bulgariansumo

There's too much art I have here that isn't catalogued anywhere else for me to want to deactivate. I don't even plan on leaving. So unless this place shuts down, you should still be able to find all my stuff here. If you're planning on leaving and want to still find me, I post art on tumblr, twitter, and pixiv under the same username. I also post writing on Wattpad, Tapas, and Royal Road, if you're interested in that.

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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.

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 @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 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.