@Fyrestar
Even DeviantArt notes that opting out doesn’t mean that your images won’t appear in datasets.
And they flat out state that it does not affect whether your art appears in their own DreamUp dataset.
Want to learn more about all of this? Do this.
- Fill out DeviantArt’s DreamUp Username Opt-Out Request
- It will be reviewed by a human within 10 days.
• Please note this is only available to artists who DeviantArt believes are ‘most likely to have been sourced by Stable Diffusion’.
Assuming you pass, and are opted-out, then your name can not be used in DreamUp as a text prompt.
Even if you do this and are approved, your images are still harvested and used in DreamUp.
All that changes is that your name can’t be used as a part of a text prompt.
Now, let’s opt out our images.
- Go to each of your images on DeviantArt and click this box:
As noted above, this only works if crawlers respect the meta directive, and DeviantArt does not. Regardless of your setting for this option, DreamUp still gets your images.
And, remember, there’s no guarantee that bots are crawling DeviantArt. So even if DeviantArt makes the meta directive available for the crawler, the crawler might not be getting the image via DeviantArt.
They can just crawl Google, or YIS, or some other image search tool’s cache instead.
So the meta directive at that point doesn’t even matter - the data’s not being crawled ‘from DeviantArt’, and Google and YIS aren’t going to respect a meta directive for something they are not.
FIND OUT IF YOU ARE IN THE DATA SET
If you want to find out if you are in the dataset of 5.8 billion images being used by many of these tools,
you may do so here.
It works best if you give it an image to search for in the data. Names sometimes work, but if you give it an image you almost always get a 100% positive or 100% negative.
I’m in there so many times, and from so many places, I’m not even sure what the pathway was that resulted in the images being snagged. Like - I don’t believe DeviantArt was in any way involved in most of the grabs, because even images from my vanity websites are in there. Images from friends web comics are in there too, so to keep from being snagged you’d need to implement this tag every place your images appear ever.
That’s why I think this doesn’t have anything to do with the images being grabbed from DeviantArt or even this site - to me it looks like they’re just coming out of image searches on something like Google.
Because the images aren’t ‘from this site’ or ‘from that site’ - in some cases the images are SO OLD the site they were on doesn’t even exist any more.
So … for me … it looks like they’re eating search engine caches. Because even if you went to that site today there’s no site to grab the image off of.
At which point, site directives stop having any meaning.
To make this really work, I think you’d almost have to do it as meta data in the image itself.
But that too would have to be supported and respected end-to-end.
And we never, ever got that working for Copyright, so I don’t know how you could successfully get it working for something like this.
My guess is that someone will start selling an invisible watermark service, like the old copyright keys that supposedly tracked artist copyrights. The ones that seemed to work were incredibly expensive, and the ones that were free never seemed to work.
Maybe there’s an opportunity here for someone to turn a fast buck by scamming people with promises that can’t be delivered. Like DeviantArt has done.
So, anyway, yes, the meta directive is nice. But if even a single crawler ignores it, you’re in the dataset. And, today at least, there is nothing you can do about that.
So to me at least it seems like a lot of work to make people feel like something is being done. But it doesn’t actually do anything.
Just look at DeviantArt’s implementation - they right out admit that they themselves are ignoring their own implementation, and the only thing they’ll consider allowing people to opt-out from is the artist name.
Almost assuredly because they want to avoid violating an artist’s trademark.
So, names CAN be protected, on DeviantArt at least. Most likely because of trademark liabilities.
But not images.
BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE
Philomena is public source, and anyone who wants to is welcome to extend its functionality to support this meta directive. That would make the new features available to any site that is based Philomena.
You don’t have to wait until this site’s dev team has the resources and time for it - you can do it yourself, and then sites that use Philomena may opt-in to the new features if they are functional and efficacious and integrate with their own processes and features.
PS: For me, my favorite thing about all of this is that DeviantArt’s DreamUp opt-out is careful to say it is ‘currently free’, and only available to artists who they judge to be ‘most likely’ to have been harvested.
So … not everyone gets to play. And if even hardly ever did anything artists like me are in the dataset, there’s no way of knowing what ‘most likely’ means. I’m absolutely not ‘most likely’, but I’m already in it.
If you do get to play and fill out DeviantArt’s forms, god bless. But it doesn’t do anything except protect any potential trademark you might have on your artist’s name - not even for DeviantArt’s own DreamUp. And even for people whom DeviantArt considers ‘most likely’ there’s no guarantee that it will remain free.
DeviantArt has been very clever how they played this. They gave people the impression that they’ve done something, and people keep asking why others aren’t doing the same.
But all they’ve done is give the appearance of this being optional somehow.
For me, that’s kind of DeviantArt’s whole thing. Respond to drama, like selling prints of people’s DA submissions, by giving people more boxes to click. As soon as people get lost in the box clicking and demanding that other sites ‘do the say’, DeviantArt goes ahead and does what they had been doing all along.
