weewooweewooweewoo....couple things ✮ 1) regarding the new Scratch TOS/AI update: DO NOT FREAK OUT & DELETE YOUR PROJECTS!!!!!! cannot emphasize enough!!!! This literally happened on X a few weeks ago, someone sent out a panicky PSA about the site's "new AI TOS" and millions of people deleted their posts and accounts but it was a false alarm. - Scratch's new TOS are very vague and there's little info on what kind of AI they want to implement. Best case scenario, it's one of those "coding assistant" things that finds bugs in scripts, suggests how to code something that you ask it about, or generates images of how to code something/what it would look like etc etc. Not necessary or good, but not worth losing your mind and account over at this point. - the average user's art is not getting plagiarized by AI on here. To be super blunt--even though some Scratchers are super talented, training AI to generate art/writing based on immature & relatively "bad" art/writing from inexperienced 9-year-olds would be an extremely odd move. The outputs would be an absolute slopfest of poor anatomy and code bugs and bad grammar lol. In the past, ST noted that although they played around with the idea of adding image generation to Scratch, they thankfully decided not to implement it for a variety of reasons (https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/834371/). (this decision could, of course, be reversed, but that's not on the agenda as far as we know) - "protests" don't do anything. I've been here for 13 years, have seen "sitewide protests!!" for everything from allowing recolors to Scratch 2.0 to ban policy. If you really want to protest, comment intelligently & calmly on the forums, send an email to ST and/or MIT, or if you have one, cancel your Scratch membership + send an explanation why. But projects/studios/comment thread arguments/'blackouts' are honestly useless and just spread panic and misinformation - I'm absolutely not pro-AI, i am simply against instantly panicking and running off a cliff like a herd animal lol. Things always theoretically COULD go wildly bad from here on but that's no reason to act like they actually have. ✮ Unrelated update #2 2) had surgery a couple weeks ago to address some back + neck issues. Medically it went ok, I'm not dying lol. Mentally, it's been....lk horrible. They only barely fixed things medically, and they completely ignored my requests for how I wanted things to look cosmetically. I'm really devastated with what they did for the outcome and it's gonna be at least half a year before I can even try to get revisions done (if insurance will even cover that lol....). Kinda more depressed than i've maybe ever been. All that to say that I'm trying really hard to stay active and reply to all my comments but it's been a struggle lately, so I'm really sorry if I'm slow to respond to stuff atm. I'll be ok i just gotta lock in lol ☹️✌️
