RHaseltine posted at 7:00 PM Fri, 2 August 2024 - #4487985

SydneyInPeril posted at 6:51 PM Fri, 2 August 2024 - #4487984

I pretty much stopped going when they rolled out ads on the forum and gallery - I've had at least one friend there tell me that they basically started doing it without announcing it, and in response they pulled their gallery images down because they were based on a home tabletop game and they'd posted in good faith that it wouldn't get advertising placed on them after the fact. And I more recently poked around and found they've been dabbling with a generative art engine, which pretty much finished me with them.

The ads are gone

That's well and good. I've already left and don't really intend to come back for a while. My recommendation for the management over there is to make public announcements of changes like that in the future, on both the website and the forum, before they go live and blindside people. Especially the ones that smack heavily of "Number Go Up" revenue grabs like the Temu ads were.

I'm still debating whether I keep using the software (I blocked internet for it at the firewall so it can't "phone home" in case they're pulling images to feed into that engine).

The Daz Loras are generated solely from Daz-owned store images, not gallery imags nor locally stored images.

There was no immediate indication where the training data was coming from, and given the way the Generative Image Engine thing really got traction you can understand where if there's no real immediately clickable announcement/press release about what it's being trained on, directly on the page indicating it's a thing available, that anyone who sees it immediately assumes the worst case scenario for what it's been trained on.

Needless to say, I don't plan on removing the internet block from the software if I continue using it, and I'm not planning on buying any more product from DAZ right now. Management is making some really poor decisions lately in what appears to be an attempt to grasp desperately at additional revenue streams, all of which are severely impacting the core customer experience, even if they seem like they shouldn't be having any impact from management's perspective.