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DeviantArt, a Wix-owned artist community, announced a new protection for creators to prevent their work from being scraped for AI development.
AI technology for creation is a powerful force that DeviantArt can't ignore, but it must also implement fair tools and add protections in this domain.
As AI-generated artwork began to proliferate on the web earlier this year, some art-housing platforms banned the art altogether.
Today's bleeding-edge AI art tools learn to generate new images from text prompts by "training" on billions of existing images, which are often scraped together by trawling public image hosting websites.
Many creators are rightfully critical of AI-generation models and tools, because they do not give creators control over how their art may be used to train models or generate images.
DeviantArt's new protection will require third parties using its content for AI system development to exclude content that has the "noai" and "noimageai" tags present.
DeviantArt expects all users to respect creators' choices about the acceptable use of their content, including for AI purposes, and prohibits users from using their content to train an AI system.
It's an attempt to give power back to artists like Greg Rutkowski, who are worried that AI-generated art will crowd out their original works.
AI systems have set off firestorms of controversy in recent months. A system trained to imitate the style of acclaimed South Korean illustrator Kim Jung Gi was condemned by many in the art community.
DeviantArt is encouraging creator platforms to adopt artist protections, and Shutterstock is banning AI art not created with DALL-E 2.
Levy says DeviantArt has allowed AI-generated art to be submitted since its inception and that the number of tagged AI-art images has grown over 1,000% in the last four months.
DeviantArt is committing to supporting AI art by launching DreamUp, which uses DeviantArt-specific models to guide the generation process toward styles that frequently trend on the platform.
Levy didn't say whether DreamUp will automatically filter out subjectively objectionable content, but he noted that DreamUp-generated art will be bound by DeviantArt's terms of use and etiquette policy.
Image Credits: DeviantArt
Some users would prefer not to see AI-generated art on a platform like DeviantArt, so they can set preferences to hide all images tagged #AIart.