I knew this was coming, and am frankly surprised it hadn't started sooner. :|

Honestly I'm surprised you were still subscribed in the first place.

Side note but anyone who'd like some free core can hit me up for details. B-)

They messed the deviants you watch section even more, RIP

Can confirm, even after blocking as many AI tags I could think of, I still get shown all kinds of AI art in my feed. It seems like it varies from person to person, but for a friend and I, AI stuff has been inescapable, even outside of dA. :/

I'm more open on the AI stuff (I mean, my works are probably too niche for models to scrap on XD), but after all the rambles last year, I'm now more wary of the 'beautiful' art on my home page - I'd assume it's just another AI work when they're too detailed or too colourful/vibrant to be manual! That's a bit of a shame for those artists who genuinelly have these talents.

As I articulated elsewhere, boil it down to its essence and AI-gen is just a search engine with extra steps. All these companies integrating it into the front-end is basically bringing the enterprise full circle.

To quote myself:

I still use Deviantart to this day because I'm waiting for both a bunch of Unfinished Requests and a bunch of new Deviantart alternatives such as Artspacious and Preefix(the latter is for dumping AI arts if I ever considered those)

as I wait for Artspacious, I even tried this site.

what killed Deviantart for me was: rampant Cyberbullying there(one of them take place around the time of Wix' purchasing Deviantart, at least one that happened to me back then) as well Spambots such as John7321 favebombs everything I posted there as well bot-hijacked old accounts randomly faving my posts there, latter can makes up most of those that doesn't ignore me there. Eclipse allows spambots outnumber living users in Deviantart

other alternatives are either too Far-removed from old Deviantart(Inkblot and Artfol), died twice(Sheezy), stillborn(Artrise), and it's Drama did killed it for even me(Buzzly)

not to mention witch-hunts there

I think DA was suiciding before the AI and NFT thing to be honest. I seem to have picked the wrong time to learn art, I kind of gave up on art sort of well I was doing long renders. Just didn't want to upload my art there or anywhere cause I spend so much time on my art.

precisely cuz of Eclipse?

That's one thing, but the new moderation just doesn't really exist. There is hardcore NSFW stuff floating around the site without any mature filter, so schools, colleges and parents started banning DA because of it. So then DA got more and more full of older artists, feeling less and less like a community and more and more like ArtStation because more and more were purely money-oriented but not really in it for the art. The Wix redesign just made it feel less and less friendly for hobbyists imho. It's also one reason why I started learning art because I couldn't find hobbyists making stuff I liked anymore. I either saw walls of artwork made by the top 10 of DA on the top pages or was recommended stuff I don't like (now it's AI which is even worse lol).

worse, there's people in deviantart that make money from AI-generated arts and/or literatures and become rich from it

also, my parents can be among those that bans Deviantart

Yeah... I mean, people were making money from other people's art on DA a while. DA gets royalties, they don't care. Pretty sure DA is probably making a lot of the AI accounts themselves as it's a way to data launder and promote their own images back to their own audience. They get royalties and % that way and no one can "track" them down.

This is exactly why I am a hero.

In truth I am Deviantart's equivalent of a Mujahid. Me and my kind will settle for nothing less than the complete destruction of Wix and the Deviantart administration.

All that over the presence of AI art? I think there are better ways we can expect this to go, if our minds are open enough.

waits and sees if anyone has heard of Devdazzle

I feel better knowing that I'm archiving all my art from my DA, but I should just get jdownloader for my Deviantart account, to make it less tedious.

Gives you a moment to look at your old work so that's nice.

Doooowwn with Deviantart! ✊✊✊

Looks like Fur Affinity is on the path to self destruction too, their recent rule changes surrounding NSFW involving certain Pokemon/Digimon is ridiculous and very subjective. It's been proven in the series canon that evolution has nothing to do with age and just like in real life body types don't necessarily indicate age either. Apparently drawing a cutely styled Pikachu now makes it a "child" automatically and can get you banned lol

Wuh... Why would someone draw NSFW Pokemon stuff to begin with?

Speaking of DA suiciding and FA more thoroughly banning cub stuff. They don't just have AI and pedos on the loose. They have AI pedos totally NAMBLA: https://www.deviantart.com/klkey

I don't agree that FA is banning NSFW pokemon porn, they're just banning pedo/cat-like proportion pokemons. You can age them up. Which is a shame for short people who identify with their small fursonas, but most of it is really pro-lolicon type stuff. I don't really care what virtual realities people get off too in their private homes, but promoting pedo on the internet is dangerous and creates safe spaces for pedos, just like how feral furry erotica communities are inundated with zoophiles. But for sure DA's AI pedos are more pedo than any midget pokemons on FA. Also don't get people saying that trans people like me support little boys (or girls) wearing skimpy clothes, being trans and fetishising kids aren't related. It's just pedos like putting adult fetishes onto kids. Wish they'd chase these pedos instead of normal LGBTQIA+ people.

Tbh furries banning borderline pedo stuff is a good look, not saying you're inherently a pedo for liking small cartoon characters though.

Good thing that I'm not in any way into that! My issue is with "proportion = child or adult" especially in a stylistic medium like art on a non-human, non-real creature and how it's totally up to the individual moderator if they decide your art is or isn't "right".

Fair but it wasn't too long ago FA and furries were plagued with insults of association with pedophilia and "brainwashing kids". For example, in Florida, transgender kids are associated as a pedophilic thing because of eh 'poor dresscode' standards and also associated with otherkin kids dubbed as "furries". Like the "furry kid needed litterbox at school" nonsense. I think at the moment the LGBTQIA+ heavy communities, like furries, just want to distant themselves from the associations certain political groups apply. So they'd see it as a "good look" to distance themselves from such associations with pedophilia, zoophilia, etc.

Moderator discretion is definitely iffy and irky. But I think the site is actually more in line with state laws now, and as USA laws tighten on such things, I think FA just want to avoid a court case. At least FA ban AI, though. InkBunny is more cub-oriented (e.g. furry equiv of loli/shota) and they've "half-banned" AI by requiring public-only dataset usage. I kind of wonder how they're going to determine this until AI model transparency regulations are forced legally. Likewise, since you can just pirate an AI model, it requires the model and prompts themselves to be indicated outright wherein used in IB rules. I think Weasyl and SoFurry allow AI but the community itself doesn't seem to much, probably after the AI Dungeon threat on writers' commissions because SoFurry was pro-AI images from a writers' free-illustration perspective before. Not sure on FurryNetwork as I don't really use it but AI doesn't seem to bring up anything. I don't know what non-artist furries use more, Furry Amino? Ferzu? Barq? Discord? Telegram? Twitter? Not sure but those definitely don't allow cub, but allow AI to my knowledge because social media is about the site owners' profit, not the users, DA follows the same model.

ArtStation isn't very furry-friendly, it's very concept-design oriented, they allow AI but turning up with an AI portfolio with no skills is going to get a raised eyebrow and a swift firing because industrial art is iterative and needs the artist to make better edits than prompt engineering and inpainting can. I imagine most hirers in industry will go more the "augmented AI" route until AI gets far more advanced. It'll erase certain "procedural" esque concept jobs I imagine though, and reduce the skills needed for conception is graphic design, reducing the pay for those jobs. While with furries it's very freelanced, furries are very bothered by a lack of exposure in a competitive market, but fortunately AIs aren't very good at capturing detailed fursonas yet. People with simpler fursonas never really paid much to furry artists anyway, 3$/hr for tediously inked yet simple designed art is not a fun job. So I can only encourage furry artists to do character-capturing art that AI is too entropic to achieve to a certain fineness, style and customisability. I don't think that necessarily means having an overly rendered style, either, but rather a very "controlled" design which AI doesn't owe to with prompts alone. I can only hope AI's lack of control over specificities makes people appreciate artist's for their finer detail efforts but you know how quick-fix consumerists are.

DeviantArt is just asking people to want the site banned, I honestly won’t cry when DA gets deleted one day. (For all I know, they’ll pull a Tumblr, knowing how incompetent the staff/mods are.) (And yes I’m saying this out of spite, I really wish really big social media sites are all gone tbh.)

Yeah they're banning anti-AI protestors for speaking out but not pedos using AIs that integrate people's children's faces into realistic pornographic images ranging from softcore to full on hardcore porn. It really berates the innocent work of non-pedo photographers and artists.

I wouldn't miss DeviantArt. I don't like that my account is stuck with a year of Core Pro either, but I'm just using it as a stance as they're less likely to ban someone who still has a Core membership. Since I know from reports that they banned half the non-Core protestors and hide anti-AI images when they can but some find their way onto my wall. They're like if China had an art community, only worse because they actively profit from your art as the web hosts. Your content and the piracy is the only reason they even exist, the company themselves have no real product. The community is slowly waking up though, but the apologists don't want to leave because they're too attached to their established watcher counts. Numbers mean little if the watchers watching you are favouriting more-so work stolen by artists. Audience quality matters just as much as artwork in the art world. I respect my audience, but I will say that most consumers these days don't care if they're consuming parasitically or not. It's like the problem of Spotify vs piracy, who pays artists more? The pirate that pays 10$ for a music album to post it online, or Spotify that pays an artist 0.01c per play but has a few hundred listeners? Neither obviously, and AI is just an advancement of work-dismissive consumerism. It's not even about money, cause many artists don't want money, they don't want to be exploited for their free work either, though. I don't think anyone can deny the parasitical nature of DA and social media upon artists even before AI.

Oh right, and if you work hard but don't get paid or gain exposure but they do you're a "f*cking Luddite" so they say, even though Luddites just wanted fair pay and were pushed into poverty. Even today those groups are still poor because of it, AI isn't helping them, just like how many black and Latino people in the USA are abandoned to post-industrial ghettos with no capital nor hire. With all this tech we are left in the end more and more livelihoods deprecated results in either survival/revenge criminality or pot luck entrepreneurship of manipulating others. And somehow they think that's an ok argument to insult the working artisan? Luddites weren't anti-tech, they were worker unionists who wanted fair compensation for the theft of their techniques and lack of compensation therein. If that makes me a Luddite, then sure. Better to be a Luddite than a parasite consumerist that finances fasces who aim to tear us up into smaller and smaller powerless groups. May be AI should be used to steal from their jobs and put them morons out of work and merit, too. If you can't promote positive equality, there's always negative equality. Since AI images are public domain as bitmaps, you may as well sell their so-called "art".

Also Bing made an image AI that is deliberately trained against AI artifact/plagiarism detectors, cause apparently Micro$haft likes fake news and plagiarism, typical techno-fascists. They're political terrorists, that's for sure, no one who's not a criminal would be constantly trying to work against factual proof and merit. I aim to move to Linux when I get the chance, looks like more and more people are wanting to, can't blame them. The problem with MS and other corps is not new. It's just getting worse.

So, the 'insert media' widgets breaking halfway through writing a comment was a PITA, but at least you could refresh the page and pick up where you left off.

Now you don't even have that.

Once I've mirrored everything to S7, I am seriously questioning if I ever intend to upload to the site again.

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