Raw LLM Responses

I'm generally on the side of being pro-AI - or at least, I feel the backlash against AI art as a concept is a bit overblown - but this was a really dumb decision on DA's part given how intimate of a subject this is to artists. On a surface level, ignoring context, I don't think an AI looking at a piece of art as a reference is actually that bad. It most likely does fall under fair use by most evaluations - If a commissioner can take a piece of art and give it to a human artist as a reference and have that not be plagiarism so long as the end result is still visibly different from the original piece, its hard to see how it would be legally any different if the human artist in this case is a robot. Unless the AI user specifically had the AI spit out something that's near identical (in which case why are you even using an AI art generator in the first place) the image should theoretically not replace the original works that were used as reference. I also don't think AI will ever actually replace artists in any meaningful sense - it certainly hasn't lessened my desire to actually commission people - but that's a bit beside the point. That being said, even I can see why artists would find the casual non-consensual use of their art by the biggest art sharing website in the world to train a technology that many view as trying to outright replace them as incredibly insulting, and its wild to see that Deviantart just didn't care. I might think the outrage over AI art is overblown for sure, but artists opinions are coming from a genuinely emotionally valid place, and they should have the ability to decide how their art is used. I think the idea behind having tags that flag things against being scrubbed by bots is a very good idea, but the fact that DA didn't enable this for pre-existing images by default was very dumb, and really doesn't help make the discussion of AI generated images any less toxic when they're validating a lot of peoples fears.