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Why use the LLM/"AI" generated banner for the Community? (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/coffee@lemmy.world
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Dear Coffee Community at LemmyWorld,

Thank you for the marvel you do...

I am sorry, but just to clarify, may I ask... why ever use the so fake, effortless, worthless, void-empty, horrible, and sorrowful meat-ground set of bytes... as the very main banner to represent the so ineffably magnificent art, history, and human effort... as Coffee... and more than 10,714 Members of the Community, too...

There are so many artists out there who have art attributed... and if you haven't chosen a work of your own, have you considered a competition between the current Members to choose the artwork for the banner? A moment of photography would already be a marvel...

Please... please do consider the noise, emptiness, and unintentional but possible disrespect... towards the miracle... divine elixir... the coffee...

Best and kind regards

Translation from the Arabic...

O Coffee! Thou dost dispel all cares, thou art the object of desire to the scholar.
This is the beverage of the friends of God; it gives health to those in its service who strive after wisdom.

Prepared from the simple shell of the berry, it has the odor of musk and the color of ink.
The intelligent man who empties these cups of foaming coffee, he alone knows truth.

May God deprive of this drink the foolish man who condemns it with incurable obstinacy.
Coffee is our gold. Wherever it is served, one enjoys the society of the noblest and most generous men.

O drink! As harmless as pure milk, which differs from it only in its blackness...

Delicious beverage, its color is the seal of its purity.

Source: by Abd-al-Kâdir ibn Mohammad al Ansâri al Jazari al Hanbali [1587 AD; webarchive]

// cc @martijn@lemmy.world ; @dannoffs@lemmy.sdf.org ; @Xariphon@kbin.social

top 34 comments

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[–] 20 points 4 months ago

Even a boring royalty free shot of some coffee beans would be better than this slop.

Anything to contribute martijn@lemmy.world, @dannoffs@lemmy.sdf.org, @Xariphon@kbin.social?

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    [–] 14 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Do you have a suggestion for an alternative?

    There is probably a permissively licensed photo out there somewhere.

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  • [–] 44 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    What about using the header photo to boost participation? There could be a monthly thread where people post pictures of their coffee setups, or a coffee shop they went to. Then people vote on the pictures, and the top one is used as the header photo for a month. Having your photo chosen takes you out of the rotation for a while. Something like that.

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    • [–] 39 points 4 months ago

    Yeah, this isn't the only community that a slop banner, and I hate that problem too. (The other one I know of off the top of my head is !show_and_tell@programming.dev .)

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    [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Wow those coffee beans look like dead overturned cockroaches

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    [+] -6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (11 children)

    How many of y'all donating to the server? If you use FOSS, what about each of those services?

    No? Then frankly I don't care. It's a banner image that was probably made locally on a 3080 that used the equivalent of 5 minutes or less of Baldurs Gate 3 to generate, and isn't being used for profit.

    Now, if the owner of c/coffee WAS a business, fuck them. But they aren't. Paying for an image when they already are paying server costs is also inconsiderate.

    Now if one of you like OP wants to graciously donate an image, either bought or made yourself, go ahead. You op talk the talk but can you walk the walk? Surely people here spend more than usual on coffee can afford a couple images to donate to the instance, instead of throwing out a ridiculous pompous linguistic embellishment. Could have been a lot more productive to have contacted the mods and offered rather than an articulate word vomit. Until you do though, you're still no different than the people who say they would do something but haven't. This is why FOSS creators etc burn out. If promises could pay bills...

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 4 months ago* (9 children)

    Apologies, but have you even read the messages, and comments, including?:
    - https://lemmy.world/comment/24355304;
    - https://lemmy.world/comment/24344381;

    Of course! I would sure take pictures for free for the so unmeasurably important as some whole Community header, banner, etc.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    But you haven't. Talk is free electricity isn't.

    I've seen too many in the FOSS and free public service community burn out because it's constant asks or talks but too many rare do's.

    If you couldn't take a picture, why did you assume the creators could? They couldn't, so they used the next best option to give something to a community they already donate for free.

    You know what could have been a better post then this? A contest for people to create banners etc to donate to the community.

    Instead it's just the usual pissing and moaning about AI use that contributed nothing.

    Well, not the usual - full of much more contrived loquacious wording than normal.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    As I see it, they have multiple options that don't require any effort:

    1. Not use a banner at all.
    2. Ask the community to make one for them.
    3. Use an image from any of the free services like Unsplash.

    There's no valid reason to use an unethical AI to create some poorly created image.

    And there's no reason for you to behave with such poor manners either. It's better to either keep quiet if you don't have anything positive or constrictive to come with, or preferably, be a positive person that lead with good examples.

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  • [–] -4 points 4 months ago

    1: depending how they set things up, it could be the installer asked for something, in a very specific banner size.

    2: they probably didn't think most people would care enough about a banner image. Which yeah, it's kinda not the most priority thing. Especially if they manage more than this community. No one in the community asked to run a contest, or offered art either, and it's not like you can just ask a stranger since not everyone can make one. It's c/coffee not c/art. This likely slipped past their mind to put further effort into it.

    3: Sizing would be an issue. Although unsplash has many images, it doesn't have many banner sized images. Then narrowing it down to coffee related ones and it's going to be even less.

    Actually, just checked, and their search filters do not have something for banner sized images, but what's funnier is it you're going the absolutist route on AI, you shouldn't use unsplash either, since the first thing they advertise personally themselves is AI (I have uBlock on so this is the site choosing this ad itself)

    Lastly, AI ethics are subjective. If you're running an open source model on your own hardware for non-profit reasons, I don't see that as unethical. You're not using a ton of electricity in that case, you're not making any money on what's produced, and you're not supporting a corporation.

    It's like the difference between using the open source AI model on Home Assistant to control your lights vs Amazon's Alexa.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (5 children)

    I am sorry, but it stills seems you haven't read both the messages referenced at:
    - https://lemmy.world/comment/24364958

    I am sorry to know that...
    Please stay safe!

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  • [–] -2 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Oh wow, a bunch of comments that say they would but haven't. Yeah, I read the "I would do that" comments already, but it seems you didn't get the point of being proactive rather than passive.

    Congrats on making my point.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    You are such a loser it's incredible.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago*

    It's amazing how much effort people will put into composing their blather and do nothing whatsoever to actually support what they're crying for somebody else to do. I think the banner is fine. People who turn an inconsequential image into an issue so they can pat themselves on the back for being social justice crusaders are just worthless jerkoffs.

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    • [–] -5 points 4 months ago

    I did look for another comm that had a better banner but this is the only active one that isn't full of tankies.

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    [+] -8 points 4 months ago (9 children)
    [deleted]
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    • [–] -1 points 4 months ago

    For those recommending unsplash instead of using AI, bad news - this ad shows even with uBlock Origin installed, front page:

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    [+] -55 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

    That's a bunch of babble just because of an AI-generated image.

    "b-but AI took our jeeerbs!"

    ...it's just a tool.

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    • [+] -38 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Are you going to pay an artist to make something? Steal some stock images? Make it yourself?

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  • [–] 32 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Easy to take a good pic yourself. If I wasn't away from home I'd go arrange a couple pieces of gear all neat and tidy and take a decent pic just as good if not better than the slop. Zero reason to generate this.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Also away from home, but also willing to do the same here. I even have an old-school coffee grinder like the slop generated. Got a couple of proper Bialetti Moka pots and a Hario grinder too. Maybe have my old gen Delonghi Magnifica in the background. I'll check back in here on Monday, I wanna see where this goes.

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Thank you for the response!

    I would, of course! But I haven't yet had a chance to take a photo of anything so marvelous as antique coffee grinder, and the closest coffee-related works I have are not so appropriate for the header banner I believe... such as a single mug on random background, or the following I've just found in backups I captured:
    - https://imgur.com/gallery/n29NSUM

    Direct preview of the first from gallery

    If we consider non-virtual (e.g., video-game screenshots) but physical photography, for more than 20 years I'm into photography of mostly nature as sky and landscapes, or human works as architecture and statues etc.:
    - https://imgur.com/gallery/6yh8JfC

    Hence, the fair competition mentioned! There are Members in the Community who have ineffably awesome photos or hand-crafted artworks, I believe!

    And, using LLM/"AI" is already a stealing, isn't it? Where:
    - 1. Vendors of these "AI" sell not even their works meat-groundprocessed through their algorithms;
    - 2. The actual, authentic, original authors of these works become unknown;

    The case of Getty Images (US) Inc v Stability AI Ltd, which went to trial in June 2025...

    In its claims, Getty alleged that Stable Diffusion was trained using subsets of the LAION-5B dataset, a dataset comprising 5.85 billion CLIP-filtered (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) image-text pairs, created by scraping links to photographs and videos, together with associated captions, from the web, including from Pinterest, WordPress-hosted blogs, SmugMug, Blogspot, Flickr, Wikimedia, Tumblr and the Getty Images websites.

    Source

    Related:
    - https://lemmy.world/post/48289309 (The Millions of Songs Mashed Into AI-Generated Music...)
    - https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671 (Extracting books from production language models...)

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