DeviantArt upsets artists with its new AI art generator, DreamUp

Looking at the comment section it seems that people struggle to understand how it works and thinks it is literally copying parts of people's images.

Educating people about such a technical topic seems very difficult especially since people get emotional of their work being used.

It's worse than copying parts of images, it's replacing artists.

I know because I'm literally working on setting up Dreambooth to do what I'd otherwise have to pay an artist to do.

And not only is it replacing artists, it's using their own work to do so. None of these could exist without being trained on the original artwork.

Surely you can imagine why they're largely not happy?

No one is happy when technology renders them obsolete or drives the marginal cost of what they produce to zero.

Traditionally technology renders people obsolete because the technologists figure out how to do something better than those people. Nobody's happy when it comes for them, but that's life. Someone invents the camera, and art is changed forever.

In this case, technologists figured out how to exploit people's work without compensating them. A camera is possible without the artists it replaces. Generative modeling is not. It's fundamentally different.

If people figured out how to generate this kind of art without exploiting uncompensated unwilling artists' free labor, it would be a different story.