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The Downfall of DeviantArt
Once a vibrant platform for artists, DeviantArt is now buckling under the weight of bots and greed—and spurning the creative community that made it great.
The sales weren’t exactly legit—an online artist known as WyerframeZ looked at those users’ followers and found pages of profiles with repeated names, overlapping biographies and account-creation dates, and zero creations of their own, making it apparent that various bots were involved in these “purchases.” In January 2023, three prominent illustrators (Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz) filed a copyright-infringement and unfair-competition class-action lawsuit in federal court against DeviantArt, Stability, and Midjourney, whose own app trained on the same database that powers Stable Diffusion. (He may also dismiss the breach-of-contract charge against DeviantArt, whose attorney continues to argue that the site’s actions constitute “ classic fair use.”) Here, Zhang may have help from other advocates like Southen, who’s published results from experiments with Midjourney that have spit out copyright imagery from big-name intellectual property titans like Marvel and DC.
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