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| Basic Information | |
|---|---|
| Release Year | 2000 |
| Product Type | Social Media |
| In Production | yes |
| Official Website | https://www.deviantart.com/ |
DeviantArt is an art sharing platform that was launched on August 7th, 2000 by Mathew Stephens, Scott Jarkoff and Angelo Sotira, among others. The service was eventually bought by Wix in 2017 for $36 million,[1] with significant reports of declined quality from its platform's userbase.[citation needed - check comment] Soon after the platform's purchase, the platform began focusing itself on NFTs and AI-generated content.[citation needed - check comment]
Consumer impact summary
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- User freedom: Varied, platform is reportedly filled with TOS-violating content coupled with incidents of agresive moderation.
- User privacy: Abysmal, new features added tend to automatically opt-in users, such as when the platform opted the userbase into being training data for AI image generators.
- Business model: Advertisements through contests, paid subscriptions via "CORE", tokens for AI-generated content, cuts from transactions on the platform.
- Market control: Limited, since the mass exodus circa 2020, a significant portion of the userbase has transitioned away to other social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and NewGrounds.
Incidents
This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents related to this platform. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the DeviantArt category.
Automatically opted-in for AI training (2022)
During November of 2022, DeviantArt released an update to their platform that automatically labelled everything on the site to be approved for AI training by third parties. Due to public backlash, this change was reverted in couple of days later. Now all art on the site is automatically opted-out of AI training, users can however still manually opt-in for their content to be used to train AI.[2] It is, however, unknown if these labels are respected by third-parties seeking training data.
This incident did lead to attempted litigation in January of 2023 after content from artists on the platform were discovered in leaked training data.
Pay-walling of downloads (2026)
On March 9th, 2026, the platform modified its download system to limit how much user-generated content could be downloaded from the platform, where non-paying users are limited to downloading 10 artworks per week, while users paying for the CORE service on the platform raises the weekly limit to 300 artworks.The platform stated that this change was to make it harder for artworks to be scraped,[3] however it doesn't block users from scraping watermarked or lower-resolution versions of said content. Despite this feature being paywalled, none of the revenue made from raising these limits goes to paying the artists on the platform.
See also
Social media platforms
References
- ↑ "Wix Acquires DeviantArt, Pairing Wix Capabilities with Global Creative Community". Wix. 23 Feb 2017. Archived from the original on 9 Mar 2021. Retrieved 9 Mar 2021.
- ↑ "UPDATE All Deviations Are Opted Out of AI Datasets". DeviantArt. 11 Nov 2022. Archived from the original on 13 Nov 2022. Retrieved 10 Jul 2026.
- ↑ "Status by Team on DeviantArt". DeviantArt. 9 Mar 2026. Archived from the original on 10 Mar 2026. Retrieved 10 Mar 2026.