Regarding DeviantArt (Patreon)

Until further notice (and possibly forever) I am suspending submission of new poses to my DeviantArt gallery. I am not closing the account or removing anything from the gallery so please don't feel you have to rush over and start downloading things - I'm just not posting anything new.

In case you are not chronically online and missed the drama this week:
DeviantArt introduced a 'noai' tag that inserts metatag information into all deviation pages telling AI scrapers to not use what it finds on that page. But the roll out on this was very bad. On release, they were making users opt in one deviation at a time. This was obviously burdensome for people who have been on DA for a decade (or more!) who had hundreds if not thousands of Deviations.

It also excluded people who did not have access to old accounts as well as artists who were dead. They switched courses on this after a huge community backlash. First they introduced a gallery wide opt out option and then finally reversed directions completely and made all art on DA marked "noai" unless a user specifies they want to opt in to AI use.

The noai tag on it's own even with the poor rollout could have been a celebratory moment. DA could've been seen as the one art site attempting to protect artists.

Instead, they paired this announcement with the release of their own hosted AI generator called DreamUp which runs on a dataset that was trained using art scraped from a lot of places, including DeviantArt.

They have made a big deal about how they plan to modify the dataset for their AI to not include sources from artists who don't want their art used this way but it's pretty obvious to me at least that caring about what artists want their art used for it not part of DeviantArt's core (haha) values anymore. They rushed into this AI space professing they "had to" because building their own would have "taken too long" and honestly it's all just falling really flat for me. Their interview with RJ Palmer made it very clear they have one priority here which is to boost and promote the use of their AI regardless of what the system they're using has done to their own artists in its construction.

I don't even care if my pose refs are used to train AI and I don't have enough art on DA that I care about to even worry about that part for myself, I'm just so fed up with the direction DA's leadership has taken here and how backhanded it feels.

The team I work with to help me with marketing and social media has been recommending to me for years to build my own self hosted gallery. They already have a proof of concept build for a self hosted set up where I can have folders for themes, a tag/search system, and a blog-to-mailing-list set up. They have even gone so far as to put the building blocks down for subscription based memberships if I decide I need them in the future. (I am not leaving Patreon - but at least this way, I can have a viable alternative. These companies are really out here making it hard for creators at like... every turn and I just don't want to be blindsided again and again.)

I am hoping to start crowdfunding close to the start of the new year to fully build out a new free gallery site. Short term it will be a place where I can post my new, free poses for people. Long term it might eventually become where my paid and subscription based stuff is hosted. Super long term I hope for it to become a hub of free resources from many different providers, similar to how Resources & Stock category was on DeviantArt before Eclipse. More on that much, much later.

I tried to keep this succinct and not too much of a rant. If anyone would like more details and information please feel free to ask. ♥