Thank you for your years of service!

I'm sure a lot of regular and occasional posters like myself appreciate that building and maintaining something like this is a ton of often underappreciated work, the kind that often only gets noticed on the rare occasion when something actually goes wrong and needs to be fixed ASAP.

You gave us a place to be EAs and be a part of a community of like-minded folk in a way that's hard to find anywhere else. For that I'm grateful, and I'm sure others are as well.

Again, thank you.

And, best of luck with wherever your future career takes you!

I agree it shouldn't be decided by poll. I'd consider this poll more a gauge of how much interest or support the idea(s) could have within the EA community, and as a starting point for future discussion if sufficient support exists.

I mostly just wanted to put forward a relatively general form of democratization that people could debate the merits of and see with the poll what kind of support such ideas could have within the EA community, to gauge if this is something that merits further exploration.

I probably could have made it even more general, like "There Should Be More Democracy In EA", but that statement seems too vague, and I wanted to include something at least a little more concrete in terms of a proposal.

I was primarily aiming at something in the core of EA leadership rather than yet another separate org. So, when I say new positions, I'm leaning towards them being within existing orgs, although I also mentioned earlier the parallel association idea, which I'll admit has some problems after further consideration.

I actually wrote the question to be ambiguous as to whether the positions in leadership to be made elected already existed or not, as I wanted to be inclusive to the possibilities of either existing or new positions.

You could argue that Toby's contribution is more what the commissioner of an artwork does than what an artist does.

On the question of harm, a human artist can compete with another human artist, but that's just one artist, with limited time and resources. An AI art model could conceivably be copied extensively and used en masse to put all or many artists out of work, which seems like a much greater level of harm possible.

That link has to do with copyright. I will give you that pastiche isn't a violation of copyright. Even outright forgeries don't violate copyright. Forgeries are a type of fraud. 

Again, pastiche in common parlance describes something that credits the original, usually by being an obvious homage. I consider AI art different from pastiche because it usually doesn't credit the original in the same way. The Studio Ghibli example is an exception because it is very obvious, but for instance, the Greg Rutkowski prompted AI art is very often much harder to identify as such.

I admit this isn't the same thing as a forgery, but it does seem like something unethical in the sense that you are not crediting the originator of the style. This may violate no laws, but it can still be wrong.

Can you cite a source for that? All I can find is that the First Amendment covers parody and to a lesser extent satire, which are different from pastiche.

Also, pastiche usually is an obvious homage and/or gives credit to the style's origins. What AI art makers often do is use the name of a famous artist in the prompt to make an image in their style, and then not credit the artist when distributing the resulting image as their own. To me, even if this isn't technically forgery (which would involve pretending this artwork was actually made by the famous artist), it's still ethically questionable.

AGI by 2028 is more likely than not

My current analysis, as well as a lot of other analysis I've seen, suggests AGI is most likely to be possible around 2030.

Vote power should scale with karma

I'm ambivalent about this. On the one hand, I'm partial to the ideal of "one person, one vote" that modern liberal democracies are built on. On the other hand, I do find scaling with karma in some way to be an interesting use of karma that makes it more important than just for bragging rights, which I like from a system design perspective.

Should EA avoid using AI art for non-research purposes?

In addition to reasons already given, I've recently starting coming round to the idea that we should straight up be boycotting AI that can potentially replace existing humans.

If we take, for instance, the ideas of PauseAI seriously, we should be slowing down AGI development in whatever way we reasonably can. A widespread boycott of certain forms of AI could help with this by reducing the market incentives that companies currently have to accelerate AI development.

Now, I don't think we should boycott all AI. AlphaFold for instance is a good example of a form of narrow AI that doesn't replace any humans because it does something complementary to what humans can do. Conversely, AI art models compete directly with human artists, much in the way future AGI would compete with all humans eventually.

It does seem to me that there is a lot of support already among artists and creatives in particular to boycott AI, so I think there's a better chance for this to gain traction, and is more tractable a method than trying to pause or ban AI development outright. Whereas pauses or bans would require government coordination, a boycott movement could come from individual acts, making it much easier for anyone to participate.

Edit: 

Just wanted to add, in some sense an AI boycott resembles going vegan, except with regards to AI issues instead of animal ones. Maybe that framing helps a bit?

Also, another thought is that if it becomes sufficiently successful, an AI boycott could allow for part of the future economy to maintain a "human made" component, i.e. "organic art" in the way organic food is more expensive than regular food, but there's still a market for them. This could slow down job losses and help smooth out the disruption a bit as we transition to post-scarcity, and possibly even give humans who want purpose some meaningful work even after AGI.