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 weren't exactly legit--an 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." It's 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. 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 DeviantArt's promotional and revenue apparatuses.

The image above was created via Stable Diffusion with the prompt "lawyers in suits fighting robots with lasers in a futuristic, superhero style." Looks like Matthew Butterick and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm are going to have a busy year! The same folks who filed the class action against GitHub and Microsoft related to Copilot and Codex a couple of months ago, have filed another one against Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney related to Stable Diffusion. The crux of the complaint is around Stability AI and their Stable Diffusion product, but Midjourney and DeviantArt enter the picture because they have generative AI products that incorporate Stable Diffusion. DeviantArt also has some claims lobbed directly at them via a subclass because they allowed the nonprofit, Large-Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network's (LAION), to incorporate the art work submitted to their service into a large public dataset of 400 million images and captions.

Getty is bringing its intellectual property rights infringement complaint to London's High Court of Justice. Stability AI already faces a separate major legal battle begun this week when a group of artists filed a class action lawsuit in California against it, along with Stable Diffusion platforms Midjourney and DeviantArt. Some of the billions of pictures in the LAION-5B dataset employed to train Stable Diffusion may have been scraped from the web, including Getty's servers, without their creators' awareness. Notably, Stability AI has suggested there will be an opt-out option for any artist whose work might be used to train new iterations of Stable Diffusion. Getty hasn't mentioned any financial compensation or desire to shut down Stable Diffusion in its case.

In addition to concerns about AI-generated content taking human jobs, it seems there are also questions regarding the material these tools are trained on. AI-powered content-generating tools have seen their popularity explode in recent months, but it hasn't stopped the controversy that surrounds them. That's been especially true of systems that create art. The problem was highlighted last September when the Colorado State Fair's contest for emerging digital artists was by Jason M. Allen, who created his entry using Midjourney. Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are trained on billions of images.

A class action lawsuit is filed in the US against Midjourney and Stability AI as well as the art platform DeviantArt. US artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz file a class action lawsuit in California against Stability AI (Stable Diffusion) and Midjourney. The artists are seeking damages and an injunction to prevent future harm. Art platform DeviantArt is also accused of providing thousands or even millions of images from the LAION dataset for Stable Diffusion's training. Instead of siding with the artists, DeviantArt put DreamUp online, an AI art app based on Stable Diffusion, according to the plaintiffs.

"AI image generators use two neural networks. The first neural network creates an image while the second judges how close to the real thing the image is, based on real-life examples from the internet. Once scoring the image for accuracy is complete, the data is sent back to the original AI system. That system then learns from the feedback and sends back an altered image for further scoring until the AI-generated image matches the control/template image. "We recognize that work involving generative models has the potential for significant, broad societal impacts. In the future, we plan to analyze how models like DALL·E relate to societal issues like economic impact on certain work processes and professions, the potential for bias in the model outputs, and the longer term ethical challenges implied by this technology."-openai.com AI-generated image results are made from a collection of images it has no right to use. It does not create as artists do. Artists did not opt-in their work for this. AI is sourcing from portfolio sites like Behance, Art Station, Deviantart, Dribbble, and Pinterest without the original author's consent. The text below is taken from a now-suspended Kickstarter by Unstable Diffusion. The 2nd paragraph is especially telling. It's as much a tool as a robotic arm is on an assembly line. It's not meant for artists but as a replacement for artists. AI companies want amateurs to produce artwork without the need for further editing. It is marketed toward amateurs with the promise that they can create art without being an artist. Making good art is harder still. It is the very antithesis of what AI companies are claiming to stand for. And as it stands today, illegal and unethical. Why are they doing this? To unleash your creative power? If you believe that, I have some NFTs to sell you. "Our hope is that DALL·E 2 will empower people to express themselves creatively.

But the real problem is that, especially without extensive AI expertise, smaller platforms can only do so much. The agenda so far is being set by fast-moving AI startups like OpenAI and Stability, as well as tech giants like Google. Beyond simply banning AI-generated work, there's no easy way to navigate the system without touching what's become a third rail to many artists. "This is not something that DeviantArt can fix on our own," admits Gurwicz. "Until there's proper regulation in place, it does require these AI models and platforms to go beyond just what is legally required and think about, ethically, what's right and what's fair."

DeviantArt, the Wix-owned artist community, today announced a new protection for creators to disallow art-generating AI systems from being developed using their artwork. An option on the site will allow artists to preclude third parties from scraping their content for AI development purposes, aiming to prevent work from being swept up without artists' knowledge or permission. "AI technology for creation is a powerful force we can't ignore. . . . It would be impossible for DeviantArt to try to block or censor this art technology," CEO Moti Levy told TechCrunch in an email interview. "We see so many instances where AI tools help artists' creativity, allowing them to express themselves in ways they could not in the past. That said, we believe we have a responsibility to all creators. To support AI art, we must also implement fair tools and add protections in this domain."

While not everyone's convinced that AI art is actual art, the generators used to whip them up are likely here to stay. DeviantArt is now getting into the space with a generator of its own called DreamUp, promising "safe and fair" generation for creators. The website says one of artists' main concerns about AI art is that their work may be used to train artificial intelligence models, which means the generator could spit out pieces in their style without their consent. In an attempt to give artists control over their work, DeviantArt is giving them the ability to choose whether or not the tool can use their style for direct inspiration. Further, the website is giving them the power to declare whether or not to allow their work to be used in datasets used to train third-party AI models.

Art theft has become a major problem in the world of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) as grifters look to make a quick buck from the works of others. The nature of the online goods means it's very difficult to confirm who owns the NFTs being sold and if the sellers have the legal right to sell that work on any platform. Progress on a solution has been slow, but it does appear new tactics from hosting companies like DeviantArt are working. DeviantArt recently implemented a new system designed to help identify stolen artwork in the wild by using machine learning to locate works that may have been stolen. It's even able to detect subtle variations in stolen artwork, including if an image is cropped, flipped or slightly altered to avoid traditional image detection systems.