Also, their "AI Art Section" is really good! It makes me wonder if you could tell their AI art generator to reference tags from DeviantArt ( I'm assuming that tags exist) to help narrow down the style or contents of an image.

Oh no, a lot of DeviantArt's ugly western fan art won't be in AI training datasets?! Good.

AI will soon allow everyone to make whatever art they want, and no stupid copyright or yuppie mouse will change this fact; corporations will try to enforce artificial scarcity, but it won't work.

You’re getting downvoted but you’re speaking straight facts tbh. Human art is gunna be irrelevant in less than 5 years, aside from people who want art specifically made by humans. These kinds of things people are bitching about don’t matter, in just a few short years these models will advance so much they won’t need any new training data anyway. They’ll be able to get what they need and these artists will still be out of a job.

That said, my heart goes out to the artists losing their livelihoods at the altar of profit and technological progress, we ought to have a UBI/unemployment program for automation job loss.

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.

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

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.)

>no stupid copyright

Who gives a damn about the rule of law, amirite?

Edit: Getting downvoted for supporting the rule of law. Wow.

Can you make your own AI data sets or make your own AI data too hard?

How exactly will human art be irrelevant in less than 5 years?

Chess AI demolishes our best players by a landslide and chess is probably the most alive its ever been in its history. I don't see how art being done by computers (assuming they actually improve enough) is going to make human art irrelevant.

If an AI can make every movie, tv show, or youtube video that I ever liked reliably I would quit social media forever.

Please correct me if I'm wrong,

Do you mean to say that as long as you are entertained, you are not in need of human art? I think I can understand that. Like a hedonist, right?

I think art is important as a means and avenue of expression. Expressing politics, common sentiment, etc. Things that are all human. Yes, an AI can create something to the same quality and execution (or better), but it doesn't have intent. It doesn't have that relatability, that a person might have, when walking under a bridge, seeing some graffiti on on the pylon that says "Fuck Putin". Something about that particular spot under the bridge, something about a kid risking his short measly life in a tense political climate, just to put their thoughts on something physical. Something about that gives meaning like no form of entertainment can. (to me at least). An AI can probably put the words together in a cooler way, with better colour control or what have you... but a person, who did it in the middle of the night, wilfully putting up self-incriminating evidence for all to see... no AI can make me feel that.

I'm interested to know what are your thoughts on that - Do you feel like reaching singularity necessarily means no thoughts, no politics and no intent?

You wouldn't want to socialize with other people anymore?

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.

Commissioning art for money will likely be hit very hard. Art as a hobby will never die though, and there will always be popular human artists.

Uh… aren’t they a bit late? AI Art is kinda over the finish line so their bowser inflation drawings aren’t of much use

Slowing down the inevitable.

Soon enough AI will be training AI.

AI already does art better than the majority of humans and it will be trained on the whole web, including all DA, all Pixiv, all ArtStation, etc. Nothing will stop it, BUT I hope that people won't overdo it and won't upload for quantity's sake. I think that we should focus on quality instead of quantity of art. There are billions of images on the web and you could spend your whole life browsing through what has been uploaded to this point, without even considering what will be uploaded in the coming years. So I appreciate more DA accounts with 40 very good AI artworks, instead of 4000 poor or mediocre ones. I think it's going to augment our ability to create what we imagine, to look at it ourselves or show it to others. Opting in or out probably won't change anything - regardless of the morality of it.

Why specifically western?

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.

I kind of disagree with the “artist will be out of job” part. We have seen this fear when cameras were introduced and that didn't kill realistic art and I think it will happen again with AIs. Yeah, they will have a place in society, but that doesn't mean they are displacing artists, just getting their new space for them, just like cinematography and photography didn't displaced painting or sculptures.

I respect DeviantArt for doing That

You will never make any actual art :)

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

Maybe do the training all over again?

Haha no - he wants to exclusively watch AI generated movies that he’s incapable of talking about with literally anyone because they’re all based on prompts his shitty imagination conjured, like those YouTube videos made for children of Spider-Man and Elsa crashing their truck into Thomas the Tank

Lol. If that's the case, it's kinda sad though.

It’s incredibly sad. These nerds have no idea what they’re actually fantasizing about. Dude should just do heroin.

That's quite a joj

[removed]

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

Let me clarify, I’m not saying it will go away as a hobby or as a passion, just the percentage of people who are doing it for money will be a TINY fraction of those who are doing it for money today.

Think of the numbers of horses being used for transportation today vs the number of horses being used for transportation before the invention of cars. Horses for transportation are irrelevant today compared to back then.

It cost ~600k to train, I don't think deviantart are going that far

>Who gives a damn about the rule of law, amirite?

No morally decent person cares about this all that much. If you do, you support Iran executing teen girls for protesting for human rights.

​

The better question is whether copyright lines up well with economic incentives and ethics, and that's a long discussion. The TLDR is it does more good than harm at present, but there is a lot of harm in the process and it might not always be the best way of organizing art.

I feel like this whole AI art thing exposes a lot of people with questionable ethics and morality. It's kind of a shock really when you witness this widespread obnoxious behavior and lack of empathy... But such is life I guess, lol.

No. No possibility of negative attention. Why would I want that?

Lol sorry - I just still can’t stop thinking about how hilariously pathetic this comment is.

All of human history, art has been used to connect with ones fellow man. Artists bearing their soul and giving a glimpse into the workings of their heart. The communal experience of audiences coming together to witness and wrestle with a creations meaning. Experiencing a work of poetry Or literature that challenges ones perceptions of the world, or affirms the human spirit.

And now these dorks think art’s highest aspiration is to be a series of colors and shapes that show them exactly what they already think they want to see so that they never have to consider another human again. Just sit in the dark being fed meaningless stimulation.

Have fun with “Transformer Batman and make it anti-feminist” or whatever movie you’re dreaming of putting into a promt

As jobs they will be irrelevant. Art is technically already irrelevant in traditional mediums, I mean try telling your mom you want to be a water colour artist and would like to go to art school. You have a better chance making money painting houses than canvases.

But some people manage to make a good living as concept artists, comission fan art, graphic design and all that. Proper stable jobs in fields like game dev being paid as much as the software guys it wasnt a bad career path. those jobs will be gone now. It's irrelevant in a way that matters the most, making money.

Why would I want to deal with negative responses?

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.

I didn't know that, thanks for answering

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.

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.

That's all it is

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.

You know life isn't just flowers and rainbows, right?

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

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.

Who would win? “Ai systems yametekudasaiii Iyaa itai yo” tag Or bs.get(url)

> those jobs will be gone now

But new jobs will appear, and new applications that were too expensive will become possible.

Before the PC there were plenty of professional typists and secretaries. Their jobs disappeared or were transformed, and we got an even larger number of office jobs on PC.

Generative AI will support jobs in many fields - medicine, design, advertising, hobbies and fan fiction. Art itself might get a paradigm shift soon, as humans strive to find something AI can't do. The same happened when photography was popularised, and look how many more uses photography has then painting used to have.

I think he knows that but I think he's trying to say that he can make his own challenges that he would rather have. In stead of being forced to deal with other ones.

Copyright law generally protects the fixation of an idea in a “tangible medium of expression,” not the idea itself, or any processes or principles associated.

Neural networks don't store images inside, they decompose these images into elementary concepts and then recompose new images from such concepts. Basically they learn the unprotected part of the training set.

Think about it in size: 4 billion images shrunk into 4GB, that means a measly byte per input image. Not even a full pixel! It certainly has no space to store those images. It can only store general principles.

Getting offended for having a single byte learned from one of your images seems unjustified. On the other hand it looks ugly how pre-AI artists are gatekeeping the new wave of AI assisted artists. Let people eat cake.

> There are billions of images on the web and you could spend your whole life browsing through what has been uploaded to this point, without even considering what will be uploaded in the coming years

That's a very good argument why this whole reaction against AI art is overblown. What's a few billion extra AI images on top of the billions already out there? Not like we were lacking choice before.

But AI to the rescue - have you seen how nice it is to browse lexica.art by selecting "Explore this style" on an image? It's like an AI Pinterest. AI can help you find the art you like among the billions of images out there.

I’m not saying this group of people are going to be permanently unemployed, I’m saying they’re not going to be making art for money. Many of them may facilitate the process somehow, like prompt engineering, etc, but that’s very different and FAR less time consuming than actually creating art.

It would certainly be interesting to see AI eventually make media that hits every "pleasure points" of our brains through algorithms that everyone gets addicted

Sorry for the late reply but yes to the first one. All I care about is being entertained. Everything else comes second. Yes like a hedonist.

I don't think reaching the singularity means any of the three you mentioned. I think as we approach the singularity more possibilities to open up. For example, if you wanted to live off solar power off the grid that is more realistic than 10 years ago. The further you go back in time things, in general, become more limiting. As time goes on it will become more realistic to expect to be living off the grid, expecting to live beyond 200 due to advancing medicine, living in VR, etc.

Yes, but why should I not be allowed to make my self happier?

Chess is different from art in general I think

I looked at lexica.art (today and some weeks ago), but I don't see a reason to browse it instead of human artists works. There are enough human artworks to look at and AI outputs are currently low-quality. I prefer human art at the moment, I won't be spending time looking at AI art. What I'm waiting for is much better recommendation, labeling, filtering and search for human art. For example, current DA search and home page are rubbish. Twitter allows blocking an unlimited number of users, but makes it less convenient to browse trough hundreds of images. No website is perfect unfortunately.

There is a tool to search images used to train Stable Diffusion. It has semantic search, so you can type in a "prompt" and it will find you the closest matches between real images, including art. You can also search by image.

rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval

600k *with infrastructure in place* and expertise

Their data isn't needed anymore. The algorithms have been trained. Trad artists today are also copying artists and their tecniques that came before them.

Deviantart has all the poorly drawn anime females with Huge boobs you could ask for

[removed]