Regarding TF captions: I don’t personally have a complaint as long as they don’t overwhelm everything else - they’re not as engaging as other content, but they can fill out a healthy community.

But /r/transformation had some very reasonable purposes behind banning AI art - first and foremost that AI art is uniquely ill-equipped to provide good TF art, due to the interpolation needed between a first and final form. AI can surely shift the pixels around to make a waifu picture more mermaid-y, but it’s not going to have consistency in the ways needed to build a good result.

I think having a separate community for that is meaningful and worthwhile (a la /r/aiexpansionhentai, which used AI for a subset of TF that’s much easier to automate), and when AI art gets good enough (and humans get good enough at wielding it) the conversation is worth revisiting.