really needed any more: coding agents do it better today, at impressive quality and speed. And honestly: I think that's great – because it means I can spend more time on ideas and design work instead of getting stuck on details and bugs in the code. That's also what prompted me to start this project: I knew a venture of this size was simply not doable on my own, but with coding agents it suddenly becomes realistic.

That I'm relaxed about this with code and not with art is no contradiction. Code is a means nobody wants to look at – it should work, and then it's beside the point. An image, a novel or a painting is the point itself. Automate that and there's nothing left.

What I use AI for:

Research and data analysis: I use AI as an assistant to get a quick overview of a topic or question and to gather more leads for my own research.
Help with concept work: developing, testing, sorting and prioritising ideas. AI helps me keep track of the many ideas I have and to align them with each other. But: I decide what gets built and how.
Technical design and implementation: together with AI I define the technical framework and have the AI write the code. But I'm the one who decides what gets implemented and how – and I review the AI's code as well.
Text and graphics on this website: I often have the AI turn my research and concept work into text and graphics to communicate what this is about. I check them and revise them regularly.

With that last point in particular, I'm entirely aware of how it looks: pure prompt output is supposed to have no place on Conflavo – and for this site I generate text and graphics myself. It looks like a double standard.

The difference isn't that other rules apply to me. The difference, as I see it, is where this material ends up and what it's for:

I don't post it as a work and I don't sell it. It hangs in no gallery, sits in no profile, and competes with nothing a human being made.
It has exactly one purpose: to convey my idea of Conflavo before Conflavo exists. It isn't art with a value of its own.
And it has an expiry date – not a vague "someday", but a condition: as soon as Conflavo brings in money, the budget for graphics, text and UI design goes to artists on this platform.

If you think that's splitting hairs, I can't argue you out of it. All I can do is draw the line clearly enough that you can hold me to it.

I can accept that not everyone will like this position. But as things stand I don't see another way: I want to start now, I'm (still) doing this alone, I have a full-time job, no fortune and no investors – without AI support I'd have to give up in the face of the complexity, the cost and the sheer amount of work.

If you think I'm going too far somewhere – or if you have a better idea for keeping mass-produced prompt output off Conflavo: write to me at conflavo.official@gmail.com.

— Tobi