Artists are outraged that DeviantArt is letting AI and bots monopolise the promotion and monetization of their art.



DeviantArt , a major community service where you can post artwork such as illustrations, has a system where you can purchase posted illustrations and 3D models, and depending on the number of sales and the evaluation of the work, it is displayed on the top page and promoted on official SNS, making it easier for more users to see. However, there has been a large number of bots that abuse this system, and artists are criticizing DeviantArt for not trying to deal with them.

How DeviantArt died: AI and greed turned a once-thriving community into a ghost town.
https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/deviantart-what-happened-ai-decline-lawsuit-stability.html



VFX artist Roman Libert posted a screenshot at the end of March 2024 saying, 'DeviantArt has fallen. It's a pity.' The image shows DeviantArt's official X promoting 3D avatars as 'top sellers,' but according to an investigation by an artist named WyerframeZ , many of the works introduced by DeviantArt are low-quality, automatically generated by AI, and are obvious bot accounts with duplicate names, bios, and account creation dates. It seems that these bot accounts were supposed to earn high ratings and be officially promoted by purchasing each other's content. In response to Libert's post, some users lamented the current state of DeviantArt, such as 'I abandoned my DeviantArt account because of this,' and 'DeviantArt doesn't seem to care about the pain of artists and humans creating works, so I decided to leave this site after posting for 17 years.'




Slate, an online media outlet covering American culture and current events, points out that 'it's not unlikely that someone is using bots to create a strategy of inflating their popularity by generating a large number of accounts and AI-generated images and having them cross-purchase, thereby introducing them to DeviantArt and increasing returns from the revenue sharing program.'

DeviantArt has faced criticism in the past for its AI-generated works. In November 2022, DeviantArt launched a service called ' DreamUp ' that allows users to use the image generation AI ' Stable Diffusion ' on the site. The site took into consideration users who do not like generated AI by providing settings to reduce the display of AI works and a mechanism to prevent the AI from learning works. However, a class action lawsuit has been filed against DeviantArt along with Stable Diffusion, claiming that 'the image generation AI is trained on billions of copyrighted images, and images are downloaded and used without the consent or compensation of artists.'

Class action lawsuit filed against image generation AI 'Stable Diffusion' and 'Midjourney' - GIGAZINE



Slate points out that DeviantArt's lack of restrictions on generative AI works will affect the promotion and monetization opportunities the platform offers. When DeviantArt was first established, it was large enough and had enough features to allow many users to build their careers as artists. However, DeviantArt has repeatedly lost users and revenue opportunities to other services, as later similar sites have been easier to use as a social platform for professional debuts, and image posting platforms with better user experiences such as Tumblr and Instagram have emerged. As a result, advertising has increased, and new innovations such as DreamUp and NFT-related tools in the early 2020s have been criticized by users, Slate analyzes the current state of DeviantArt.

Jinnah Chan, a photographer who has testified in a lawsuit against DeviantArt, said, 'I fight in court to win for artists and photographers around the world, but my fight with DeviantArt is also personal. I dropped out of school and started to pursue a career as a photographer because I gained more followers on DeviantArt. The first big job I got from Mercedes-Benz was because they found my work online,' he said, highlighting the importance of DeviantArt as an art sharing service. R. J. Palmer, who was in charge of concept art for ' Detective Pikachu ,' said, 'I got this job thanks to the 'realistic Pokemon' illustrations I posted on DeviantArt in 2012 that became a hot topic. I've been on this site for 20 years, and I met my current partner through DeviantArt,' expressing his sadness at the fact that the advertising mechanism is filled with AI and bots.

Chan runs Cara, a volunteer-managed digital portfolio social network that 'discloses that its work is created by humans.' DeviantArt co-founder Angelo Sotira also uses Cara, and on April 30, 2024, he said on Cara, 'I'm so sad to see other platforms abandoning real artists in favor of AI-generated ones. On the other hand, I'm so happy to see the soulful communication that takes place between real artists when I check out Cara. Thank you for this place!'



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in Software,   Web Service,   Art, Posted by log1e_dh