along with a lot of other AI art announcements we're much less pleased about, deviantart announced this morning that they have created a standard for flagging works of art that you don't want to be bulk-scraped for machine learning datasets. in response to this, we are adding these flags to every page on cohost.org. we're off today for a federal holiday, but we punched in for five minutes to get this done because it was easy to do.
we have no plans to start offering any AI art generation tools, and we also have no plans to allow you to opt into having your art scraped. if you want to opt in, you're welcome to post your art to another site as well. (and, unfortunately, even if you don't want to opt in, nothing protects you from people reposting your art to other sites which don't set this flag, which we all know happens constantly.)
it's possible that dataset or model vendors will see platforms blanket-tagging pages with noai and noimageai, and decide that the original intent of the standard -- to reflect an artist's personal, conscious decision not to have their artwork scraped -- has been compromised1, and their scrapers will start disregarding the flags altogether. in this case, they'll probably blame us for not playing fair; so be it. at least then they'll have to admit how thin their commitment to respecting this standard was in the first place.
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indeed, this has happened before, with the W3C Do Not Track standard to allow people to opt out of tracking cookies -- Microsoft began setting this flag by default in Internet Explorer 10 and the internet advertising industry quickly responded by announcing that they were respecting user agency by ignoring it.
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