As with all things involving a community, there are basic rules and guidelines to keep everyone safe! Most of them are common sense, but may be worth reading through anyway - especially if you plan to go to an IRL event.
A disclaimer on the disclaimer page: none of this has been finalized yet and will be subject to rewordings and such until it's been greenlit by the rest of the team, at which point changes will be clearly marked with date timestamps.
No but, seriously...
Breaking any of these rules will result in a warning; if particularly severe, you may be asked to leave the venue (a refund will not be provided). Repeated or severe violations may lead to being banned from our events and social spaces, being banned from the venue (even for events held by other groups/people), or legal action from either us or the venue's management.
Yes, I know, the dreaded A-word. It had to come up someday. This is in the process of being run by the rest of the Galaxian Recordings team, so the final guidelines - as well as the team's overall stance - may differ.
The vast majority of deep-learning or generative AI models - whether they generate text, images, or even audio - are trained via anything and everything that large companies are able to scrape from the entire internet. This is accomplished with bots similar to those used for search engines back in the day, but they're somehow significantly more inefficient and disruptive to webmasters of all sorts - many of which have taken direct action with scripts that block any incoming traffic that even resembles a bot or scraper, slowing down the average user experience as a side-effect.
Court cases over copyright and fair use continue to swirl around dozens of massive tech companies in their race to develop the "best" AI model, with no regard for either their energy usage or their sub-optimal hardware that they seemingly refuse to invest in.
The reputation of "AI" amongst the general public continues to plummet as tone-deaf investors who got rich off altcoins in 2020 continue to push for more always-online "AI integration" in any application they can think of - meanwhile, executives use this software to cut corners and costs at the expense of real employees further down the ladder.
It's a rapidly inflating bubble surrounded by extremely heated debates, a minefield of moral and legal grey areas, pointless debates about "freedom" in the context of LLM alignment or "censorship" (and a skyrocketing amount of "uncensored" generative AI services created solely out of spite), and an overarching hostility towards those who oppose generative AI for any reason. I don't know about you, but I really don't want to be there when the bubble pops like it did with previous "Web3" trends.
HOWEVER... Ethical AI can exist, made with material that is either public domain or provided with permission and/or with royalties and credit where either are due; but many of the big companies responsible for this AI bubble are unwilling to forfeit their profits and stop this downward spiral for the sake of ethics. The obvious choice would surely be to stop throwing money at the big online/cloud-based services and use local programs for generative AI instead, but aside from a marginally reduced load on the big companies' overworked, outdated, near-vampiric hardware, what does this accomplish? Most image gen models made by the general public are openly trained on copyrighted material, and no "non-commercial" license is going to stop others from misusing them for profit of some kind anyway; most LLM models are re-filters of models released by the very same companies that are slowing the internet down with their scrapers. As someone who uses commercial and legal "AI" voice synthesis software, I desperately want to believe in ethical AI in certain other fields (mainly text generation), but those beliefs are being burned to the ground as I watch more communities noticeably split apart over the very mention of "AI"; as I watch more companies use unrefined AI-generated imagery from an overbloated version of Stable Diffusion as a selling point. (I mean seriously, it's like they take the first result they get and don't bother to proofread or tweak it...)
...Besides, have you seen all the AI-generated eurobeat that's on YouTube recently?! We can't lose to that!
Basically, we ask that any contributors to Galaxian Recordings' events or albums refrain from using material entirely or mostly generated by services/models that are not confirmed to be ethically trained. If a service/model's developers do not outright say that it is trained on public domain/CC material and/or material given with permission, it is very likely not trained on such. If you're not sure, ask!
A few recognizable examples of things we won't allow under any circumstances in DJ performances submitted to GLXR events, songs provided for GLXR albums, or any material created to directly promote our projects:
A few recognizable exceptions:
Usage of AI contrary to these guidelines will usually lead to being warned by a member of staff - although each individual staff member's exact stances on AI vary, we try to give the benefit of the doubt to people who may be unaware of the impact of unethical generative AI services. If you continuously and knowingly use unethical generative AI even after being warned, you will most likely not be invited back to future projects. Acting aggressively towards any of the staff over the subject upon being warned, or lying about the source of AI-generated material (i.e. claiming it is your own work and not the work of AI) while contributing to a GLXR project may additionally lead to an immediate ban from our social spaces.
We do our best to make our fans and collaborators feel as safe as possible within our spaces, and take action whenever possible against people who disrupt these efforts for any reason.
Unfortunately, we are only human, and there are times where we have allowed collaborators to work with us without knowing of actions they have done, past or present, that would most definitely break our code of conduct and generally go against what we stand for as a circle.
If someone listed as a performer in a previously held event is known to have deliberately and consistently harmed/abused other people (including but not limited to other performers), or knowingly supports someone else who has done these things, they have most likely already been banned from our social spaces and will not be invited back to future projects. It's the very least we can do in the face of communities where it is shockingly common for victims of abuse to be silenced or pressured into proclaiming their abuser's "innocence".
If any past or present contributor's behavior concerns you, please privately contact one of the Galaxian Recordings team, and we will investigate to the best of our limited abilities - false accusations will not be tolerated. Please note that we do not have a public blacklist or "wall of shame", to dissuade harassment or "witch hunts" that could potentially backfire and instead empower perpetuators of abusive behavior.