Unlike a lot of communities, yours at least started on the correct side. Better to ban outright, than to slowly realize that you should have banned it.
Encouraging a culture of not using AI works to an extent, but I also tire of threads claiming the parent post is AI. There isn't a sure-fire way to know one way or another.
The barrier of rejecting LLM content is a basic pre-requisite of any community of humans directly engaging with other humans in good faith.
There are always ways to achieve that: long vetting process and in-person meetings, high membership price, trusted computing verification, etc. It’s an arms race, but you only have to make it not worth it to the attacker.
Therefore, communities will either die, become much less accessible, or delegate human verification arms race to a service—most likely paid solutions provided by the very industry that is providing the products killing those communities[0].
[0] For example, see Altman’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain).
We had no problems with people using it and posting elsewhere, it was the demands that we must allow it that were problematic and made us question whether we were doing the right thing.
No regrets now, though, as we see competitors being flooded with AI slop and they are too invested in it to change now.
Now I see it as the perfect tool for impostors.
People often confuse freedom of speech, with freedom to access a specific platform for speech.
Its dead wrong, I dont know why people would want to be in a community where they arent wanted.
This is standard predatory behavior. Child abusers hanging out with kids, weirdos hanging out near the women's clothing department, etc.
It's usually a clear indication of the sort of people you don't want to associate with in your online community. They bring a net negative to the table.
Most adults understand why men should not, generally, be hanging out in the women's clothing department. When accidental violations of those norms are pointed out, they apologize and correct. Creepers, OTOH, gonna creep.
For their own well-being, online communities should police repeated violation of social norms. Otherwise the normals leave and creepers take over.
(I can't help thinking of the Father Ted Christmas special, where a group of priests have to organize a quasi-military operation in order to escape from Ireland's largest lingerie department without a scandal.)
When posts fall within "acceptable" then it does not actually matter where it comes from. Logorrhea, massively offtopic, and/or shitposting are bad when humans do it. Those should suffer the same fate.
Historically it was tolerable, but has become the highest priority today because machines have cranked up the volume. If we mis-identify human garbage as robot nonsense it does not matter.