@grahamperrin OK. I understand your point.
The rule exists partly because we've had an almost endless stream of bots, malicious users, and similar accounts lately, to the point that I've had to restrict registrations even further. The intention is not to police opinions, but to prevent this kind of behaviour from making the Cafe a worse place for the people who are here.
There is also so much money circulating around AI right now that some people, or bots, are actively trying to get into communities like ours and subtly promote their paid services. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes much less so. That is one of the concrete reasons that led to this rule in the first place.
And just to be clear about the report you mentioned: threatening to stab someone in the face is obviously not acceptable here. That user was not on BSD Cafe, but on another instance, so I cannot enforce our rules there. What I can do, and what I did, is suspend that user's interactions with our server. Violence is not accepted here, whether it comes from inside BSD Cafe or from outside.
There are also other circumstances, which I won't go into again, that made me think that asking people not to *promote* AI is a reasonable way to protect the atmosphere of this community.
That doesn't mean people cannot talk about AI, disagree with the rule, criticise it, discuss its benefits, or have completely different opinions from mine.
What I want to avoid is every discussion turning into another occasion to repeat that AI will save the world, computing, humanity, or that replacing human skills with it is simply inevitable and everyone should accept it.
Until these technologies can be used in ways that are genuinely ethical, safe, transparent, and autonomous, I don't see promoting their current ecosystem as very different from promoting closed technologies and dependencies that can potentially cause harm.
So, for me, the rule is not against the technology itself. It is about how that technology is currently being developed, promoted, and used, and especially about the idea that it should be pushed everywhere, often at the expense of human skills and judgement.
I would genuinely be sorry to see you leave, but if this is not compatible with what you want from an instance, then of course I respect your choice.