DeviantArt’s Downfall Is Devastating, Depressing, and Dumb

AI generated content is great and all but it drowns out everything else on there. Anyone can type a prompt and generate a great looking image with a couple of attempts these days it seems.

The people spending days, weeks, months and more on a piece can't keep up.

It's almost like low quality mechanisation is something that should be resisted. I wonder where I've heard that before...
- You heard it from traditional artists when the camera was invented
- As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. It is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled.
  ― Charles Baudelaire, On Photography, from The Salon of 1859
- yOuRe GaTeKePiNg!!!
- I don't know for what product that'd be desirable. What did you have in mind?
there's some stuff image generating AI just can't do yet. it just can't understand some things. a big problem seems to be referring to the picture itself, like position or its border. another problem is combining things that usually don't belong together, like a skin of sky. those are things a human artist/designer does with ease.
- there's some stuff image generating AI just can't do yet
  There's a lot.
  Some of it doesn't matter for certain things. And some of it you can work around. But try creating something like a graphic novel with Stable Diffusion, and you're going to quickly run into difficulties. You probably want to display a consistent character from different angles -- that's pretty important. That's not something that a fundamentally 2D-based generative AI can do well.
  On the other hand, there's also stuff that Stable Diffusion can do better than a human -- it can very quickly and effectively emulate a lot of styles, if given a sufficient corpus to look at. I spent a while reading research papers on simulating watercolors, years back. Specialized software could do a kind of so-so job. Stable Diffusion wasn't even built for that, and with a general-purpose model, also not specialized for that, it already can turn out stuff that looks rather more-impressive than those dedicated software packages.
- It‘s even hard to impossible to generate the image of a person doing a handstand. All models assume a rightside-up person.
- think of an episode of any animated series with countless handmade backgrounds, good luck generating those with any sort of consistency or accuracy and you will be calling for an artist who can actually take instructions and iterate
Almost 10 years old now, more relevant than ever: Humans need not apply.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Humans need not apply
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I'm a bit surprised about how quickly I got tired of seeing AI content (mostly porn and non-nudes) Somehow it all just looks the same. You'd think that being AI generated would give you infinite variety but apparently not.
The same way people using shovels can't keep up with an excavator.
Technology changes the world. This is nothing new.

Deviantart died a very very long time ago. the creature currently wearing it's skin can fuck off and die for all I or any other actual artist cares.

What do you use instead?
- I hung around art station for a bit but there is no replacement for what deviantart used to be and that's a real shame.
I was shocked to see this post. I honestly thought it was dead after 2015.
All these news pieces about A.I. killing ancient company xyz ...

Most serious artists have switched to using ArtStation and/or Instagram a long time ago, not because of AI, but because of the weird stuff on DeviantArt.

This article also misrepresented Andersen v. Stability AI, you can read the judge's opinion here:

https://admin.bakerlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ECF-117-Order-on-Motion-to-Dismiss.pdf

But basically, the judge's opinion was scathing and dismissed all but one of the plaintiffs' claims.

There is a very good reason you can't copyright artistic styles.

The weird stuff on deviant art is still better than people who direct link PDF files at law firm websites.
- 😢

Thinly veiled and successful porn site blocks porn. Everyone leaves. They killed themselves for money.

The lifers clinging to the site blame AI because the bots are the only thing keeping the lights on. All the humans left with the porn.

My missus used to post drawings on there about 10-15 years ago.
Think all the actual art is on Twitter these days (although some have gone to Mastodon).
Just seems a bit of a niche social network when bigger ones exist with bigger audiences and more chance of people actually wanting something drawn. Even if it's mostly really weird smut.
Where will I get my pregnant Sonic fix now?
I'd argue all the humans left when artstation became big. All my artists friends used to upload their (non porn) work to deviantart before artstation was popular. But banning the porn was the first nail in the coffin for sure.
- I haven't head of art station till now. What's the difference from diviant art? Seems like its a censored platform as well from 30 seconds of googling.
They did? Since when?
- "sexy" is not automatically porn.
- Who decides if that's porn or not? The rule says no porn and I can only imagine she has less on for the account only images.
  https://www.deviantartsupport.com/en/article/what-is-deviantarts-policy-around-sexual-erotic-and-fetish-themes
  As a hypothetical potential user, I see "no porn" from a site I seen a lot of porn on in the past. The first thing I think is a big corpo bough them and milked it dry. Even if it's not enforced the perception is "we caved to censorship for profit over letting our users do whatever doesn't wreak the law". They killed trust.
Thinly veiled and successful porn site
All I ever came to DA for is wallpapers.
When did DA ever allow porn?
- Wasn't it years ago? I'm starting to think I'm just making a big dumb now.

It is sad that so much of technological advancement is not freeing people from labor has the opposite effect, making people fight to pay rent and necessities everyday and never having free time to live. There is so much to like in these new Ai technologies but they being wielded by capitalists to extract a little more money. I highly doubt that visual arts is a big expensive in movies and films since usually half the budget is marketing and another big chuck to secure big stars to the project.

In any case everyone already lost and the Internet is a little bit worst. Reading about this class actions I think no good will come out of it, or the draconian copyright laws will be even worst and small artists will already have lost to the prior models using their content or a "fair use" exception will be made but only for big companies AI and not help small artists and content creators that battle with DMCA abuse taking down fair use vídeos from YouTube and content from over the net anyway.

Technological advancement, thus power, is sometimes used against other people to reduce their power.
We live in a society.
I think what we still have is a lot. Saying it's all dead is a huge exaggeration.
I've just installed Encarta 98 for nostalgic feelings, and found it quite lacking (as in being false and on the side of the criminal and not his victim) on a few points. Wikipedia is better on those.
We are also taking some things for given.

wow I had forgotten about this website for such a long time. Like maybe 15-20 years ago it was a great resource for fantasy themed drawings and inspiration for rpg games

There should always be a home for you degenerates to enjoy whatever category of poorly drawn unicorn porn one likes

Didn't forget Sonic inflation comics
I'm more of a Pegasus guy myself.
IWTCIRD

That's a site I haven't heard of in a while.

Ah, man. I remember when I went to this site to get themes for windows cursor, windows themes, and even skins for some of the programs I liked at the time. They went downhill quite some time ago, maybe around 2014 or 2015, as I stopped using that site as much because of the increase in pornographic stuff that showed on the front page. It will be missed though, either way.

Coincidentally, I remember starting using that site in 2014 or 2015.
- How was it? What was your use-case for it? The software/theme part of the website started to get drowned out by furry stuff, and the occasional live nude models or just scantily dressed models, which is fine but not what I went there for.
I stopped using the site in 2014. Used to post regularly but got sick of all the porn. I stopped posting art online for a long time. Then I stopped drawing for a while. Now I'm trying to get back into it. Posted on the artshare community a while back and the feedback was nice.

It’s obvious, generative AI could not exist without human work on which to train and rather than ask, or pay, for access to it, tech companies (and the assholes running them) feel free to appropriate it as they see fit.

Fuck them running.

The coolest AI work these days is open source, and developed by enthusiastic communities across the world.

It fell ages ago, all the artists I follow went to FurAffinity ages ago.

I didn't really move to another platform when I stopped using deviantart a few years ago, I just started sharing my work with small circles and local galleries instead.

Both disappointing and expected.

Welp, I had no idea about this, time to delete my gallery I have had for 20 years.

Stopped using it last year as it was just so slow.

Is there really a point? It's likely already been scraped into the data pool
- Sure, I may be too late now, but removing real content makes their platform less valuable overall.

Worse still, DeviantArt showed little desire to engage with these concerns

Well. There it tis.

Angelo ran da into the ground long before this. Not gonna lie, I'm not surprised. Not even disappointed.

Deviant is probably having the best time of its existance thanks to generative models.

Could still be the antithesis to AI bullshit, but don't think there's an easy way to tell now.

To take it from the publishing industry, A.I. is already decimating once-common job prospects. An April report from the Society of Authors found that 26 percent of the illustrators surveyed “have already lost work due to generative A.I.” and about 37 percent of illustrators “say the income from their work has decreased in value because of generative A.I.”

I have to say ... I LOVE THIS !

Adapt or else ...