Waifu Diffusion

magcolo said:

No one can see it if you just scroll through the original post, we need to stop the misunderstanding before it spreads further, tho it’s probably already too late, and novelai especially advertising us for their paid service is just plain bad.

It hardly matters, Danbooru already has a reputation as a reposting site. You need to contact an administrator directly to have your art removed, and while I'm sure evazion is explaining the reality of the situation to anyone who contacts him, if they've already gotten that far it's unlikely that anything would deter them from just going ahead with the take down request at that point. The NovelAi issue is just the cherry on top of reasons for artists to hate us.

nonamethanks said:

We already did: https://twitter.com/danboorubot/status/1577095040500781057

That doesn't really help as it is buried deep into the replies and more importantly, in english.

You need a tweet in Japanese in my opinion, explaining that danbooru is not affiliated with novelai, that ai scrappers use the whole web and removing images from here does literally nothing against them. Possibly even contacting the original author of that tweet directly even.
The misunderstanding has to end before the misinformation can't be stopped.

I hate to be pessimistic here, but the damage is arguably already done. The place wasn't exactly currying any favours with the majority of Japanese artists anyways. Their sentiments have always been that danbooru is a shitty thing, and continues to be a shitty thing. That an AI was trained on it is just the latest shitty thing to have come out of it. Hell, they still believe that paid rewards get posted here to this day. Even if they're given the correct information, are they going to care? I kinda doubt it.

EDIT: I see that there's been over 120 artist bans within the last 24 to 48 hours. Looks like damage already done to me.

I'll be honest, when it comes to free art (as opposed to Fanbox etc.) I don't see why Danbooru honours takedown requests at all. There are other boorus like Gelbooru that don't, seemingly without legal consequence.
I can certainly understand artists not wanting their art used commercially without their permission, but I don't think there's any real justifiable objection to what boorus do. All they do is make it easier to find the art and artists in the first place; 95% of the thousands of artists I follow I found through boorus. If an artist isn't on a booru and I'd have to trawl through 1,000 tweets of food pictures and Splatoon gameplay videos in their feed to actually see their art, guess what? I'm not going to see their art.
I know there are some artists so neurotic they think saving art from Twitter is theft, or who try to ban "lurkers" from following them at all hekiga (freelot), among a dozen or so others, blocked me on Twitter for daring to follow him with an account that doesn't actively make tweets, but I can't say I have much regard for that sort of nonsense.

When NovelAI is openly using Danbooru as a scapegoat, while actively refusing to honor exclusion requests themselves (saying they don't believe in copyright, despite running a proprietary, paywalled, entirely closed-off model), it really makes me wonder what the point is. When NAI can disregard them so blatantly for something that's genuinely objectionable, or at least debatable, why bother obeying them here?

I'm personally wondering if there's going to be anyone left to upload at the end of all this...

anon7631 said:

I'll be honest, when it comes to free art (as opposed to Fanbox etc.) I don't see why Danbooru honours takedown requests at all.

Because Danbooru doesn't want to get sued. Legally speaking, we are on immensely shaky ground, protected mostly because larger corporations don't really care about our existence. We don't *own* any of this stuff, it isn't ours to distribute and show off as we see fit.

It also serves as a shield from those that accuse the site of art theft, stating that "You are free to remove your stuff the moment you don't want it here." Makes most artists simply decide to go that route instead of trying to pursue long, expensive, and potentially fail-able legal recourse for the reposting of their art without their permission. Copyright law can and will fuck you in the ass if you try and be cute with it, and we have only really escaped its wrath by simply being irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. (Most places banning links to dan as sources also helps, as it keeps the name on the down low.)

The fact that others due it without being whacked(YET) is mostly irrelevant to whether we would survive a legal battle. "Other people steal stuff too" Isn't a defense, so its best to avoid being in the line of fire in the first place.

As far as the whole "They just make it easier to find art" part of it, the issue there is the showcasing is actively providing the product without the views that come with it. Many people don't follow the source to where it came from, just looking, thinking 'cool', or 'meh', and moving on to the next piece of art, thus essentially depriving artists of the exposure they want from their art through the medium they desired.

Fanbox advertising is also featured on pixiv pages, which we don't really provide. For some, the free stuff is there to try and get people to be willing to drop a sub to their paid works, which becomes more difficult when people aren't seeing the big flashy "CHECK OUT MY FANBOX!" links. Sure, there is the argument that not everyone would be clicking those links anyway, but that just makes it worse since they are already dealing with a smaller pool to begin with.

The AI's are currently dodging the big copyright hullaballoo because they are technology so new that there really aren't any laws that fit their existence yet. 100% AI Art can't actually be legally copyrighted due to its very nature of being completely out of human hands(Most copyright laws don't allow you to copyright things outside of human scope, to prevent people from trying to copyright a sunset or other shit like that.) but this is what I like to call a "Honeymoon period", because the moment people start trying to use AI art for anything other than just generating free art? Copyright law is absolutely going to start sprinting to catch up. Imagine generating a gacha character and then being told that everybody else can put it in their games as well, because it doesn't belong to you.

anon7631 said:

I know there are some artists so neurotic they think saving art from Twitter is theft, or who try to ban "lurkers" from following them at all hekiga (freelot), among a dozen or so others, blocked me on Twitter for daring to follow him with an account that doesn't actively make tweets, but I can't say I have much regard for that sort of nonsense.

That specific artist, among a few others, is precisely why I'm disappointed with the extra restriction banned artists now have. Danbooru was the easiest way for me to actually browse their art, because I only use Twitter to follow news and artists (which I already hated doing because Twitter is garbage for browsing art) and artists like that won't even let you appreciate their art if you simply don't like actively using Twitter.

At this point, I'm strongly opposed to AI generators, and especially NovelAI, just purely on how much they've managed to ruin in less than a week.

Grahf said:

Their sentiments have always been that danbooru is a shitty thing, and continues to be a shitty thing.

I think so too. NovelAI just stimulated their aversion to danbooru. I saw some tweets by artists saying that NovelAI is worth it but danbooru is shit. Already their aversion is mainly directed at danbooru. "Repost sites" like danbooru are only bad for them. They don't seem bothered by going back through a bunch of game screenshots on Twitter or using pixiv's noisy and useless tags.

susiey said:

Already their aversion is mainly directed at danbooru. "Repost sites" like danbooru are only bad for them.

It's amazing how many artists seem to be against people actually viewing their art - or preserved for the future. Especially art they've long deleted from pixiv/Twitter/etc.

Jigsy said:

It's amazing how many artists seem to be against people actually viewing their art - or preserved for the future. Especially art they've long deleted from pixiv/Twitter/etc.

I don't understand it. Twitter is literally the worst art platform I could imagine.
It operates on whim and malice, and I regularly see artists posting tools to checked whether they've been secretly banned or blacklisted. I've lost count of how many artists I've seen suspended for no discernible reason, with all the content gone forever unless it's backed up on a place like Danbooru.
But even if they don't get banned, it's impossible to find anything. Within an artist's profile you've got no sorting, no filtering, just one stream of the single worst element of web design ever invented: infinite scrolling. Even if the artist DOESN'T fill that with 90% non-art, good luck trying to find an image from 2018.
Then if you do find it, what do you get? It's lossy-compressed to hell and back, so badly you can often see the jpeg artifacts without needing to even zoom in.

I honestly don't get it. Do they just not care? How can they take all the trouble of building their skills, drawing a piece, and choosing to upload it, yet when it comes to their own uploading they treat it like worthless garbage? A booru can't fix the damage Twitter's compression does but it at least keeps the art accessible.

I was amused earlier when looking at the ban list fallout from this, to see an artist with something like 80 uploads here. In their account list was 7 pixivs, 3 skebs, and *17* twitters, and every single one of these links were red links. Apparently some artists are just opposed to anyone being able to see their art at all..

morriganaensland said:

yeah i wasn't expecting there to be any way to restrict that. maybe if they didn't name drop danbooru specifically so there's at least not a specific booru to pin this all on. if they would even agree to that.

But they are using danbooru data. There have been efforts to scrape Danbooru for a long time before SD as well, and they're still using remnants of that such as the Danbooru2021 database. I say credit where credit's due, if they're scraping danbooru or using a model (Danbooru2021) that was made from scraping Danbooru then make it public.

anon7631 said:

I honestly don't get it. Do they just not care? How can they take all the trouble of building their skills, drawing a piece, and choosing to upload it, yet when it comes to their own uploading they treat it like worthless garbage? A booru can't fix the damage Twitter's compression does but it at least keeps the art accessible.

Artists use Twitter because that's where they will get exposure, especially in Japan. Industry professionals and potential clients network through Twitter. Most won't go out of their way to scour for artists on a booru or even on Pixiv. Dedicated art websites (DeviantArt, Artstation, etc.) are bad for exposure except among those who are already art enthusiasts.

I've seen many artists level the exact same claims you did against Twitter, but to put it quite simply they're there because everyone else is there.

I don't know why they treat their art like garbage, either.

They seem to think that they can't help it, if their art is removed by Twitter's malice and whims, or if a copyright request (which, I think, is a fake by harassment) removes fan art from pixiv.
Sometimes artists even remove their art on a themselves whim.

On the other hand, they don't understand the value of archiving, they call it unauthorized repost, and they feel it's just as abhorrent as piracy. (Of course, I understand it's legally sensitive.)

As for why they stick to Twitter, I think yuudo is right.

That is Twitter for you, a site that actively makes things worse for everyone, no matter what the subject is. News - simplified to the point of being useless due to having to fit the character limit (or turned into 100 tweet long essays that nobody reads), politics - also the same, art - even when the artists themselves aren't burying their art between quadrillion pics of their last meal/video game screenshots/random photos of their daily lives, it lacks any features useful for finding specific kinds of art.

For some of them it's about a sense of control over their work that isn't fulfilled when people post to third parties. It's more important for them that they are in control of where and how the art appears than it is for the art to be accessible beyond them. I don't know if I agree with it, but it's an understandable perspective. Especially now as the worst fears about lacking control are confirmed when they see their art sliced apart pixel by pixel for a machine to slap into a complicated composite, and rightly or wrongly that's getting tied to danbooru and sites like it.

As an aside I also remember getting blocked by an artist and looking into why, only to find speculation from other blocked people that they just outright block anyone from another country.

Karesh said:

For some of them it's about a sense of control over their work that isn't fulfilled when people post to third parties. It's more important for them that they are in control of where and how the art appears than it is for the art to be accessible beyond them. I don't know if I agree with it, but it's an understandable perspective. Especially now as the worst fears about lacking control are confirmed when they see their art sliced apart pixel by pixel for a machine to slap into a complicated composite, and rightly or wrongly that's getting tied to danbooru and sites like it.

This is basically it. Not all artists want their works to be visible forever or to be spread everywhere. They may have their own private reasons for wanting to remove a work from the public eye and sites like this take away that power. Considering artists have also had works stolen and used for commercial purposes without their permission (like being sold as t-shirts and such), there is an understandable paranoia against reposting sites.

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to fetch deleted works and other sites where things get reposted, but Danbooru has become the greatest scapegoat and the name itself is now like the bogeyman of unauthorized reposting.

luntoer said:

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to fetch deleted works and other sites where things get reposted, but Danbooru has become the greatest scapegoat and the name itself is now like the bogeyman of unauthorized reposting.

The quoted part is the most frustrating thing in this whole debacle. Other image boards/gallery sites do not remove artists' works on request like we do, they do not ban paid rewards either, and yet we are being singled out and attacked more than them.