tl;dr: I'm the admin of the ATSOI group. I want to ban AI art from the gallery, because so much of it is coming in, but please read the whole thing, if possible. If not, at least scroll down to the number list for the policy changes I want to do. Let me know what you think. Thanks.
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Hello all,
It's the admin,
@chrlorez-art. It's been a very long time since I've reached out to the group in general. I'm not sure how many of you will even see this post, tbh, but if you do, please read and let me know what you think.
A lot has changed in the last few years with DeviantArt, and a lot of those changes has affected how groups work in general. I'm honestly not sure how many of you will be able to even see this post; I've noticed general participation in the website is down in general, and organizing groups has been pretty awful ever since Eclipse rolled out years ago.
I haven't really changed the rules much to accomodate these changes. Admittedly, I was fairly inattentive to the group for the past few years, and was mostly hands off.
For pretty much the entire time I was admin for the group, since 2018 iirc, I've had a fairly open policy about gallery submissions. The only criteria we had for submissions was that the submission needed to be relevant to the group's focus on size content. I never rejected a submission based on quality, because I don't think its fair for one person to determine an arbitrary baseline of quality for hobbyist and amateur artists to meet. However, in the last year and a half, a fun little tool called Stable Diffusion rolled out, and we've been inundated with AI art submissions ever since. Half of the website is AI generated now, and frankly, I'm not happy about that, and I'm certain a lot of others aren't either. That being said, I've been lenient on accepting AI size art when it is on topic, because I thought that it could be an effective creative outlet for other people on here, even if I don't agree with it. I've soured on this idea over the last year, and I've been rethinking our submission policies. Quality control is important in running a group in most circumstances. Too much poor quality art will make people think your group is unappealing. But ultimately, I don't want to reject people who are developing their skills because one guy thinks they aren't quite there yet.
AI art, on the other hand, doesn't improve an artist's skills; the end product improves by installing more extensions, more checkpoints and more Loras. Optimistically, artists that import their generations into Photoshop and clean them up develop skills, but most people don't do that. And frankly, I'm just tired of all the submissions coming in that barely qualify as size art when the technology can barely show perspective.
I don't want to come across as discriminating against the members who do use Stable Diffusion and other AI generators, and I think they deserve a place to show off their ideas, but when you can generate 15 images a day, and you submit the max limit every single day, the gallery gets overwhelmed. I think ideally, an separate AI size content group would be a good solution, but I don't have any interest in it myself; I'll leave that to someone else.
I wanted to run this by the members first, but I've been thinking of updating the submission policies. Here's my proposed changes to the group: A. Submissions for members will be no longer be automatically accepted.
B. AI art submissions will be vetted, and will not be accepted, unless they meet one of the following conditions:
- The submission is a story and the AI images are there for visual reference.
- The submission is supplemental material to a story, and the AI images are there for visual reference.
- The submission has been determined to include enough direct artistic expression to justify being accepted.
- The submission looks good enough to convince me that actual artistic expression is possible with AI.
C. There will be a review of all accepted AI-generated submissions in the gallery, and any that do not meet the conditions outlined in (B) will be removed from the gallery.
Before I implement these changes, please let me know what you think by commenting on this journal. I would like to get some feedback to see if there's another solution to consider.
Thank you for reading all the way through.