I know it doesn’t help the overall problem, but since @stoecker doesn’t seem to be interested in resolving this, you can set the Advanced Preference help.displaymotd to false to stop showing this content at JOSM startup.
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I have just opened JOSM and saw a relatively harmless image with some seashells. I can’t see the history of what was there before but I’m pretty sure whatever it was it must have been an innocent mistake and not an attempt at raising temperatures at workplaces around the world.
Does that mean that the matter is resolved and we can go back to doing what we like to do, or is the current image also problematic?
As far as I know, the JOSM start page is kept in the (trac-based) JOSM wiki at https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/StartupPageSource where it can be modified by a number of different people; anyone requiring some sort of “sanitized” JOSM that will never show a message that might be found wanting should perhaps indeed follow @iandees’ suggestion.
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Oh you innocent child, it had muscular mice a day or two ago. (making the thumbnail as small as possible) - the issue is mostly using AI images begging us to translate JOSM (with Launchpad’s archaic interface)
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If I’m not mistaken, the startup image is hotlinked from a specific URL on the JOSM server and is not version-controlled. So anybody who has write-access to this URL can arbitrarily change the image without any means of accountability such as pull requests.
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@stoecker or you want some good image (but obviously non-AI) you can find some very, very good here : Commons:Quality images - Wikimedia Commons there is 387 724 images…
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what if the ai images are there on purpose, a menace that ai translation will be used if real people are not found?
wikimedia seems to have images that would be suitable for a similar campaign
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The puzzle is, when one parses that page…
Done!
(The falling stars near year end bug me more… not all users believe that what came out of Judea.)
While stoecker hasn’t replied to this thread (and so has given no apology either), the image has changed to a non-animal one, so it’s fair to assume he has read this thread.
Atleast it’s now safe for work again, but who knows if it’ll stay that way.
In either case: it’s still using AI images to ask for HUMAN translators. Which is still a joke of an idea.
Until they stop using AI, I don’t think anyone should bother translating for JOSM. Because clearly they don’t care for human labor.
Again @stoecker we’re not asking you to commision a 200$ art piece… we’re asking you to post a genuine image. Doesn’t matter the quality.
If anything, a shitty drawing in paint would be better because it would be genuine.
This is a 
thing I made on a paint app on my phone. But atleast it feels genuine. You’re free to use it, public domain.
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On the plus side, if you change your system date to show the falling winter map icons the secure connection breaks and you get the text without the image.
The last couple days JOSM has shown me an image imploring me to “IMROVE ONLINE HELP”. I assume this is meant to be ‘improve’ as ‘imrove’ isn’t in the dictionary. I don’t know how much I’m meant to read into them taking the P.
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It was a great confirmation that it was indeed ai images (if there was any doubt…)
FWIW, the actual image is not attached to that page, but linked using a plugin macro named “VarImage” (which I haven’t been able to find the source for) that looks in a directory named “icons” for the given directory (in this case, “JOSM_2025_I18N_Contest”), then (I presume) picks a random file from that directory (which, at the time of writing, seems to only include one file, named “fox.jpg”).
I presume access to upload files in the “icons” directory resides with whoever administers the josm.openstreetmap.de Trac instance, whose configuration does not seem to be available (at least, I couldn’t find it).
Do with this as you will, I just wanted to dig into the details.
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I am intrigued by this selection of three native animals. I haven’t seen that many lions on the mean streets of Charlbury recently.
What animal would you (or anyone else) suggest as representative of the UK?
Going by what’s on television this would obviously be a meerkat. 
By what you see on the street probably a bedraggled fox.
Plenty of lions on the coat of arms though. Just missing the unicorn.
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A lot of artists, especially small artists, are very opposed to AI images like these. All these AI systems are massive copyright fraud. I think if you’re managing a big FLOSS project, you should have known that AI images like this can be so radioactive.
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A cat, obviously.
(from 2019) “France’s EU minister names her cat ‘Brexit’ because ‘he meows loudly to be let out but won’t go through the door’”
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It needs to be pointed out that the juries are (literally) still out on this from a legal pov (with just one case of many resolved and that was a bit tangential to this and in the US). Even if there was a groundswell of support for expanding intellectual property rights to cover such use, it is likely going to be tricky to do so without impacting rights that current IP legislation provides for (transformative and fair use) and that limit the rights of the creator.
Better to reject AI slop on the grounds that it is just ugly and tasteless.
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Irrespective of AI, I think sexy mice are ugly and unproffessional. They should be removed, and I am no longer updating the Danish translation until they are.
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A reference to Richard the Lionheart?
I dislike the images being forced down my throat (AI or human generated!), but that “IMROVE” was a gold nugget, alone worth this whole hubbab. (That American English translation needs improving, get it?). And meme potential is through the roof!
If one is managing a big FLOSS project, one should have also known that having e.g. Meta as a platinum corporate sponsor can be so radioactive. And that is IMHO waaaay more insulting (and relevant to OSM) than displaying random pictures in one of the editors (which you can turn off).
I remember when the PhotoShop has started becoming popular that people were disgusted by the idea of using software to “improve” photographs (some still are). You should’ve setup up the scenery and lightning and framing and camera settings and DOF and all the other minutia of art of photography, instead of using fewe easy software clicks to automagically remove most of the effort in making a good photograph!
(And before that, people very vastly annoyed by the very existence of camera, allowing every random stranger with access to it to make an picture in seconds with just a few minutes of training, stealing a living out of artist portrait painters – yeah, the result was not the same, but it did cover huge number of use cases, so it proliferated).
Yet nowadays, you can hardly avoid your smartphone automatically “beautifying” (behind your back) even the photos you take, and that has become a norm.
Not that I approve of AI; just stating my opinion that stopping escalating AI usage is probably highly unlikely without major civilization collapse (for starters, to get rid of them, one would probably have to remove financial incentive.)
While there is huge usefulness of AI in e.g. biology and astronomy, in a hands of a common persons it will lead to unbeliveable amounts of enshittification, due to human nature of greediness and laziness. If you can have AI write your homework, why would waste time to do it yourself? (yeah, there are reasons, but try explaining that to your teenager). If you can have AI write that documentation in seconds while you’d waste many hours and days, even if handmade result is better, how many people will succumb to alluring easy way? Far too many of them, in my experience.
Here you touched a sore point. IMHO, copyright is fraud in itself. It’s government-enforced monopoly promoting slavery of not only the body, but the free will itself. If AI disturbance will lead to abolishment of copyright, I’ll be the first to welcome our new AI overlords!
When I (say) buy a pair of (even hand-made) shoes, the seller doesn’t get to dictate in which situations I may wear them and in which not, how many hours per day am I allowed to wear them, whether I can upload pictures of them on Mastodon, or whether I can share them with my brother or give them to my neighbor, or if I may change the laces. The very though of such restrictions would be ridiculous!
Yet if I buy hand-made picture (or a song, or a software, or a textbook, or even a corporate-made movie), that author (or far more likely, the corporation they’ve been forced to sell their rights to) is able to have exactly such rule over me for the rest of my life, with threat of more years of prison then if I killed someone in cold blood, because I indulged in “help thy neighbor” (e.g. sharing that textbook I bought with my poverty-striken neighbor so they at least have a fighting change for better life).
We are here: The Right to Read - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
How do people manage to accept copyright as something “normal” (much less “desirable”!) is beyond me. Oh, wait, I know – the money motive. The same one which makes using quick and free AI output desirable.
So how about having same rights for everyone, no matter the chosen profession? Set a price on your art (or shoes or piece of software or whatever) as you wish, but once you’ve been paid and sale completed, you no longer can dictate what I can do with the thing I bought fairly.
Now, I get it - the artists feel the rug is being pulled beyond them and that their way of living likely to have to change drastically. I guess that is how horse-drawn carriage drivers must have felt with advancement of motor car, or pottery artisans with advancements of manufacture and industrial revolution. It sucks, and I feel their pain (and my own, as a free software developer competing against Microsoft Copilot AI who have taken my work without compensating me and is ignoring license terms). But extolling copyright and making it even stronger is hardly the move in the right direction.
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