A space for scientists, researchers, and lab workers to share experiment fails, lab wins, and PI woes. Do you need advice, a place to vent, or just some lab-life humor? Want to share your big successes, your awesome protocols, and tricks of the trade? Join your fellow labrats.
All volunteer efforts are welcome, and using AI tools to support volunteer work is completely reasonable to me.
I personally value well-crafted human-made art more highly than AI-generated art. If someone wants to invest the time to create original icons and donate them, I am always very happy to see that!
That said, requiring unpaid contributors to meet a craftsmanship standard before they are allowed to help does not seem constructive to me. Volunteer communities usually work best when people contribute with the time, skills, and tools they actually have available.
A middle-ground alternative to AI-generated work is searching through Creative Commons assets, but even that still takes time to source, filter, adapt, and integrate. Expecting volunteers to always provide fully custom artwork or spend significant additional time curating assets does not seem like a fair expectation to me.