Regarding DeviantArt
Until further notice (and possibly forever) I am suspending submission of new poses to my DeviantArt gallery. I am not closing the account or removing anything from the gallery so please don't feel you have to rush over and start downloading things - I'm just not posting anything new.
In case you are not chronically online and missed the drama this week:
DeviantArt introduced a 'noai' tag that inserts metatag information into all deviation pages telling AI scrapers to not use what it finds on that page. But the roll out on this was very bad. On release, they were making users opt in one deviation at a time. This was obviously burdensome for people who have been on DA for a decade (or more!) who had hundreds if not thousands of Deviations.
It also excluded people who did not have access to old accounts as well as artists who were dead. They switched courses on this after a huge community backlash. First they introduced a gallery wide opt out option and then finally reversed directions completely and made all art on DA marked "noai" unless a user specifies they want to opt in to AI use.
The noai tag on it's own even with the poor rollout could have been a celebratory moment. DA could've been seen as the one art site attempting to protect artists.
Instead, they paired this announcement with the release of their own hosted AI generator called DreamUp which runs on a dataset that was trained using art scraped from a lot of places, including DeviantArt.
They have made a big deal about how they plan to modify the dataset for their AI to not include sources from artists who don't want their art used this way but it's pretty obvious to me at least that caring about what artists want their art used for it not part of DeviantArt's core (haha) values anymore. They rushed into this AI space professing they "had to" because building their own would have "taken too long" and honestly it's all just falling really flat for me. Their interview with RJ Palmer made it very clear they have one priority here which is to boost and promote the use of their AI regardless of what the system they're using has done to their own artists in its construction.
I don't even care if my pose refs are used to train AI and I don't have enough art on DA that I care about to even worry about that part for myself, I'm just so fed up with the direction DA's leadership has taken here and how backhanded it feels.
The team I work with to help me with marketing and social media has been recommending to me for years to build my own self hosted gallery. They already have a proof of concept build for a self hosted set up where I can have folders for themes, a tag/search system, and a blog-to-mailing-list set up. They have even gone so far as to put the building blocks down for subscription based memberships if I decide I need them in the future. (I am not leaving Patreon - but at least this way, I can have a viable alternative. These companies are really out here making it hard for creators at like... every turn and I just don't want to be blindsided again and again.)
I am hoping to start crowdfunding close to the start of the new year to fully build out a new free gallery site. Short term it will be a place where I can post my new, free poses for people. Long term it might eventually become where my paid and subscription based stuff is hosted. Super long term I hope for it to become a hub of free resources from many different providers, similar to how Resources & Stock category was on DeviantArt before Eclipse. More on that much, much later.
I tried to keep this succinct and not too much of a rant. If anyone would like more details and information please feel free to ask. ♥
Comments (21)
Super late to the conversation as I catch up with my backlog of Patreon blog posts, but I think you're right on the money about building your own platform. As someone currently looking for a different way to host their stock outside of Deviantart thanks to this mess, my ears also perk at the idea of you making a platform for others to share. I want to host my own site and have the capability, but what I lack is time and funding. Either way, seems like you're on the right track already having launched your site in the interim. Excited to see how you'll evolve with more independence!
Fingers crossed I can built it out that much! 😍 ✨
I had been defending DA for years, but after this they lost me, even if they backtracked by the end of the day they have lost my good will. This sucks.
Honestly yeah, same. This one really feels personal
I haven't been paying attention to DA except to pop in for five minutes to accept art into the groups I am holding open... But reading this, now I understand why all a sudden literally HUNDREDS of pieces a day are suddenly being pulled out of all my groups the last few days. And I don't blame them one bit.
Ahhh yep that's why
Thank you muchly for the update, and please, please let us know when you start crowdfunding next year? I hit a buttload of unexpected expenses in the last couple of months that'd made me badly short but I want to chip in after the first of the year when things are more stable again. I'm sure any website you guys come up with will be fantastic!! And, on dA... geeze. I'm gradually backing up and deleting 17 years worth of art there. After that I'm going to move on to some of my other satellite galleries I haven't touched in ages. This whole thing is like a wake-up call to be super-careful of where we post our art because the current climate just isn't favorable for the average artist anymore. It never was easy, and now it's actively BAD, and it sucks.
So frustrating 😭💕
At any rate, I’m very glad to hear that you have other options in mind. It sounds like having your own site might give you the option for some really wonderful features, and whatever you pull together, I absolutely plan to support it. :)
Like you say, the metadata tag *could* have been such a positive step, albeit a small and unenforceable one. It boggles my mind how badly they mishandled communicating and enacting it, and how thoroughly they tied it in with their own AI… such a mixed bag. I have to agree; it feels pretty clear that whoever is calling the final shots does not have artist’s needs and values at the forefront of their mind. Even if there are *some* good ideas buried in the mix, it doesn’t seem to be enough to make up the difference, and it doesn’t seem to be the primary goal—or the messaging at the start would have been handled *so* much differently, rather than backpedaled after this (entirely predictable) backlash.
What makes it worse is that I know for a fact they had people telling them "this is going to look bad and here's why" and they did it anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thank you so much for this! I wasn't on DA as much as usual this week, and came in on the end of that sh*tstorm with no idea what happened. There's a lot of conflicting information on there about it, too, so I really appreciate you spelling the whole saga out. DA is my only online outlet for my artwork, and I'm honestly torn about what to do with it from here - since the art that's already posted is still vulnerable to AI, is there any point in pulling it? This is an entirely new field for me (I was juuuust starting to get my head around NFTs, ha) and I have no idea how best to protect my art while still finding a way to share it with fellow artists. Regardless, I am eternally grateful for your stock, which has inspired me and helped me refine my skills so much over the years. Whatever happen from here, I'll be following you wherever you end up :) ♥
It's possible anything anywhere on the web can be scraped for AI training. DA's noai tag might help a little for programmers who care to heed it but they can also just ignore it like a sign that says "no photos." At this point the only assured way of not having your art used for this type of thing without permission is to not post it which AI tech bros will tell you. Infuriating. I say just keep posting your art when and where you want. We can't necessarily stop them at this point but we also can't let them cower us. We just have to keep trying.
Hi senshi. :) Thank you for update. I saw the posts from team and the backlash. I dug around and found the DreamUp opt out which honestly wont do anything but here it is in case you wanted to see. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScBl3RIkgoVJh89rWOSd-bz_FdlCZGSUho4ADhG2rmCq3dVPg/viewform I've seen many of our old timers up and quit by deleting their galleries and page itself. Funny enough, if a person deletes their page without deleting each gallery submission OR putting those suckers in storage, we have acces/ can still see them if we favd them. It's always been that way/never fixed. The lifetime core, other core tiers, and senior members are most certainly not happy with how DA has always not listened to their loyal members. This wasn't even something that was requested on that request a feature/fix page. I'm almost done working on my own website as well due to being sick of their shenanigans. Due to the amount of photos you have, please contact croquis.cafe. They can tell you what site they are using.
Thanks for all the info! ♥ I'm very confident my team can build me something and self hosting will get rid of a lot of the major concerns I have. It's always been a risk building in other people's sandboxes
I appreciate taking a stand on this in an ever-increasingly difficult time for artists/creatives online. If you do a site I will support the heck out of it, free, subscription, you name it. You’ve always been so generous with your content and support of people, very much appreciated!
aw tysm ♥ I wanna be clear here that I am not completely against AI. I think it could be a really amazing and helpful tool and I already have some friends who are using it in neat ways to inform their art, but the way it's developed has rubbed me entirely the wrong way and while I can appreciate DA's professed goal they absolutely undermined their own effort right out of the gate. Frustrating. :/
I'll have to go through mine but I haven't submitted anything on there for a while and I don't plan to anytime soon.
Everyone is opted out automatically now so at least you will not have to go through each one individually anymore (though a lot of people already did spend tons of time doing that when the first announcement came out)
Yeah, I made sure to opt out on everything I had on there, and probably won’t be submitting anything there anytime soon. (Of course, I rarely submit anything there so it wouldn’t make much difference) Very bad move on DA’s part, so hopefully the backlash will be enough to make them reconsider.
After listening to their higher ups chat with RJ and seeing some of the tweets from the CEO they seem dead set on AI so I don't think at least that part is going away any time soon. What they can do with it to make it more ethical is yet to be seen. In the meantime, as one of my twitter followers said: they're just rolling the turd in glitter.