DeviantArt announces DreamUp, a text-to-image generator based on Stable Diffusion, drawing intense criticism from its artist community
Confused artists discover their work will be used for AI training by default. — On Friday, the online art community DeviantArt announced DreamUp …
Ars TechnicaBenj Edwards
Context & Ripple Effects
DeviantArt is walking into a fight its supplier already lost. Weeks earlier, artists in Stability AI's training dataset learned they were never asked for consent or payment, and an engineer's DreamBooth reimplementation made recreating any artist's style a one-click affair. Against that backdrop, DeviantArt shipping DreamUp — with members' work feeding AI training by default — reads to its community less like a feature launch than a confirmation of suspicions.
The timing compounds existing distrust: coverage describes the platform as struggling with bot activity while prioritizing revenue over creators, and Japan's anime community has already shown how fan loyalty to artists fuels AI art backlash. Ten days later, Stability AI itself would walk some of this back in Stable Diffusion 2.0, removing NSFW data and blunting style mimicry — an implicit acknowledgment that the consent critique was landing.
First-order effects
DeviantArt's own artist community turns on the announcement immediately, discovering their portfolios are training inputs by default rather than by choice.
DreamUp puts DeviantArt in the position of monetizing the same Stable Diffusion model whose dataset already angered unpaid artists, fusing the platform's reputation problem with Stability AI's.
Second-order effects
Trust-erosion accelerates creator flight: artists who already saw the platform as bot-ridden and revenue-first now have a concrete reason to migrate to communities positioned as AI-free or opt-in.
Stability AI's distribution partners inherit its consent controversy — every platform licensing Stable Diffusion must now decide whether to offer opt-outs, and DeviantArt's default-on choice becomes the cautionary example other licensors differentiate against.
Third-order effects
Community platforms face a structural fork between hosting human creators and selling generative tools trained on them — a conflict that pushes the industry toward explicit permission boundaries for public data as a precondition of legitimacy.
If the pattern holds, model vendors will keep conceding ground piecemeal (as SD 2.0 did on NSFW and style mimicry) under community pressure, making consent architecture a competitive feature rather than a legal afterthought.
The trend: Creator platforms are being forced to choose sides in the training-data consent war, and those that default their communities' work into AI pipelines are converting user trust into churn.
Update: We heard the community feedback, and now ALL deviations are automatically labeled as NOT authorized for use in AI datasets. https://www.deviantart.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@DeviantArt this is how dreamup is being developed. it adds training on non-opt-out artwork on top of the stability diffusion model, which is ALREADY trained using unethically sourced data. they CANT UNLEARN those parts. this whole discussion is not in good faith unless they addr…
With DreamUp, DeviantArt's new AI art generator, you can create images of nearly anything you can DreamUp from a prompt you craft. Join the challenge to dream up your very own llama! Here are a few to get you started. Tag us in yours! #DreamUpLlamas https://twitter.com/...
Heads up, DeviantArt turned heel and as far as i can tell all of your existing deviations will have to be manually opted out of AI data sets. YOU ARE OPTED IN AT DEFAULT Extremely scummy move https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
DeviantArt has decided your artwork there is fair game to be used in their new AI generator by default. You have to go to an obscure form to opt-out and requires 10 days to be reviewed. https://twitter.com/...
One of the shittiest roll outs in history. The disrespect to the artists that have kept the platform going is astounding. Go listen to that Space they held earlier today. It was vile. https://twitter.com/...
DeviantArt SHOULD have been an opt-in system. Artists SHOULD be compensated if their art is used in training. Too many artists are not going to realize that @DeviantArt is using their art for AI without their consent and without compensation.
You “heard” the community feedback and acted.. Why are we so angry? We are beyond angry n upset. On top the AI nonsense, you @DeviantArt being an art platform and you don't understand or even thinking about how to protect your own artists?? Your just “Deviant” now, no Art 😐 https…
Spent some time getting my head around the DA situation. Here's the core info, for everyone's benefit: DA has introduced DreamUp. This is an AI image generator implemented within Deviantart that uses the Laion5B dataset via Stable Diffusion. https://twitter.com/...
deviantart is run by a bunch of web3 NFT blockchain geeks and their move of trying to normalize “AI art” is an act of disrespect to artists and everything artists stand for. don't praise them for this change, it's a change they tried REALLY HARD not to make. fuck deviantart. http…
I can't describe the mental exhaustion I feel after this @DeviantArt announcement. Artists are underpaid, overworked, and have been fighting for years against AI/NFT's industrial scale art theft. Having the oldest, most established platform backstab us like this is horrific.