Hey guys, it's Celestia, and today's video isn't my normal content. If you guys remember my video about
Clip Studio Paint subscription update, you'll know that my art news videos are just quick
little rundowns of art-related situations that are ongoing, rather than video essays or analysis
or anything. Less of me giving my take on it, more of a "here's what's happening". Not NONE of me giving
my take on it, though, I mean, there's-- there's always a little bit of that. I have too many
opinions, I'm sorry. That in mind, today, I'm going to be going over the deviantART AI art generator
situation, and why it is, for many artists, the final nail in the coffin for the platform as
a whole. Basically, on Friday, deviantART announced that they would be launching an AI-powered text-
to-image art generator called DreamUp, and already, that infuriated a lot of people. AI
art as a whole is a contentious topic that has pretty aggressively polarized and divided the
art community, which means that a significant portion of their userbase was already very
against the medium altogether. So deviantART, a site that has long since claimed to be the most
artist-friendly social media platform out there, thought it would be a good idea to try to sell its
community on a tool that is threatening the entire art industry and filling the majority of
it with anxiety and dread. And that's not the only great idea they had, either-- they also decided to
train that AI generator on all of the art that was already on deviantART by default. If you're
not familiar with how AI art works, I do have another video on it that's linked in the icard
above, but basically, the generator that deviantART is claiming as all their own genius new invention
is actually an already well established type of AI art generator called stable diffusion. The
person-- in this case, deviantART-- that's training the stable diffusion model provides it with a
large sample of art and images for it to use to begin learning to associate those images with
applicable relevant words and then understand where individual pixels should be in relation
to each other based on the way they're placed in the relevant images of the same category.
And it doesn't just learn how to depict certain prompts accurately, it also learns to depict them
in certain styles, because it associates certain pixel patterns with the art that it understands to
have been made by certain artists. That's a gross oversimplification of how it really works because
my understanding of it in and of itself isn't all that great, and I'm sorry if I got anything wrong,
but the part that's relevant to what's happening on deviantART is that the generator needs a huge
library of work to train itself on in order to be functional, good, and accurate. The only thing
setting deviantART's generator apart from others is that they use a different library of work to
train it: more specifically, their own. That's right, deviantART trained its AI generator on all of the
work that was already posted on the platform throughout the entirety of its history. That
means that every artist who ever posted their work to deviantArt is liable to have had it used by
this generator as something to mimic and imitate, and they didn't have to give their permission or
consent for that, because when they rolled out this fantastic new feature, they decided to make opting
into it the default for every single individual work you've posted. Opting out of having your work
used for this generation was something you had to do individually for every single piece of work in
a very time consuming and convoluted, unclear process, and while they have finally made it
possible to opt in and out for your entire gallery at once now, this was was only added as a feature
after the massive backlash, and it still wasn't even advertised as an update. What WAS advertised,
however, was the statement that deviantART posted after over 10 hours of artists frantically trying
to save their work from being subjected to this generator, saying that they've heard our feedback
and generously decided to label all of the art posted to the site as opt out instead, meaning
that you have to manually and explicitly decide to authorize your work for use in AI datasets. Which
is good; it's exactly what the community wanted, although I think most of us would have preferred
no AI datasets at all, but it IS what we wanted. It's just that we wanted that from the start. It's
too little too late, and that's for a couple of reasons. First and foremost is that the trust that
deviantART had built amongst its community was completely demolished by this. Some artists spent
hours panicking and trying desperately to protect their intellectual rights, and others didn't even
know about the situation because they either hadn't heard or had long since left the platform
and had their work authorized automatically for use in AI datasets for hours, because they didn't
even know it was happening or that they needed to opt out to avoid it. And DA had hours
and hours and hours to do something, especially given that they clearly were willing to reverse
the opt-in default, because they did so eventually. They CHOSE not to for that long, and while they
won't admit it, they chose to for a very specific reason, I think, and that is to get authorization
to use as much of the art on their platform for AI training as they possibly could, drawing out
the process of opting out so that they could take advantage of the hour's worth of artists opting
in automatically. This is purely speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were always planning
on reversing the opt-in default. I personally believe that it's more than likely that they
anticipated the backlash and had always planned to respond to it by turning the default to opt
out eventually to appease the community, but wanted those hours' worth of data collection first because
it was worth more to them as a pro than the backlash presented as a con. Again, though, that
is just a theory. What isn't a theory is the second reason that them reversing this default opt-in is
too little too late, and that's that their model is already trained. Opting out of having your art
used in their AI's training only means it won't be used for further training; if it was posted to
deviantArt before you opted out, it's already been used to train the generator without your consent,
and opting out can't untrain it, it can only stop it from being used for more training in the future.
That means that artists have no say in the matter; they can't stop deviantART from training an AI to
create art based on their work and styles, because they already did it, and they're already planning
on using that model anyway. And now they're graciously saying "oh, you know, sorry I broke
into your house and robbed you, but you didn't say explicitly that I wasn't allowed to. But don't
worry though, I'll generously assume that you no longer want to be robbed even if you don't say so,
so, you know-- I won't do it again". Here's a graphic that explains it more clearly than my bitter-ass
analogy. Anyway, now, on top of that, they're still claiming to be the heroic voice of the underdog
artist here. See, stable diffusion models were already using huge libraries of copyrighted
content that were scraped from various image hosting sites online, including deviantART, for
training, without the consent of any of the artists who own those images. But our good buddy deviantART
says that they never consented to those models using those images and that therefore, they have
our backs, and admit no wrongdoing when it comes to the fact that their users' art is in those data
sets as a result. They're not mentioning that they used those existing libraries without those users'
consent to train their existing model rather than making a new one based on artists who DID, in all
awareness and understanding, CHOOSE to authorize the use of their work. They're denouncing the use
of art being used without artist consent in AI datasets in the same breath as they're promoting
their cool new thing made using art without artists' consent. They're also saying that if
an artist-specific style is used in the generation of a piece of AI art, it's completely fair because
that artist will be automatically credited by DreamUp as an influence, which is similar in
vibes to saying "I reposted your art, but I gave you credit, so it's okay". Like, it's different, but
it's not THAT different, and it's not a great look. And as of right now, that's pretty much the end of
this story. DeviantART seems to think that making opting out the new default will magically fix
this problem, which is either just unbelievably dense and ignorant of them, or deliberately
banking on artists not understanding the system and thinking that opting out actually removes
their art from existing datasets rather than just future ones. So clearly, they underestimate artists,
which you'd think they'd know better than to do after this long spent supposedly advocating for us and
basing a platform around us, but you would think they'd know better than to do a lot of things
they just did, so who knows. Regardless, artists are still putting up a fight against this, and DA is
facing no shortage of people telling them that this isn't enough, and this doesn't fix it. Hell,
their own copyright policy says that the following constitutes copyright infringement: placing someone
else's work online without permission, using a creative work commercially without permission,
adapting someone's creative work in one medium to another medium without permission, and modifying
or editing a work without permission. And they're not acknowledging that based on that alone, based
on THEIR rules, they have openly infringed upon the intellectual rights of every artist on their
platform. They're not acknowledging how many people have already been hurt by this, or even apologizing
in any way for what they've done. Saying they've heard us is not the same as saying they're sorry
and admitting wrongdoing in any meaningful way that suggests that change might come, it's their
PR team desperately trying to sweep the mess they made under the rug as quickly as possible, and if
I can help stop them from doing so with this video even a little bit, I'm sure as hell going
to. To be clear, this update is being written on the evening of Saturday, November 12th, and
is based only on the information that's been made available to me up until this point. If deviantART
makes any kind of meaningful change after that point, please don't take this to mean that I'm
disregarding or diminishing that, it just hasn't happened yet. And while I both hope that it does
and will make an update on it if so, I don't foresee them making any change big enough to
warrant that update. They clearly invested a lot of time and money into DreamUp, and I can't see
them being willing to either scrap it now or start over on an entirely new model that will
inevitably take years to develop and train, even if not doing either option means sacrificing the
support of their entire community. They may, however, be open to legal action that might
actually force them their hand, even if they end up making changes exclusively as a result of that
and not because they care. I think they've made their stance on caring pretty clear so far. That's
just my thoughts, though; I don't want to give too much of my own input here because this is just
an update video, and I always believe that these platforms should be given the chance to respond
to feedback and make positive change. DA hasn't yet, but it also hasn't been that long yet, and I
do genuinely hope to see things take a turn for the better as things develop. But what do you guys
think? Did this drive you away from deviantART as a platform, or are you going to wait and see
how things turn out? Do you think people are being too harsh on them over it? Let me know
in the comments, and also let me know if these art news update videos are something you enjoy
in addition to my regular content, so that I can, you know-- make more. Thank you guys for watching,
and I hope you enjoyed today's video! Special thank you as always to channel members Cafe
Soleil, Joseph Solomon, Unknown Code, Lucian is Apa, and Abyss Reborn as well as patrons Batman, Kyle Low,
Blue Swanson, this is totally my name, Uni Tea, Cora Feere, Jamesha Walker, ShiromeArtiste, Elenxji,
Soul Crystal, Kim Nguyen, and StonyCobra13 for their support, and I'll see you in the next one!