SaaSS censorship: art drawings
At least two art-generating online dis-services have
banned the word
"abortion".
One of them directly threatens users who try to generate
drawings on that topic.
This form of censorship seems to reject many other words, including
words for reproductive anatomy and for birth control products.
This form of censorship demonstrates the injustice of SaaSS (Service
as a Software Substitute). The user simply wants to run a particular
program, but
that program has never been released,
so the only way to run it is to connect to someone else's server which will run it for
the user. This is basically similar in injustice to a nonfree program,
but worse: the server operator can control who is allowed to use
the program (by requiring each user to make an account), snoop on all
the data the user provides to the server, and can even demand data
from the user for purposes of profiling or subsequent manipulation.
If the same program were released as nonfree software, that would not
respect the user's freedom either. For instance, it could contain
arbitrary censorship rules. However, unless it has a
back door
(which is not unheard of),
the developer could not remotely add more censorship to a copy that
a user has already installed.
Nonfree software and SaaSS are two unjust ways of making a program
available for use. The only just way is to release it as free software.
As for the other characteristics of some drawings that disappointed
some users for representing stereotypes, or the male gaze, different
users might have different preferences about those things. One user
might have different preferences on different occasions.
These programs can't think about those preferences, because they are
not a form of intelligence and have no understanding of anything, last
of all what an image might mean to a human looking at it.
To make such distinctions requires a human artist.