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Concheria t1_iw1kdal wrote

lmao this feature does NOTHING WHATSOEVER.

It's just a meta-tag like Robots.txt. It's basically pleading "pls pls don't use these pictures 🙏 you can have the rest of DeviantART but pls don't use these people who explicitly say they don't want it 🥺"

The reality is that DeviantArt has no way to prevent data scrappers from copying the links to images on their site and use them for AI training, because they're images like any other, so they have to appeal to the good will of these companies to respect this meta-tag at all, and they can't get that if the signal is "our entire site is off-limits." The people demanding that DeviantArt not allow their images to be scrapped are literally asking them to do the impossible.

Now that it's opt-out, no one will respect it, because it means not using ALL OF DEVIANTART. If dataset scrappers wanted to respect artists being mad about this, they'd have done so already. Opt-out with a meta-tag was a decent attempt at making an appeal to data scrappers. The people who caused them to step back played themselves by making the feature useless.

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AdditionalPizza t1_iw2fgzl wrote

Honestly it sounds like they're just trying to appease artists with what the artists think they want, while in reality it does nothing. Deviant Art definitely knows this. Deviant Art certainly knows AI art creation will outpace handmade work by a longshot, and they want a piece of the web traffic pie.

Go and try and explain how AI art works to all of these artists complaining and they will insist it's stealing their copywritten work and using it to generate images. They just don't understand the fundamental basics of how training works and that it doesn't store copies of their images to reuse elements of it. So might as well make them think they won a battle while AI training will just continue on.

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Concheria t1_iw3qkv4 wrote

I agree, it's the most frustrating thing in the world. I was thinking DeviantArt messed up not explaining why this feature needed to be opt-in and not opt-out, but honestly there aren't enough words to explain to a person screaming until their face is red about stealing what a meta-tag is and how data scrapping works, much less how these image generators work.

What better way to appease someone who purposefully doesn't want to understand anything about computers than to put in a button and a toggle that says what they want it to say?

Honestly, DeviantArt shouldn't have touched this AI thing at all. All they had to do was quietly make an AI topic so that these pictures could have their own space, and that's it. Adding DreamUp was completely unnecessary because it's not even a very high quality implementation. They should have shut up about meta-tags and copyright or whatever because anything they could have said would have made these people extremely mad.

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AdditionalPizza t1_iw3rj7k wrote

Yeah, if they just didn't say anything they could have placed the blame on the crawlers "doing all the stealing" and nobody would really blame them.

But I think they're hoping they can get a tuned model that outperforms the others. Not sure how that will play out.

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uishax t1_iw3uie0 wrote

Well, the main problem is, their current model is crap, it just looks like a standard SD implementation, which is 3 months late to the party.

This market is insanely crowded, to stand out, you need a model that blows people's minds, even if it is for a narrow style. Midjourney v3 had that unique painting style, and v4 is just the strongest in general. NovelAI specialised on anime, which worked exceptionally well.

They needed to come out of the gates swinging, so that there's a ton of fans loving the feature, who will support deviantart. Instead, all the AI art enthusiasts, just tried it twice, said meh, and left. While the existing artists seethe at Deviantart for this big middle-finger.

I think this is pretty much the nail in the coffin for deviantart, it'll go the way of tumblr very soon, utterly incompetent execution.

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Concheria t1_iw44don wrote

Honestly, my take is that DeviantArt knows how irrelevant they're being and are jumping into the AI art bandwagon, if somewhat half-assedly. "Real" artists are simply abandoning the site because it got gradually replaced by social media a while ago.

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starstruckmon t1_iw20wgs wrote

Exactly. This is the most accurate read. Making it all opt-in means others are even more unlikely to give any thought to that tag.

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LittleTimmyTheFifth5 OP t1_iw1kiy9 wrote

Apparently it does make their AI not use it, but yeah, this does absoultely nothing against other AI.

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Concheria t1_iw1lkh8 wrote

It doesn't either. DeviantART doesn't have an AI. The generator they call DreamUP is just Stable Diffusion. You can't "untrain" Stable Diffusion (or any other existing system.)

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MechanicAwkward5545 t1_iw2q6u6 wrote

> You can't "untrain" Stable Diffusion (or any other existing system

Maybe do the training all over again?

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Arcosim t1_iw3f6fk wrote

I actually confirms that DA and all its subsites were selling the users' data for dataset creation.

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Dalinian1 t1_iw465rv wrote

At least they try to state their wish. Sad it's basically laughed at. Not the first time tech gets disrespectful and I'm sure it won't be the last. At least there are many positive other things tech can do. Very glad there are a lot of good people in the tech field to hopefully balance

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Concheria t1_iw46fin wrote

Opt-in would have probably work because it'd likely have been a small section of the site. Give that they put their own implementation of SD and added a topic for AI, I reckon DeviantArt themselves aren't really against AI art. Like I said, the people who forced them to make it "opt-out" played themselves.

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