REMIX THIS TO SPREAD THE WORD!!!! Hello friends, followers, acquaintances, dearest pookies, my idols. We need talk. Two days ago, I opened scratch to find a notification asking me to agree to a new set of terms and conditions. Thinking that it was something new, an update to help prevent bots or fix bugs here on the website perhaps? Thinking no more of the matter, I continued to find that… Dear reader… it was not. My screen was plagued by projects screaming about how the scratch team was planning on bringing new AI features to the site. After looking further into this topic I came to some of my own conclusions. The scratch team claims that they are adding AI features to the website in order to “improve” the user experience and use “anonymous” user data to aid in making the experience here “better” with the use of training AI on the site. Now, there is much speculation between scratchers who say that they training the AI off of the art and coding that people post here. Scratch posted an announcement that you can find on the main page or here: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/862915/ Referring to the terms of service that they announced here: https://mitscratch.freshdesk.com/en/support/solutions/articles/4000219182-scratch-terms-of-service One thing that stood at to me in their announcement was that they said “ We also want to assure you that right now, we are not training any AI models on Scratchers’ data.” Specifically the RIGHT NOW part of that. What does this mean,Right now?! Are you planning to in the future?! This project by @CupieMaster , explains some about the ToS please read this! They make some great points about the NO OPT OUT policy and how when you agree to the ToS you have basically signed away your creative freedom. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1269751874 Also in my research, I came across this discussion forum https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/834371/ Which gives some examples of what the AI will look like. Guys, just look at this. Why would anyone want this?! AI is terrible for the environment. Using it to generate costumes and basically code projects for us defeats the whole purpose of scratch! There are some petitions against this that I recommend you sign such as Multiple scratchers are also pointing out that people are taking these announcements too far and might be spreading information This includes the main article on their website about AI and their guidelines. This project shows some images about what the AI will look like as posted by a member of the team prior to the whole situation. Continued in notes+credits…
