DeviantArt upsets artists with its new AI art generator, DreamUp

It&#x27;s becoming harder to have a meaningful discussion on the topic of what defines art and what place AI generated images have moving forward. It feels like defending either side will cause backlash and people will implicitly include extra conclusions with a response.<p>There is a place for AI art generation and there is a place for artists. NFTs were interesting in how they overvalued otherwise mediocre art. These models are interesting in how they bring down the cost and experience needed for making derivative art.<p>To me, the creativity still lies in someone being able to produce something meaningful. Art is about being able to convey ideas in a way that&#x27;s impossible to communicate in some other way. An artist is someone that makes art. In that sense everyone who has generated art is an artist. Oversaturating the world with derivative art will only make novel things stand out more.<p>It&#x27;s very hard to share a nuanced take on this topic because this argument has become framed in such a binary way. With something like medicine, the value of a doctor&#x27;s opinion is very clear to a layperson. But when it comes to art, the value of an artist&#x27;s perspective is not clear at all. However, I think making parallels to music makes it clear for me. AI generated music will replace elevator music at best, but I don&#x27;t think the public fears ai models will ever replace musicians. At most ai will complement the art creation process. The &quot;soul&quot; and novelty in art will always come from an idea another human wants to communicate.

It looks like DeviantArt sent out an update to placate its community [1] with some interesting technical implications:<p>1) DA tos stipulates that works of art needs to be opt-in for inclusion into AI datasets 2) scraping&#x2F;downloading art will include a response header with &quot;X-Robots-Tag: noimageai&quot; to indicate individuals building models should not use the downloaded image in a dataset.<p>As someone overall empathetic to the artist community (who have had to deal with NFTs, copycats, difficult industry), I have no illusions that this will have a hard time standing up against fair-use laws. That being said, if you&#x27;re looking to build an ai-art model, this might be worth paying attention to regardless if you decide to comply or not.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deviantart.com&#x2F;team&#x2F;journal&#x2F;Tell-AI-Datasets-If-They-Can-t-Use-Your-Content-934500371" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deviantart.com&#x2F;team&#x2F;journal&#x2F;Tell-AI-Datasets-If-...</a>

DeviantArt is not the cultural force it once was. All the cool kids moved to Artstation. It is on Artstation images that a lot of these AI tools have been trained.

It&#x27;s not going to replace artists. It&#x27;s just another genre. Like any art form that&#x27;s done over and over, people catch onto the nuances of it and begin to get tired of it after a period of time. It&#x27;s why we have different periods of art in different regions of the world, or why I want to gouge my eyes out with every bland new Pixar or Marvel movie.

I have a problem with this concept of &quot;unethical sourced data&quot;. what does it really mean?<p>Isn&#x27;t google search business built on &quot;unethical sourced data&quot;, they keep a pirated copy of every website they encounter and feed it to their algorithms.<p>Isn&#x27;t by definition human culture built on &quot;unethical sourced data&quot; remixed by the human brain? Example: imagine you are creating a punk band. You will use all your background knowledged of what punk is, the band&#x27;s you like and maybe if you&#x27;re creative an unexpected source of inspiration from things outside the world of punk? How&#x27;s that essentially different from how stable diffusion works?<p>Another good example is the &quot;Who let the dogs out&quot; song. There&#x27;s an article &#x2F; podcast at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;whomst-among-us-let-the-dogs-out&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;whomst-among-us-let-t...</a> where they try to find the origin. At some point even the creators don&#x27;t really know where the source of the inspiration came from but some of the sources are geographically close which seems to point to a common source. Some of the variations seem quite different, some are pretty close.<p>Overall I think this is just computers replacing some human capabilities, like machines in factories. You lose most of the poethics in the artistry of a human doing something by hand and gain the capability speed. Doing x per second instead of y per month. If you need the symbolism and the poethics of art you&#x27;ll keep using a human. if you need to generate a thousand variations of an idea you&#x27;ll use stable diffusion.

Given the uproar from artists around SD, this move from DeviantArt seems a bit tone deaf.

I&#x27;m curious what the legal position on copyright is with ML assisted works.<p>Up until now the tools being used aren&#x27;t usually defining the end product. I don&#x27;t mean library code or song samples, etc. where licensing comes into play. The tools I&#x27;m referring to, like an IDE, or art program, or even a paintbrush, might enhance the process of creation but they don&#x27;t define the product.<p>With ML the output of the tool becomes a concrete part of the end product. So, surely the copyright ownership for the part of the product generated via ML is not held by the person using the tool. Which means you would have to license the ML generated part of your product from whoever produced the tool.<p>I have no legal expertise but it definitely feels like there is a dangerous trap in using these tools without that question being answered.

Looking at the comment section it seems that people struggle to understand how it works and thinks it is literally copying parts of people&#x27;s images.<p>Educating people about such a technical topic seems very difficult especially since people get emotional of their work being used.

Would court decisions in cases such as what is going on with GitHub automatically affect business products such as this, and to what extent (e.g. retroactive royalties, etc)...

Will they be retraining the model as people opt-out?

When you go to a museum do you go for the art or do you go for Van Gogh?<p>AI will never cut off their ear or do something artistically bizarre. It&#x27;s usually the man or woman behind the art that makes art art.

It&#x27;s an unfortunate side effect of progress. Just like when journalist were displaced by mommy bloggers.

Since Microsoft is doing it with code, it makes sense others will do the same.

Removed my meaningless rant. There is no point in sharing my views here on this subject. I forgot that I am on HN, and artist are underrepresented here.

Artists are no different than all the people who tried to destroy the cotton gin or the automated loom. We&#x27;re all going to have to live in a world where these technologies exist, and find a way to live a fulfilling life regardless. Just as chess players today enjoy the game even though computers have surpassed our chess abilities.<p>It seems odd to complain that computers are using human&#x27;s artwork to inspire their own creations. Every human artist has done the exact same thing in their lifetime; it&#x27;s unavoidable.

I mean, DA is now about 50% preggo anime porn anyways... Edit: Has been for years.