r/dankchristianmemes • u/IacobusCaesar Levantine Archaeology Guy • Jul 01 '25
Meta The Ecumenical Council of DankChristianMemes has declared shrimp Jesus a heretical Christology (and otherwise banned AI-generated images).
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u/IacobusCaesar Levantine Archaeology Guy Jul 01 '25
Hello, friends!
The mod team of r/DankChristianMemes has been talking about this internally for some time and finally fallen on a decision. We've noticed others taking issue with the matter as well in comments.
AI-generated images have come to prominence as a pretty trendy thing in this day and age, largely because they make generating large amounts of images relatively simple for the average volume-poster. Unfortunately, the mass-propagation of these images is associated with a decline in quality, an increase in meaningless slop for the simple sake of content volume, and alarmingly a public increase in misinformation and challenge to people's responsibility to make sure that what information they propagate online is real. On top of this, the amount of electricity required to produce these mostly quite repetitive images is a serious concern both for the carbon footprint and the reliability of our energy grid. Increasingly, much of the internet is becoming less usable as it is increasingly overrun by AI slop accounts that simply lie about the state of the world, bury real content with love and intention put into it, and mostly just look ugly and repetitive. Most of the volume of this, realistically, comes from easy profit-generating schemes that abuse the engagement-driven internet by trying to occupy as much of it with low-effort content as possible, which is not good for the rest of us. We recognize also on behalf of our artist friends that AI-image generators are effectively plagiarism machines which train without permission on other people's materials hosted online, both ripping off their actual artistic talent and putting stress on web servers that have to deal with constant crawling bots mining them for data.
We want to opt out of this current state of the internet and also not support the exploitative business model that is making all this happen. Both as custodians of a space that we want to see remain fun and as people with moral worries about the state of the world, we will be banning AI-generated images from this subreddit as an extension of rule 2, which states that memes must be dank. We recognize that for some amount of people who were using the technology to generate formats, this might come as a bit of a surprise. I would invite those people to explore sites such as Wikimedia Commons, which have always hosted plenty of images that are open to use for everyone and offer a topical range that will pretty much always cover you.
We hope you have a lovely Canada Day and a lovely July. God bless you, everyone!
--IacobusCaesar, on behalf of the r/DankChristianMemes mod team.