The problem is the anti-genAI crowd show up in numbers

Sorry that your position is massively unpopular?

What data are you basing this ridiculous claim off? It’s already been thoroughly debunked. In reality most folks simply don’t care about it, or are ok with using genAI. That’s certainly true of our instance users, in any case. And looking at genAI posts in this community, they have way more upvotes than downvotes. Nobody has been able to explain to me how that equates to GenAI as being “massively unpopular”. It’s unpopular with a bunch of liberals on LW, and a handful of mostly western leftists who are so entrenched in the neo-liberal economic mindset that they can’t conceive of fighting against copyrights. Of course artists should be properly paid, but not via this ridiculous system of copyright law which mainly acts to protect corporate interests over individuals.

How is this post an example of that when it isn’t tagged?

It is mentioned in the original post that it is an AI generated image, which is why this discussion started in the first place because it wasn’t otherwise obvious. I’m saying even though this post was tagged, it didn’t stop off-topic hate comments about genAI from derailing the comments.

Does “saying AI is bad” count as “significant bullying and harassment?” What about, “saying comments shouldn’t be removed for criticizing AI?” Because apparently those things count as, “trolling” so I’m not sure what standards you’re using here.

This is a disingenuous comment. The removal reason for those off topic comments wasn’t “bullying and harassment” it was “comment trolling” which is why there were only removals and no bans. If the post isn’t about AI then yes, that’s just comment trolling as far as I’m concerned. Online bullying and harassment over this topic is absolutely occurring, whether or not you are aware of it. One case is documented in the [email protected] community post I previously mentioned. We moderate this instance accordingly to the overwhelming majority preference of our instance users on this topic, and I don’t apologize for it.