The Tragic Downfall of the Internet's Art Gallery (Slate article on DeviantArt's self-destruction via AI)
https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/deviantart-what-happened-ai-decline-lawsuit-stability.html
On March 27, a large group of artists and creators from across the web noticed the frightening extent to which a once-beloved, highly influential community platform of theirs had, like so many others, fallen prey to the artificial intelligence juggernauts plundering the internet.
As VFX animator Romain Revert (Minions, The Lorax) pointed out on X, the bots had come for his old home base of DeviantArt. Its social accounts were promoting top sellers on the platform, with usernames like Isaris-AI and Mikonotai, who reportedly made tens of thousands of dollars through bulk sales of autogenerated, dead-eyed 3D avatars. The sales werent exactly legitan online artist known as WyerframeZ looked at those users followers and found pages of profiles with repeated names, overlapping biographies and account-creation dates, and zero creations of their own, making it apparent that various bots were involved in these purchases.
Its not unlikely, as WyerframeZ surmised, that someone constructed a low-effort bot network that could hold up a self-perpetuating money-embezzlement scheme: Generate a bunch of free images and accounts, have them buy and boost one another in perpetuity, inflate metrics so that the art gets boosted by DeviantArt and reaches real humans, then watch the money pile up from DeviantArt revenue-sharing programs. Rinse, repeat.
After Revert declared this bot-on-bot fest to be the downfall of DeviantArt, myriad other artists and longtime users of the platform chimed in to share in the outrage that these artificial accounts were monopolizing DeviantArts promotional and revenue apparatuses. Several mentioned that theyd abandoned their DeviantArt accountsall appearing to prove his dramatic point.
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Much more at the link. Including a link to Cara, a new site that bans AI art because it's produced using unethical tools:
https://cara.app/about .
Slate's tweet about the article: