I ceased going and spending money at DAZ when one of my friends ran into moderation issues when trying to critique the ads being injected into the gallery and forum... my understanding is they burned their gallery, too, and the one thread they'd posted those images into. The AI stuff was just confirmation it's time to leave.

Torquinox posted at 7:40 PM Tue, 6 August 2024 - #4488114

So, there is a layer of reality that has been excluded from the conversation. Daz will say they "trained the AI with their own data" but that's only the top layer of data, the frosting. The underlying layer is made of stolen data, the same as every other AI generator out there. There are no ethical data training sets. They're all based on mass theft. That's because it takes billions of images and enormous volumes of text and enormous computing power to make the ai "smart enough" to do anything with the layer of frosting on top, the actual Daz data.

It all goes back to the Laion data sets. It's well documented that those are made of stolen data. Of course, you're not allowed to say "stolen data" on Daz site because it implies that some company did something wrong - Which of course all the AI companies did when they stole everything from everyone on the internet to train their AIs under the false auspices of research and fair use. Now the AI companies are making money off it and the AI industry has billions and billions of dollars being pumped into it. This apparently makes it all ok because we're all just little people dumb enough to share our work on the internet. So, it's ok to steal from us. And it is theft. When a company takes our work and incorporates it into their AI training data sets without our consent or compensation, that's theft. It was also ok to steal from famous artists and from Stephen King, too.

There are a few artists attempting lawsuits, but who knows how those will go? I do not expect much in the way of legal remedy. It is known that AIs have a habit of regurgitating parts of or entire works in its output. And it is known that earlier models are used as the starting point for later models, and it is pretty much impossible to remove the stolen works from the data set. So, once it's in there, it's in there.

It also shows how broken the entire copyright system is, since it pretty much is expecting the artists to go after the companies in court for enforcement, and otherwise is basically slanted in the direction of the biggest coffers. As long as the companies in question get to basically rake the internet, it takes away the biggest and best forms of advertisement from the artists because it's a serious risk to put anything on the internet because it will get fed into one of these engines without a lot of work to attempt to poison the input, and that only really works if enough artists agree to do the poisoning without so many doing it that all the engineers have to do is add a special case to inoculate against the poisoning. Granted, that was already a problem (just look at the art that gets downloaded and slapped on t-shirts!), but Generative Imagery Engines make the problem so much bigger because now an artist's style can be "emulated", and is much harder to point at in a court as a direct copyright violation.

Nevertrumper posted at 11:14 AM Tue, 6 August 2024 - #4488106

In my experience, forum moderators are not your friends. They are to enforce forum and company rules, since in many ways the website owner can be made responsable for forum post.
Forum moderators also make sure, that no forum posts or threads are damaging the website owner's business model.
Just house rules.
So what do you expect?
You don't like DAZ moderation?
That's fine, you don't have to.
Just don't believe, it would be better here.
It isn't, neither at rotica or RenderHub.
DeviantArts is different as they don't seem to have an active moderation. 
Instead you'll see MAGA fascist all over at DA in their forum threads. 

And to be fair, I don't like spending my money with any business that runs their forum like that. DAZ is not an outlier in that regard.

I will also say, that having seen that, having heard about that, having watched DAZ scramble like a desperate junkie looking for their fix in the pursuit of revenue streams, I've been really not interested in spending a lot of money on the hobby. Granted, I have a lot of hobbies, so letting one lay fallow is never out of the question.

But it impacts my desire to even buy content here for the software. For either software.

RHaseltine posted at 3:34 PM Sat, 3 August 2024 - #4488013

In fact daz was very clear that the images used were its own store images in their blogs and, as I recal, in the emails.

Basically, the indication of what the engine is trained on wasn't posted as visibly as it should have been. Hence, we have to make assumptions, and the assumption trained into us that it's being trained on whatever happens to be vacuumed up, whether it be from everywhere, or from all site posted content via changes to the TOS.

I will also comment that @DarkElegance has a view pretty close to my own. I like Studio over Poser. But my friend has had experiences regarding the mentality of the moderators when they pushed back on the advertising on the gallery thing, that they told me made it felt like they were being expected to couch 100% of their commentary in a very non-aggressive way or shut up, which caused them to delete all of their content in response and walk away from it.

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.

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.

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.

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), switch back to Poser again (expensive upgrade for me now and requires abandoning content I've paid for), or even just abandon the whole thing 25 year old content archive and go back to sketchtablets and building my own 3D in Blender.

As to phone calls I really don't know as I never answer the phone, if it is family they know to either leave a message or email me.  The statement from Rendo said they did not keep credit card information but that information had been passed to an 'unauthorised third party' during the order process. I read that, rightly or wrongly, to mean any information Rendo has on me which includes my phone number so I would not be at all surprised if we are not all on a target list somewhere.  More upsetting I don't think Rendo really understand the impact this has had on their customers.  OK, they have owned up and closed the leak, we hope, and they have moved on while many of us are still dealing with the consequences.

I still don't think they've "owned up", I'm afraid. Yes, they messaged those affected... but it should have been public, front page, "we've been hacked, added extra security" announcements. But yes, I don't think they truly understand the impact it's having on us. I was already one of those that doesn't answer when the number is unrecognized, and I'll try to look it up online while the phone is still ringing (which is how I know one of them is the credit card "service")... but it's adding reinforcement to that behavior with this having been added to the calls I get.

And to add insult to injury, I'm fairly certain that the criminals got my phone number as well; The past couple of months I've had 1-2 calls a month from scammers offering to "service" my credit card. I've never had it happen until I needed my card replaced, and I'm pretty damned sure it's because "hey, this phone number, the owner has a credit card too".

Yeah, I pretty much decided I'm done here for a while. I had to have my card reissued (my bank was really damned well on top of this), and when I questioned whether Rendo did enough, I got the "we did more than the law requires".

Yeah. I still don't feel good about the way this was handled, and it's too late now to actually publicly announce it.

I had my bank call me two weeks ago about attempted fraud on my card. Thankfully I only had the inconvenience of dealing with being without my card for a week and a half. On the other hand, I'm now getting calls on my phone from "card service" scammers. Two this week already. Now that they know there's a card associated with that phone number, they're trying to get a hold of the number again so that they can try to clean me out again.

Also, I noted that there was a mention of having a security audit done. Can we please have an announcement of when that's been finished, and the result and actions taken based on it?

BTW, I don't trust Paypal (they need to be regulated as a bank, because they effectively are)... and until I know the status of the security audit, I don't plan on using anything other than a prepaid gift-card here. (I'm actually considering just doing that online period.)