Yep, there's no scenario where large companies can compete with the current studio system in a world where anyone can create anything. The only advantage they may have is the ownership of their IPs and the ability for large distribution, but I imagine that the opportunity to create a following with a more imaginative or higher quality work would be easier for an independent when you have the Internet. It'd make a lot of larger studios disappear or force them to reinvent themselves.

I think even if you had a dataset that'd only Creative Commons and public domain arts, you'd still have a lot of people whining. Because arguing that this is only about the dataset is disingenuous. This isn't only about the dataset. This is about the threat of automation and the extreme disruption of a status quo where artists are necessary for the production of large-scale media.

I honestly want to see datasets that are entirely Creative Commons, and a Stable Diffusion based on them. I personally suspect that not a lot would change. (Regardless, this is a moot point because training is now at the point where randos with a subscription to Google colab can easily create their own checkpoints. If you don't believe me, let me point you to the Furry diffusion server on Discord.)

Some online artists are really mad at the idea itself that people can "press a button and get a piece of art", and are trying to discredit the idea of "prompt-engineering" as a form of art. Even in videos like Steven Zapata's "End Of Art", he suggests that this should be a tool for traditional artists. The idea of individuals using this to create their own pieces (And worse, sell them!) is intolerable because it's inherently the intrusion of non-artists playing in the field of art.

Opt-in would have probably work because it'd likely have been a small section of the site. Give that they put their own implementation of SD and added a topic for AI, I reckon DeviantArt themselves aren't really against AI art. Like I said, the people who forced them to make it "opt-out" played themselves.

Honestly, my take is that DeviantArt knows how irrelevant they're being and are jumping into the AI art bandwagon, if somewhat half-assedly. "Real" artists are simply abandoning the site because it got gradually replaced by social media a while ago.

I agree, it's the most frustrating thing in the world. I was thinking DeviantArt messed up not explaining why this feature needed to be opt-in and not opt-out, but honestly there aren't enough words to explain to a person screaming until their face is red about stealing what a meta-tag is and how data scrapping works, much less how these image generators work.

What better way to appease someone who purposefully doesn't want to understand anything about computers than to put in a button and a toggle that says what they want it to say?

Honestly, DeviantArt shouldn't have touched this AI thing at all. All they had to do was quietly make an AI topic so that these pictures could have their own space, and that's it. Adding DreamUp was completely unnecessary because it's not even a very high quality implementation. They should have shut up about meta-tags and copyright or whatever because anything they could have said would have made these people extremely mad.

It doesn't either. DeviantART doesn't have an AI. The generator they call DreamUP is just Stable Diffusion. You can't "untrain" Stable Diffusion (or any other existing system.)

lmao this feature does NOTHING WHATSOEVER.

It's just a meta-tag like Robots.txt. It's basically pleading "pls pls don't use these pictures 🙏 you can have the rest of DeviantART but pls don't use these people who explicitly say they don't want it 🥺"

The reality is that DeviantArt has no way to prevent data scrappers from copying the links to images on their site and use them for AI training, because they're images like any other, so they have to appeal to the good will of these companies to respect this meta-tag at all, and they can't get that if the signal is "our entire site is off-limits." The people demanding that DeviantArt not allow their images to be scrapped are literally asking them to do the impossible.

Now that it's opt-out, no one will respect it, because it means not using ALL OF DEVIANTART. If dataset scrappers wanted to respect artists being mad about this, they'd have done so already. Opt-out with a meta-tag was a decent attempt at making an appeal to data scrappers. The people who caused them to step back played themselves by making the feature useless.

Ah, I see the problem. You're insane. Nevermind, then.

By Boston Dynamics' Atlas? Nah.

If you're concerned about some potential danger that might only be possible like 20 years from now then we should probably stop the entire field of robotics research.

Nothing, because Boston Dynamics' robots are barely able to understand the world around them, and are extremely costly to even produce in the first place. The videos that they show on the Internet are pre-programmed animations and cherry picked out of a ton of attempts.

It's good research, but we'd be so much more advanced in robotics if this kind of research was open just from the nature of it.