Deviant Art is using your art for its new AI Program

K.Flagg

Some of the artists I follow have noticed that Deviant Art has added a new check box in the upload/edit section on DA. DA claims it is doing things to protect artists
but your art is defaulted to be unchecked so any art already loaded in your gallery is automatically being used for their new AI program database without your permission! This seems crazy to me and completely the opposite of protecting artists like they claim. May be time to dump Deviant Art if you haven't already.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/deviantart-dreamup-ai-generator-creators-rights-2208555

Asyas_illos

@K-Flagg thanks for sharing this!

LauraA

@K-Flagg Sometimes you start to wonder if there are any ways left to exploit artists, that no one has tried yet! Thanks for looking out for the community.

kirsten-mcg

@K-Flagg Thanks for the heads up! I wonder if sites like Instagram and Pinterest will include this feature soon too? I hope so. But yeah, I agree that the box should be checked by default. Or that the option should be to check the box to ALLOW art to be used in AI datasets.

ArtistErin

Wow good catch... wonder if other sites are following suit (Creative Market? Tumblr?) which I haven't seen anything regarding AI.

Thank you-

Nyrryl Cadiz

@K-Flagg oh dear! Do u know of any other site doing this? Can somebody check Behance and Instagram?

willicreate

@K-Flagg DeviantArt has backtracked (a little). They've updated their press release to state:

UPDATE: We heard the community feedback, and now all deviations are automatically labeled as NOT authorized for use in AI datasets.

cbr.com notes there is a Google Docs to submit your DeviantArt username for an opt-out. Is this now obsolete, I'm not sure. It has been difficult to authenticate the form, so I won't include a direct link.

As the press release notes, to help prevent crawlers from ripping images from your website, add the following to your <head>:

To not allow AI to use anything on the page:

To not allow AI to use any images on the page:

To place both directives:

It won't provide 100% protection against bots or bad actors, but it's a good 1st level defense. For more info on updating your website code, Illustrator Aimee Cozza wrote a good how-to on her blog.

As for Instagram, it's owned by the company Meta, which debuted a text-to-video ai system, Make-A-Video. Behance is owned by Adobe, which has several ai system initatives. It's likely using content from their user base to feed the machine. Hopefully these companies and others will adopt the opt-out feature.