UPDATE: (commented by @spacehedgie_3D down below: ) "All of you can rest. A blog post by an official Scratch Team member addresses this: https://medium.com/scratchteam-blog/inside-scratch-lab-ai-image-generation-179f11bd921a "Because of the many challenges with AI image generation, we won’t be including it in Scratch any time soon, even on our Scratch Lab site." - Eric Rosenbaum" Pleasantly surprised and happy by this update! Was not expecting it, but it gives me enough hope that I might actually consider consider coming back. (BELOW IS THE OG DESC) So, these are screenshots directly off of Scratch's Twitter/X account and yes, you read that title right: Scratch wants to implement AI into their spaces. I don't think I should have to explain how BAD that is, but I will anyways: AI tools in scratch will kill the art community. No ifs and buts about it, it will. With it an easily accessible feature, expect every DTA you see to have AI generated entries. For every Collab, expect to see something AI generated. Every featured project and studio, expect it to be filled with AI. The worst part? Even if you avoid it like the plague, put rules in your contests to try to limit AI participants or ignore it, using the site from the point it gets implemented further will be actively contributing to it. YOUR art, YOUR hard work will be taken to feed the algorithm. If you thought that remixing and recoloring was bad, how about having art of your ocs shredded apart and smacked onto a amalgamation of thousand others in a single one of these computer generated images? I rest my case on how this will impact the art community, one of Scratch's LARGEST communities, and still that's without mentioning how terrible of an impact AI has on the environment. In case anyone is unaware, in order for AI to work, it needs a lot more energy than the normal computer system. To make it widely available, that power comes from lots of servers and processing technology that uses a lot of resources, and produces a lot of E-Waste. E-Waste produces a lot of toxic chemicals like lead, mercury, and cadmium and of course, AI software creates a LOT of carbon dioxide. There's a whole article that you can find on this on Earth.Org titled 'The Green Dilemma: Can AI Fulfil Its Potential Without Harming the Environment?', and the data in it goes as followed: "A study was conducted by researchers at the University of Massachusetts to determine how much energy is used to train certain popular large AI models. According to the results, training can produce about 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of around 300 round-trip flights between New York and San Francisco – nearly 5 times the lifetime emissions of the average car." That is a devastating amount, and that has only gone up since the time the article was written (July 18th, 2023). I urge you to go research about this topic this is hardly the only article written. I am very upset, this is a site that promotes education and creativity yet they are trying to implement a dangerous technology that is the moral enemy to creativity, and ignores education. Whether they are misinformed about the disasters of AI or simply do not care, I am not sure what is worse. Even if they don't implement this fully, they are parading AI around while ignoring how destructive it really is, and I do not want to stick around to support a site like that. Scratch has already been going downhill for the past couple of years now, and this is the final nail in the coffin for me. I'm upset, genuinely. Especially the fact that I just made this account and I enjoy making art and sharing it with y'all on here, but I can't sit idly by and continuing using Scratch when this is the mortals it upholds. For a site that promotes creativity and learning, they continue to make change after change and add feature after feature that undermines both. Maybe I'll come back one day, but as of right now this is not the place I want to be.
