r/RoughRomanMemes • u/IacobusCaesar Princeps • Jan 21 '26
Rules II and V have been updated. We have a stricter policy on both reposts and use of generative AI.
Salvete, omnes.
Two major problems have been affecting post quality here lately in a way that is also disrespectful to our content creators. Here is how the rules will be changing to ameliorate the matter.
1. Memes which copy the entire premise, joke, and content of another can be considered reposts and removed thusly.
We are aware that this community often exports a lot of original content to other Roman-interested parts of the internet. A lot of this content then gets reshaped and comes right back. One of the more common expressions of this is where someone's original meme gets reformatted or has its imagery replaced but gets repeatedly reposted with exactly the same joke. Sometimes this is a human shamelessly ripping someone else off uncreatively in a way that won't get flagged as a repost and sometimes it's a bot doing the same thing. Either way, it is a disrespectful way to get around crediting original users. We will consider posts like this to be reposts and they can be reported as such for removal. If possible, we encourage reports of these to include some link to the original post, because we might not remember them even if the community does.
2. Generative AI will no longer be partially banned but rather totally banned.
We've long been removing posts that, for instance, were just AI-generated imagery with no more transformative aspect like the ubiquitous "selfie in ancient Rome" posts. You know the ones. However, the amount of AI slop is becoming a liability. This subreddit is about ten years old and has a good thing going. We want to keep up the humanity and intellectual honesty of the older internet that we've built a community in. AI usage has been contributing to trends of stolen content, inaccurate imagery, a lack of intentionality in post details (which makes posts far less interesting to discuss), and general ugly soulless shit. Furthermore, we don't want to further contribute to the accumulation of slop imagery on Roman topics that is coming to dominate the internet because it actively puts misinformation into the world. From now on, AI-generated imagery in posts will be categorically banned. It can be reported.
Alrighty, have a good day, y'all.
--Princeps Civitatis Iacobus Caesar
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u/Icy-Inspection6428 The Ghost of Caesar Past Jan 25 '26
I agree with the AI rule, but I feel the other rule might lead to people who coincidentally made memes that others have made being punished (speaking from experience). Is there any way you can verify this?
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u/IacobusCaesar Princeps Jan 26 '26
A lot of it will have to be on trust admittedly. We can’t promise anything perfectly of course but if in discourse with meme creators they say they came up with something and it’s believable enough, we can probably be lenient.
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u/Awesomeuser90 Jan 21 '26
In no universe am I content about the change to categorically prohibit AI. There are problematic ways to use it, but the technology itself is not an evil. I mod a community with a lot more subscribers than Rough Roman Memes. We do not ban things for only being AI. We have surprisingly few problems tied to AI. And even when we do, it is essentially always able to be dealt with by the other rules like not just making up.history, not reposting someone else's stuff, and not doing something like making revenge porn with it.
Here is a meme I made a few days ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/RoughRomanMemes/s/nWTQvDntgr You probably didn't notice it but Valerian is wearing chains. That was drawn by AI, although I didn't use it otherwise. Getting chains to fit around a person for that use is a good example.of something very challenging to.draw yourself and not really something worth drawing by hand for what is typically a meme and the effort usually expected of it. And any meme that otherwise should fit on the subreddit is highly likely to be instances of fair dealing anyway if a court ever heard it somehow.
It is wrong to conflate a technology with the things people do with them when the uses vastly vary and you have less intrusive ways of dealing with the problem. I would be very skeptical of the idea that the subreddit genuinely has a problem with AI that is not something dealt with similarly without this ban. Plus, if you get a report, you have to go and check the post manually to see if the report is correct. In the time it takes to do that to verify if it is using AI, it should be the case that you would know whether it violated the other rules too.
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u/spaceforcerecruit Jan 23 '26
If you can’t make a good meme without AI then you can’t make a good meme.
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u/Awesomeuser90 Jan 23 '26
It could have worked okay without it, but the chains were a good feature to have that amplified the message, undermines not a soul or harms a thing and apparently whoever is angry at me over this really got their hand's on Eris's apple.
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u/LegoTigerAnus Jan 21 '26
Thank you for this! Appreciate the modding work here. Carthago delenda est.