What is DeviantArt?
DeviantArt [deviantart.com] is an art-sharing website that hosts galleries for illustrators, photographers, and other visual artists. Its name is abbreviated dA or DA.
Criticism
DeviantArt is a very old online art community that has gone through many changes through its life, some of which downgraded the experience to all its users and visitors. After being acquired by Wix, DeviantArt underwent a redesign that removed a lot of functionality, and questionable changes in direction that alienated its existing userbase.
For example, previously, it was possible to search for artwork by category, and there were many categories and subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you could use to categorize your work. This is no longer possible as there is only a search box now, which means the whole community has become a lot less organized.
I'm not certain, but I think this also made we lose the ability to search for Creative Commons-licensed works on the website. Although DeviantArt allows users to declare their work as CC-licensed, they don't expose an interface to actually search for them.
DeviantArt decided to launch its own A.I.-based image generator at a time every single artist on the Internet was waging cyberwar against the technology, and in doing this they also decided to just opt-in all works already uploaded into the platform for training their AI without their users' consent.
Since launching in 2000, DeviantArt has become one of the internet’s most popular platforms for artists to upload and share work. Then, in a single day, the company did much to destroy two decades’ worth of goodwill and community building.
The uproar arrived with the rollout of DeviantArt’s DreamUp, an A.I. image generation tool it created alongside Stable Diffusion and incorporated into its platform on November 9. Upon its release, every single piece of art on the platform was available for DreamUp to scrape. Deviants, as the platform calls its users, were furious, a sentiment further aggravated by being required to opt out of the A.I. datasets—one work at a time—with the platform claiming more expedient options were too complicated and technical to implement. Many of DeviantArt’s more than 60 million registered members have thousands of works uploaded.
DeviantArt’s New A.I. Generator Angers Artists for Promising—But Failing—to Protect Creator’s Rights, "November 15, 2022" [https://news.artnet.com/art-world/deviantart-dreamup-ai-generator-creators-rights-ip-controversy-2210607] (2024-10-13)
Nowadays, many times I see a DeviantArt result on Google Images, it's AI-generated, and that's really depressing.
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