Lotus's profile

Nooooooo! Don't eat that! It's poisonous! Probably. Maybe. I don't know. But neither do you!

@BonappleTeeth
Why not?

Darling.

Bro.

Take a step back from the keyboard, breath in a few times. Maybe go outside and take a walk. Listen the birds sing. Maybe come back inside, watch a movie. Fap. And generally chill the fuck out.


It's a picture of a cute horse on the internet. There is no reason to be this upset. I don't come to my little pony because it's my favorite arena of battle. I come to my little pony because it's cute. I like it. It makes me happy. I have enough shit going on in real life to cause stress and problems. I come to pony to get away from that.

PonerPics featured images is not the Olympics. It's not the top competitive race for the absolute best artists. It's not meant to be where you put your ego on display. It's where we feature artists, including fairly new ones. We do certainly prefer the images that are most personally satisfying to look at, and we do try to feature the best artwork by the artist. But it's not anyone's birthright. It's not a trophy. We've featured multiple shitpost images before. Just type in "numget AND featured image" and you get three results.

Take a look at this beaut

Look at it. Admire it. Save a copy if you need to. That image was a featured image on PonerPics. Was it featured because some kind of algorithm determined it required the most effort to create of anything posted that week, or because it required the most skill, or because it got the most upvotes, or because it was better than anything posted by BatFang? No. I featured it because it's fun. Because that's what I think My Little Pony should be. Fun. I like fun, creative energy, and I want to promote that. The featured image isn't there to feed artist egos. It isn't there to be coveted. It's there to provide something nice to look at and for the artist to hopefully get that little boost that encourages them to make more.

I chose this image because it is cute and pretty to look at. It still has 23 upvotes to 3 downvotes. I changed the featured image not because of the over the top outrage of two people, but because the artist asked me to. And now the featured image is a cute little version of background pony image. I like that one too.

>Apologize
No. Because I didn't realize that the image was in any way AI assisted when I chose it. And don't give me some bullshit about "oh it's so easy to find out." No. Boneapple even posted a comment on this image on day 3 of the feature saying "it's cute," which it objectively is, and he didn't know why people say AI was involved. It was only an hour and five minutes before he made another post saying it may be AI assisted. He can say "it only took me three minutes!" but the receipts are right there for anyone to view. Same thing with Wallbeige. He waited three days, including posting in the forums, before trying to jump in. Neither of the two would have even known this image was AI assisted if there hadn't been that comment suggesting it. So no shit I didn't know. And I'm not going to apologize for something they didn't recognize either.

And no, I'm not going to spend an hour and five minutes on every featured image trying to make sure that it isn't AI assisted, or a trace of an existing image, or an edit, or whatever. Obviously I don't want to feature any kind of trace, edit, or AI image, but I'm not going way out of my way either. This is a hobby for me as it is for you. I'm not going to do that. I see cute pony, I like it. What I do spend significant time on when choosing featured images, is to make sure artists aren't featured too often, to look at which artists haven't been featured in a while, and to find uploads by new artists.

Now let's get back to ponies