DeviantArt
Online Art Community
The 25-year-old art community that launched its own AI generator, DreamUp, in 2022 — igniting an artist revolt and a landmark lawsuit — then declared itself “100% right” to have embraced generative art.
In their words
Boy, we got A LOT of heat. But, we were also 100% right. Since then, we have been seeing waves of new creators leveraging this tech and co-existing with traditional digital artists, and the lines between them are starting to blur.
You cannot just go and enjoy the fruits of the labor of others and do not credit them or give them the power to control their work.
Biography
Founded in 2000, DeviantArt grew into one of the internet’s largest art communities, home to hundreds of millions of works by amateur and professional artists. In November 2022 it became the first major art platform to ship its own generative tool: DreamUp, built on Stable Diffusion, pitched as AI “done fairly” — with credit mechanisms and tags letting artists declare whether their work could be used for training.
The DreamUp revolt
The launch backfired spectacularly. Every artwork on the platform was included in third-party AI training permissions by default, with artists required to opt out through a review process. The backlash was so fierce that DeviantArt reversed course within days, excluding all content by default. The damage lingered: in January 2023, DeviantArt was named a defendant — alongside Stability AI and Midjourney — in the class action brought by Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz, as the maker of DreamUp. Many artists decamped to anti-AI alternatives like Cara.
DeviantArt never retreated. AI-generated images became a huge share of new uploads (its top-earning sellers include prolific AI creators), and in April 2026 CEO Moti Levy published a defiant journal post: the company had taken “A LOT of heat” but was “100% right,” pointing to creators earning $23 million on the platform in 2025 — twelve times the 2022 figure — as AI and traditional artists learned to co-exist.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/deviantart