PurplePort, a website connecting photographers to models, has decided to ban machine-generated images. While sites like Flickr are embracing the new technologies, PurplePort considers them “deceitful” and as something that “doesn’t help the community.”
It doesn’t matter which service or machine learning algorithms you use to create your images: Midjourney, DALL-E, Craiyon, Stable Diffusion, or anything else. If you upload them on PurplePort, they will be removed. The site notes that they’re banned “until further notice,” and they even invite the community to report such images.
“Our entire purpose is to bring creatives together into a safe, honest, and vibrant community to create fantastic images,” PurplePort’s Russ Freeman writes in a statement. “So the use of 100% machine-generated images, whilst an incredible breakthrough, is not something that helps our community.” Freeman notes that using machine-generated images might empower everyone to participate in generating art. As you may remember, one such artwork recently won a fine art contest and pissed off everyone else who participated. But it “does not reflect the core purpose” of PurplePort and it doesn’t “contain enough human input.” Perhaps it’s worth noting that using AI-generated photos isn’t completely forbidden. You can use them for backgrounds in the same way that commercial background images or textures might be used. But that’s about it. Finally, it is trivial for anyone to generate art using these art-generating machine algorithms, as I have demonstrated in the images used in this post. It requires no investment in skill or time. Thus, it is equally trivial for such images to crowd out the true artists amongst us and devalue those who have invested their time in their artistic pursuits.” If you’d like to read more about PurplePort’s decision, you’ll find more information in this blog post and Upload Guidelines. And if you really want to showcase your AI-generated art somewhere… Well, you can always head over to Flickr.
