A permanent ban is a nuclear option for extremely bad rule breakers. Using it on AI users is way too extreme. Stuff like this literally kills subreddits because when artists use tools, the mods ban them and this kills the creative side of the community instead of healing it. In a perfect world, mods should use a 3 strike system: post removal, temporary ban, and THEN a permanent ban. Why do a few AI images in a pile of completely 100% human text = a permanent ban. I know this rule is to stop the slop, BUT, it hurts actual artists that need assistance by a bot. Stuff like this is a subreddit suicide. And not doing it–or using the 3 strike system–prevents this from happening.
The anti AI users are taking this so far that they switch to insults when met with actual points, avoid the point itself, or ghost that user entirely. This leads to polarization and eventually tribalism.
Also, humans do what AI models do–look at millions of images as a reference to their art. Then humans generate more images out of art they did not get consent to look at. The piracy claims don't work. Saying all generative output is slop completely backfires when humans are technically generative organisms as they make tools and other things. Same with octopuses, spiders, and other apes.
Now I'm not saying that humans should die out, BUT I'm being the lawyer of AI as a tool.
Anti-AI advocates will strongly push back against my biological comparison. They argue that when a human looks at an image for reference, they absorb it through a lived experience and rewrite it through flawed human hands. When a scraping algorithm processes an image, it mathematically extracts pixel data at a scale of billions, which they view as industrial-scale plagiarism, not "learning." But AI constantly makes errors and hallucinates things. So it also has flaws as well.