DeviantART back at it again supporting AI over artists despite the recent court favouring AI losing copy-right.
I don't give a shit if you support Israel or not, if you start acting like a jackass I'll treat you as such! Pick a lane and stick to it dA, G-ddammit!
(p.s. Yes I left the "team" a message giving them a piece of my mind and stating the legality of this nonsense given AI cannot be copyrighted, and how this could be crypto-farmers rather than real artists.
NO - they have not responded directly. Alas, I have the people behind me. So... that counts.)
Hey y’all new art style just dropped. It’s called AntAI art. The idea is you purposefully make something as ugly as humanly possible and then post it to deviantart with the “authorized for inclusion in third-party AI datasets” checkbox marked.
There's a setting under General where you can mass opt out of the AI stuff; I checked some of my work and it seems to have applied. I saw in the notes of that last post that this may not be working for everyone (may need to wait a few days for new features to stop being buggy) but wanted to share to maybe save someone the hassle
DeviantArt just messed up royally this time, and I’m a little obsessed. I wrote up what happened in a journal on dA for people who might’ve not known, and I’m gonna paste it here in case anyone wants to know exactly what they did so wrong. (Btw, deviations are what pictures on DeviantArt are called.)
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For those of you who don't know what's going on with everyone leaving, I'm going to try to explain.
DeviantArt launched its own AI generator, DreamUp. AI art generators are already pretty controversial among the art community. Most artists I've seen despise AI generated images with few exceptions. Also, artists in general tend to like making their own art.
One of the main concerns about AI art is that the datasets, the collections of images used for AI to make the images, use artists' pictures without their consent. DeviantArt acknowledged this by saying DreamUp won't be using any deviations as part of its dataset. However, DreamAI is using Stable Diffusion, one of the AI models that DeviantArt admitted used art from this website without permission.
DreamUp won't be using any deviations because it's running on Stable Diffusion's dataset, which already did.
Along with this, DeviantArt also announced noAI, a way for users to mark their deviations as not being authorized for use by AI. What it does is attach a message to your deviation that basically says "Please don't use this picture."
As of now, this means nothing, but if there's an AI model in the future that's trained to care about that, it will offer some protection to your deviations. DreamUp might actually be an AI that will abide by this in the future, but again, it's running on Stable Diffusion's dataset, which has long since used most if not every deviation uploaded until now. Pictures that have already been used in the dataset can't be taken out.
DeviantArt announced DreamUp and noAI together, which made it seem like they were connected, which they aren't. This led to a lot of confusion. Some people thought that DreamUp would be using everyone's deviations unless they used noAI and opted out of having their pictures used by AI. Others thought that noAI covered third party AI, but not DreamUP, meaning that DreamUP would be free to use deviations whenever they wanted to. This wasn't helped by DeviantArt's wording.
On the checkbox option to opt a deviation out of being used by AI, it says "Not authorized for inclusion in third-party AI datasets," but doesn't mention DreamUP. I think this is because DreamUP is running on third-party AI datasets, but they could've included DreamUP just so people were sure.
This wasn't helped by DeviantArt launching the system in a way where everyone's deviations were allowed to be used by AI by default. Originally, if you wanted to use noAI and not have your deviations used by AI, you'd have to go into the edit section of every single deviation and mark a textbox. For users with hundreds or thousands of deviations, this was near impossible. Some did it anyway, others decided that deactivating would be more convenient. Like I said earlier, technically their deviations were stolen before this even started, but a lot of people didn't realize that at the time.
Also there are people who've lost access to their account or have passed away that don't have the option to not have their deviations used by AI. People realized this and were understandably upset.
Since then, I think it's been changed so that everyone is opted out by default, but this sparked so much controversy and chaos that that announcement got buried. Plus some people felt like it was too little too late, and others were still concerned about them using Stable Diffusion's dataset.
There's also some other things that went down like a twitter voice call where DeviantArt and Twitter user @arvalis tried to voice some of these concerns to DeviantArt's execs. The execs didn't listen, from what I've heard, and it's still publicly available to listen to. After that, DeviantArt hosted a panel where they apparently missed the point of why people were upset with any of this.
The cherry on top is that people were looking for a place to post art since Twitter is in an uncertain position right now. Other art sites that have tried to recapture old DeviantArt haven't had good luck. DeviantArt had the perfect chance to get new users from all of this, and now people are mass deactivating.
And DreamUp's images don't even look that good.
So, hopefully that explains this mess for people who don't know.
Deviantart is introducing a new tool that allows people to generate AI art. Here is a link to said post, if you'd like to see it for yourself: Twitter Post and Deviantart Post.
DreamUp is an AI image generation tool, just like all the others out there. Feed it prompts, it goes through its database of stolen art, and shits out a piece of crap image.
You, as a DA user, are automatically opted into allowing your work to be used in this database.
If you currently have a DA or have had one at any point in your life, your already uploaded art is automatically opted into this. You will need to manually go and opt out of everything you've uploaded.
However, this only refers to disallowing 3rd party AI datasets from using your work (from my understanding, as well as the understanding of others), it does not refer to DA's own DreamUp.
To tell DA you don't wish for your work to be used on DreamUp, you will have to request that they exclude your username by filling out this form: Google form. This takes about 10 days.
I want to end this by saying two things:
1. Please speak up about this on DA. Make a huge stink. Use your voice.
2. If you plan on deleting your DA because of this, please delete all of your artwork first! You art does not get deleted when you delete your DA, unless you deleted it beforehand (to my knowledge).
Anyways, spread the word. People need to know about this, and I don't think many former DA users are aware of this.
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EDIT #1: Apparently they can reject the form. :')))) wow..
EDIT #2: They're adding the ability to opt out of multiple uploads at once: Twitter Post.
Edit #3: Apparently, you are now opted out by default.
For anyone following my account that uses Deviantart, they’ve just launched an AI image generator that pulls from its users’ artwork automatically. If you don’t want your artwork to show up in their generator, you need to opt-out ASAP.
People can and will take the images from this generator and post them claiming they “made” them themselves- if you want to avoid your artwork getting stolen, you need to go to Account Settings > General > Tell AI Datasets They Can't Use Your Content to opt-out. For more information, check out https://twitter.com/IanFayArt/status/1591116114926653440 on twitter- my understanding isn’t as extensive but it’s important to get the word out as much as possible.
ohh my god. what the hell has deviantart done with their platform. AI-art?? seriously dude? i just started to take off just a little with my art on there even though it doesnt get much attention anyway. i might move here to post my art instead.
