Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

DeviantArt was never perfect but it really is a wasteland now. Regardless of where you stand on the ethics of genAI the results in practice are just boring, the feeds are an endless stream of the same handful of prompt templates, and the volume of AI posts is so enormous that it drowns out anything else a hundred to one. Manual curation of good posts eventually hits a breaking point when the volume of white noise posts becomes so unbearable that the curators just give up and leave.

Even categories that are supposed to be for specific mediums where AI shouldn't be applicable are full of it regardless - just now I scanned the Photography section and almost immediately spotted a conspicuously three-fingered woman. Posts made using AI are supposed to be tagged as such so users can opt-out of seeing them, but that "photo" isn't tagged, nor is anything else on the uploaders profile despite all of it being blatant AI.

You could almost turn it into a game - pick a random category and see how far you have to scroll before you see anything at all that doesn't scream "babbies first copy-pasted MidJourney prompt".

It's everywhere. Google image results are already becoming heavily polluted with AI art (try searching something like "unicorn" for example). Someone posted a cool site here the other day that was a sort of automatically-generated encyclopedia, except that since it was automatically grabbing images, most of the examples of historical art styles had ended up being modern AI art instead. That wouldn't have been the case at all even two years ago, it's a bit scary.

Pro tip: You can add "before: 2023" to your image search prompt.

Thanks, that actually does an extremely good job on the "unicorn" search of filtering out all the AI unicorns.

Woah, never knew about that one. It works wonders!

It really needs to be said that AI "artists" have confused productivity with quality. I actually don't go to DeviantArt to see your ai generated garbage. I care more about people who are willing to do interesting things with their medium even if they takes a lot longer.

Yeah, it's almost comical the degree to which quantity has become emphasized over quality. More than a few times I've clicked through to an AI posters profile out of morbid curiosity and seen that they have thousands or even tens of thousands of uploads despite being active for less than a year or so. Even with the supposed productivity boosts that AI brings you can't convince me that someone posting 20+ pieces every single day like clockwork is putting any real consideration into them, but the magic of AI is that something with little time and zero thought put into it can still be superficially passable.

I am a bad artist but I do make art, and have been trying to make art over the past year or so. I've made less than 200 pieces over that time but I can still go back to work that I've spent hours on and remember the decisions I've made and the specific works that have helped me grow or that I'm proud of. Do you think AI artists remember the work they've produced?

They will not remember the prompt that created them but by default AI art encodes that information into the image metadat.

Not that same thing, though. Reproduction isn't the purpose of considering artistic decisions you've made-- it's to reflect on and refine your eye, ability to communicate things visually, and your trajectory as an artist. That capability is entirely separate from the medium you use, or the source of your work. Indeed, nothing in AI image generation makes that less possible than in physical media, but metadata has a very different use case. The entire point is that you need to pay attention to your output enough to parse the extreme subtleties, and posting dozens of pieces per day negates that.

> Posts made using AI are supposed to be tagged as such so users can opt-out of seeing them

While this is the official line I'm fairly certain the real reason for stuff like this is to prevent AI models consuming their own output.

Probably, either way they are doing a piss poor job of enforcing the rule so everyone loses. The people who don't want to see AI posts see them anyway and the AI models will end up Habsburging themselves.

There were always uneven applying of rules based on certain staff whims, and that of course, carries its own law of unintended consequences.

Now, with Wix in charge, and a handful of the roachier staff left (I'll name names, Realitysquared) the site has negative bupkes chance of content moderation/curation worth a wet damn.

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