Oof... I'll try to follow you there but this is still my main place. Have you thought about Itaku?

It feels kinda sad seeing how much AI has proliferated and been accepted on Deviant Art. And all those memories I had of the old site design just feeling better to use in every way before the eclipse update...
I originally had plans to reupload a lot of my old art from around 2022 onwards there but then I saw how much i had and how much of it sucked and I kind of gave up.
I use it so infrequently now it's kind of ridiculous. I think about it, get flooded by how much good art is still on there even in spite of the artificial takeover, and then I can't really keep up in any way other than clearing my notifications.


So yeah uh
I don't really know how to end this I wish you luck, sorry

I'm really not interested in moving to other sites, that time has long passed, Twitter has always been a joke and Blue sky is just another version of FA where it's just an echo chamber.

And the AI thing is a non issue really.

Oh.
Wasn't going to bring up Xitter.

Blue Sky's not just an echo chamber, it's fucking depressing. It's like people are actually enjoying themselves for once but every five posts there's something deeply upsetting politically that no one can, maybe not even should, ignore. And yet it's never that simple to deal with ANY of the problems they bring up. Simple personalized instructions are the ONLY things I can work with, guess what they don't come with.
I'm not a political activist. I don't have that kind of confidence and I can't handle those things in a smart way. If you need a tough body or capable hands for writing or typing, trying to deal with things in an indirect way, I can do THAT, but my voice was not built to talk to big cheeses.
The only thing I even want that site for is to get talked to about the thoughts that I'm thinking or the posts that I make, really. If I can't enjoy what other people are posting there's no point in being there, it's just a shitshow. I'm fucking dead inside after all that and it's going to take a fuckton of escapism to even remotely get back to a normal mood.

I honestly don't know how you can say that, all my homies hate AI with the most burning of passions? I've seen two very recent videos for youtube come up about AI not working out actually for either art or Google, haven't watched either of them, but they do give me a little hope that it's not totally fucking the internet sideways, but I think it's going to be a very persistent problem as long as there's still people who accept it to others' detriment (The AI techbros).

Nah I'm actually here for AI art. It's about time something filtered out all the dogshit digital artists that over value their dreck. The push back against AI tools is so inconsistent, a lot of people claim it's theft but by that logic is you using a reference theft? Or the "it lacks soul" crowd, brother, ANY art made for a buck or smut is soulless, also a lot of artists are fucking assholes, a lot of self absorbed, narcissists that think they were hot shit in high school but when they start uploading their art they get discouraged by the big boys and then they bottle themselves up into their own corner getting real defensive and shit. You have no idea how much I laugh at the people that say "don't copy or steal my work", as if anyone would want to steal your garbage y'know?

Yeah DA is flooded with AI slop but at the same time people were making slop before the advent of AI, there's only a handful of good artists just like there's only a handful of good AI authors. Honestly I think the biggest fear comes from how good a lot of the AI stuff looks.

I'm rewriting this comment too much but what I'm seeing is a lack of respect for people's ownership over their creations and whatever security or protections they should be entitled to. They're all humans with their own emotions. To me it doesn't matter who owns their creation, their attitude towards others, or what the quality level of those creations are, because when artists aren't respected, they're always within their right to complain or clap back over the offense. I've learned that the hard way and had doors shut on me because of it too many times.
I can at least empathize the ideal of keeping your stuff and not having changes forced upon you.

When an artist uses a reference, they're using their eyes and their hands to create something "new" from what they're looking at, even heavy references can still have their own quirks though whether they should credit the original artist at that point still leans towards yes. While tracing and image generation are both inarguably theft, the human has at least one chance to explain themselves should they make the unwise or selfish choice to post it, the machine needs it's "owner" to defend why it rolled everyone's art into a katamari ball to make the results it's user(s) wanted, and it's often not a good defense at all.
Soul, irrelevant. Personality flaws, redirect, see: my first paragraph this reply. "as if anyone would want to steal your garbage", not even garbage is sacred to those who want the machines to assimilate as much material as possible, and wanting to keep it safe from that fate makes those people want to do it more just because they can.
It all circles back to disrespect.

A handful of good "AI authors" sounds like an oxymoron, they don't technically own the thing the machine created. The fear isn't over the quality, the fear is the ultimate devaluation of artistic human expression by the general public and the disappearance of jobs that would otherwise be sought out from companies or contractors seeking their talents.

"ultimate devalue of human expression"

My guy, that already happened with the advent of digital art due to the fallacy of "how can you value something you can't touch?"

It's kind of interesting how AI doesn't threaten traditional artists for this reason, one is in real life that produces an actual thing to hold and look at and the other is on a computer, witnessed through a screen. AI generation tools is just the next logical step in the evolution of digital media, and yeah the AI never produces exactly what you type but there are people that use AI who have to go in and edit the images by hand.

The whole pushback against AI ultimately boils down to people looking into the mirror and not liking what they're seeing.

Further point I forgot to mention, because digital art tools became so abundant and accessible, everyone having access to them and so many art programs having shortcuts to things people would take years to learn by hand ALSO devalues a lot of art.

It goes back to the famous saying: "when everyone is super, no one is."

Normally I'd keep going on, but at this point I think it's pretty clear I can't save you from so deep in the fog no matter how much truth I use to clear chunks of it. You don't want to believe anything made with skill or intent no matter it's medium or method can be better than the same thing fabricated artificially.
There's no evolution, no mirrors to cry at, the edits are to something they didn't make or own. It's all more smog.

But, I'm not continuing this. I hope some day you can reflect without outside influences about this and come to a different conclusion.

https://youtu.be/KuqBGEdha64?si=Mm5BMuE6CkQxpwdb

This is the nail in the coffin for this argument, the pretentiousness is absurd, not everyone makes art worth value, the AI tools do the same thing people already do. Some of it is good, most of it is shit, human or not.

FA's basically odd but tbh imho it's much better than the alternatives
DeviantArt's just an AI slopfest that's full of art thieves that'll post other's work without permission or you'll get art removed due to some rule
Inkbunny's scandalous controversy with being a Cub art haven will make it not so viable

FA's only advantage is that it's the only furry art page out there that has survived a ton of problems and still keeps on ticking

You can't steal digital art that's uploaded to a free website and while there's a lot of AI slop, let's not pretend people weren't already flooding the site with slop in the first place.