So I was given this response by a dev about the AI thing who I have since blocked, primarily for what I'm about to talk about in this post.
I want to talk about your right to absolutely be critical, mean, negative and angry about star stable online if you want to, and why that in no way, shape, or form is "harassment".
There's this saying in bookworld, "no authors in review spaces, reviews are for readers". Its intention is to say that, no matter how much you as an author want to know how people are reacting to your book, you do not go chasing down reviews because they're not meant as a learning opportunity for you, they're meant to let others know more about your product. You do not watch videos reviewing your book. You do not read through your goodreads. You do not intentionally seek out the two or one star reviews. You are, however, encouraged to find a friend who can look through the reviews for you, find positive or constructive ones, and give them to you.
If you want to learn how to improve for your next book, you make use of the beta readers. You make use of the sensitivity readers. You make use of the editors. There is nothing a review can say that will help you, because the book the review belongs to has already been written.
In a similar vein, I do not believe developers should involve themselves in fandom spaces. Yes, I will be overjoyed at an Ismael tweet, because that is Ismael's own space. That's his world. That's his presence, he's allowed to exist online if he wants to and Ismael is still allowed to talk about SSO on his account like how authors are allowed to talk about their books, because he does not go chasing down sso neg about his own work, the server upkeep. I, as the "reviewer", do not go into his tweet replies and let him know how much I hate the most recent quests or how bad a horse breed is (much like how I, if I don't like a book, don't go on twitter and tag the author to tell them that their book sucks). I save that for my space, the reviewer space. SSOblr, in this instance.
In our own space, as reviewers, we are allowed to be critical and negative about the product we consume, because we understand that it's about the work, not the people behind it. In many instances, we don't even know who the person behind what we're critiquing is. There is also the assumption, the hope, that the person will never see it, because developers, like authors, shouldn't hunt down reviews of their work, and if they do find something that is critical, it should be a standard that they either ignore it, or read it but don't respond to it.
We've had a grown woman on this platform beef with and publicly call out a teenager for expressing the opinion that the quests she made weren't good, with the justification that the review was "hurtful". Plenty of reviews have the potential to be hurtful, it comes with the profession. That's why you don't read them. Even then, no one who expresses critical thoughts does so specifically to upset or hurt the person behind the work, far from it. That's why we stick to our tiny individual corners of the internet and don't chase you down to tell you our opinion.
Within Star Stable Entertainment, the friends an author might use to collect positive and constructive reviews are your support team (which, unfortunately, isn't all that great. Hooray for being told to overlook antisemitism) and social media accounts. All you need to know about how people react to you and your work should be filtered through them.
If the person who used AI art feels targeted and harassed, that is on them. We didn't know it was even one single person who did it, you as a company singled them out to us so that we'd stop blaming you as a whole. Furthermore we don't know who it is, we physically cannot harass them. Who do we tag? who do we send messages to in order to harass them? No one. They would need to go on SSOblr and look through the tag after a massive controversy caused by them, purposefully searching for outrage. That's not on us.
You are fully within your right to have public opinions about the content you consume, and if a developer oversteps the creator/reviewer boundary you are not the one who should be apologizing.