to be updated

"we’ll no longer be continuing the e6ai project"

What's this project? Will this affect this site?

I can't tell anyone what projects of theirs they maintain or support, but what difference is it making for the community at e621 that this place exists? And what is AI regulation supposed to do? Creative artistic endeavors don't suddenly gain or lose value strictly because they're made with human motor control functions. People shouldn't feel insecure because generative AI exists because it doesn't change any human perceptions of artistic merit. I don't think shutting this place down is a good idea at all.

I read over on E621. So does that mean this site will be taken offline ??? Oo.

Never mind. I just read the Announcement Discussion over there.

I read the announcement on e621. I know I haven't been active here, but I'm very disappointed by this news. I actually had plans to start posting my work here, but I guess that's not going to happen. I actually thought about this the other day, how prophetic. I'm going to start downloading art.

I'm sorry to all the artists for whom this site was their main hosting space for their work.

beerwolf said:
"we’ll no longer be continuing the e6ai project"

What's this project? Will this affect this site?

Hopefully we'll soon get a better announcement up, but tl;dr: They are shutting down the e6ai website for good. The Discord server is staying.

oh this will be interesting to see

Can we get a legitimate reason as to why this site is closing? It's the only great place for good AI furry art, places like rule34 are absolute shit for tagging.

skittersqueak said:
Can we get a legitimate reason as to why this site is closing? It's the only great place for good AI furry art, places like rule34 are absolute shit for tagging.

From what I gather it was done to appeal to Bluesky crowd.

Not like they won't forget about this gesture in a week and default to hating on E621 and its owners.

Honestly, e6ai always felt incredibly two-faced to me.
e6 devs: “Let’s make scraping our site really annoying for image generators.”
Also e6 devs: “Here’s a sister site specifically for AI but our quality standards will so autistically high most users will be turned off of ever wanting to use it.”

dildofaggins said:
From what I gather it was done to appeal to Bluesky crowd.

"appeal" is a strong word and a heavy assumption
this has been surely been on the minds of e621 staff and people at bad dragon/dragonfruit for at least some months if not some years
this place was already kinda neglected when i came here to start doing some tag work in the forum with aliases implications and bulk update requests
aka AIBUR

once i started to fiddle around with cinder and some admins/staff from e621 only then this place started to get actual updates and management along with getting staff drive to get more staff's here

the bluesky post was just a catalyst for the fuel that has already been there

So where is the best place to archive high-quality furry art that was made using (in whole or part) image generator models?

dragonranger said:
Also e6 devs: “Here’s a sister site specifically for AI but our quality standards will so autistically high most users will be turned off of ever wanting to use it.”

first of all kinda ableist
second of all this was no "e6 devs" it was the people from dragonfruit that made the sister website
third of all the standards are just the same as they are to e621, only that there are extra standards because it's ai generated and has been prone to give errors and mistakes along with some utter nonsense

supuhstar said:
So where is the best place to archive high-quality furry art that was made using (in whole or part) image generator models?

civitai and r34 unless someone vibe codes a booru like e6ai or just takes their source code and starts to host one website

flowersylveon said:
civitai and r34 unless someone vibe codes a booru like e6ai or just takes their source code and starts to host one website

Yea that's my thinking too.
Which sucks ass because the whole appeal of e6 is the quality standards. Even rule34.xxx is ass compared to e6. Civit has basically zero curation; might as well use deviantArt at that point.

It really shouldn't be that surprising to anyone.
I can see them scraping cub off their site any day at this point as well because someone makes a fuss on twitter or bluesky.
They have good sites, but their decision making is garbage.

killed_to_death said:
It really shouldn't be that surprising to anyone.
I can see them scraping cub off their site any day at this point as well because someone makes a fuss on twitter or bluesky.
They have good sites, but their decision making is garbage.

Honestly wouldn’t surprise me if they just kill the site one day with no warning so no one can backup what’s here. Wouldn’t be the first time they pulled something like that.

Well that's a shame.

This sucks, e6 has great archival and tagging purposes with a decorum of standards... I avoid R34 and the likes like the plague. :/

😭

I enjoy this community so much, that's the biggest loss for me.

Much love to all of you on e6ai And the community for being so welcoming and kind ❤️❤️❤️
Hope everyone will find an alternative if the site isn't resurrected where i can find you all again.
Till then i wish you all the best 🫂

Despite all the complaints people had about the quality standards, this was the only place I really wanted to post at. It was tiring going to R34 and seeing all the posts with extra limbs, not enough fingers, etc because of how lax they were. And the shit tagging as Skittersqueak mentioned.

The support the community is showing warms my heart.

And earlier today I had finished fixing all the tags that used 'stomach' when they meant to use 'midriff'... 😫

n_n said:
Much love to all of you on e6ai And the community for being so welcoming and kind ❤️❤️❤️
Hope everyone will find an alternative if the site isn't resurrected where i can find you all again.
Till then i wish you all the best 🫂

I guess I'll return to e621. I left e621 in December 2023 for e6ai because keeping up with the 30+ pages a day for crumbs was too cumbersome for me. E6ai has been delightful to say the least. I will miss it, its people, and its zeitgeist.

Weep not because e6ai departs, but celebrate e6ai for daring to be.

Well, that sucks. This is effectively the only aggregate site I know of that's worth a damn, tagging everywhere else is a fragmented, incomplete mess. An odd silver lining, I suppose; the standards leading to potential rapid deletion has meant I've been pretty good about downloading anything that catches my eye soon after it's uploaded, out of paranoia it'll be gone the next time I refresh. So in that sense, I won't have to scramble much other than a few searches of fancy.

grove_ellar said:
I guess I'll return to e621.

I was thinking the same, but they're all overjoyed about this shutdown, so it puts a sour taste in my mouth.

Call me crazy, but I like the ability of people to express themselves in a safe and healthy way, and to build friendly welcoming communities. Guess I'm in the minority.

Will we get an independent "e7ai.net" or something like that not run by Dragonfruit? Because according to the Bluesky post, that might have been the core issue. And I will admit I was a bit surprised when I first found out e621 and e6ai were run by the same guys, maybe I had a hunch something like this would happen eventually.

skillyzee said:
I was thinking the same, but they're all overjoyed about this shutdown, so it puts a sour taste in my mouth.

Call me crazy, but I like the ability of people to express themselves in a safe and healthy way, and to build friendly welcoming communities. Guess I'm in the minority.

They've been waiting for this to happen since the site was launched.

skillyzee said:
I was thinking the same, but they're all overjoyed about this shutdown, so it puts a sour taste in my mouth.

Call me crazy, but I like the ability of people to express themselves in a safe and healthy way, and to build friendly welcoming communities. Guess I'm in the minority.

I have been disappointed but not in any way surprised by the reaction from people on e621. I can't really imagine celebrating a hub of creative work getting unceremoniously ripped down... but they don't see AI art as art, they see it as invasive poison so, in their minds, they're celebrating the trash getting taken out.

I'm still waiting to see if they make any changes over there WRT AI backgrounds and AI audio... I wouldn't be shocked if they made those things against the rules (I really hope they don't... but you know.)

Guess we gotta post our images on E621 and pretend it's not AI, because there is literally nowhere else to go. What else can they even expect to happen after doing something this silly? Civit has nonsense rules where deformed garbage can be posted, but anthro art is constantly taken down for "no zoophilia" rules entirely arbitrarily, and the search barely works. Other sites share these issues, no quality standards and random bans on content, while not being user friendly.

"We’ve heard from the community" is the saddest part, because they clearly haven't been listening at all. We had one complaint which I also had, that the standards are too high here, but it was damn nice that this one complaint is the entire list. This site, the quality of this site, it's needed. AI art isn't going to stop being made, it's just going to have to invade more non-AI spaces now. This is such a mistake.

emx said:
I have been disappointed but not in any way surprised by the reaction from people on e621. I can't really imagine celebrating a hub of creative work getting unceremoniously ripped down... but they don't see AI art as art, they see it as invasive poison so, in their minds, they're celebrating the trash getting taken out.

I'm still waiting to see if they make any changes over there WRT AI backgrounds and AI audio... I wouldn't be shocked if they made those things against the rules (I really hope they don't... but you know.)

Well if they ever do, I guess they can repost those things on whatever site replaces this one in the future.

Speaking of, was it confirmed that the site would exist but only read only past November 13? Or is everything going after that?

It's so weird. No matter the industry, digital medium, work, game development, etc. Anything related to computers is already infected, per sé, with LLM learning. Its growing at an exponential rate in all fields, for better or worse. Ai being used to generate still furry images is probably the least dramatic of any category. While it has most likely had some affect on commission sales, the people setting up local generators on PCs or paying a subscription on something like NovelAi (unlimited images for $25 mo) either weren't purchasing commissions anyways or still are despite able to use ai.
I doubt anyone putting money, even $75~ mo, into the furry art community would've stopped cold for an ai subscription.

Since the first post got nuked here's what was officially stated on e621.

Good morning, everyone.

As the news post states, Dragonfruit Ventures had made the decision to discontinue the e6ai project.
That site will be put into read-only mode shortly, and will be shut down entirely later this month.

Thank you to everyone who provided their opinions on and feedback on this situation.
Your voices have been heard.

E621 continues to disallow AI-generated content.
We had never created or trained any AI models on content uploaded to e621, and will continue to put effort into combatting the scraping effort of various bots run by others.
In our recent Terms of Use update, we made it more clear that such activity is, in fact, prohibited.

We will be able to start taking questions and provide more statements in the days to come.
Please, continue to be cordial when discussing this matter.

Regards,
~ Cinder

And a longer news update about it as well.

Several years ago we saw the advent of Generative AI that was able to create images that began propagating on the internet, these images inevitably were also uploaded onto e621. Very early on it became clear that the community preferred that e621 only host art made by actual human hands. At the time, given the novelty of the tools and the lack of community opinion surrounding Generative AI, we thought that it was a good idea to give Generative AI art its own site.

We did this quietly as we didn’t wish to promote Generative AI, and at no point did we advertise e6ai directly on e621. If someone tried to upload Generative AI images to e621, we would remove it, and redirect them to post on e6Ai instead if they wished.

To be completely clear, e6ai never had any capability to generate images, it was simply a place for people to upload images, like many other places on the internet.

We’ve heard from the community and we’ll no longer be continuing the e6ai project, and we will continue to disallow AI Generated art on e621. We’d like to remind the community that we have no control over what any company like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google or any individuals do to train their AI models. We do what we can to discourage it, but there is no way to confirm whether others are abiding by our Terms of Use.

If there’s to be any real change in what information AI is allowed to use in training, it will need to be regulated at some level. We encourage everyone to reach out to their representatives in the government where they live. For the US this would be your Representatives in Congress and your Senators.

seam301 said:
While it has most likely had some affect on commission sales, the people setting up local generators on PCs or paying a subscription on something like NovelAi (unlimited images for $25 mo) either weren't purchasing commissions anyways or still are despite able to use ai.

Hit the nail on the head here. Does AI rob commission sales? Yes and no. Yes, because there is a cheaper alternative. No, because commission prices climb. Pricing out who can buy the luxury item. Which is why I laugh at this situation. The more priced out people are, the more they turn to AI. But being told not to, and commission artists. It's a catch-22: the only "acceptable" way out is to get a better-paying job.

IMO. If you price out customers, you can't be mad when they find cheaper alternatives. Steam and Spotify are great examples of this. People want legit. People will pay for legit. But the price needs to be right.

carnivalecloudmunch said:
Well if they ever do, I guess they can repost those things on whatever site replaces this one in the future.

Speaking of, was it confirmed that the site would exist but only read only past November 13? Or is everything going after that?

The official re-written announcement is to be made soon, but the available information made public earlier suggest that the website is going to be deleted November 13th; It won't stay as a read-only website.

yamadorux said:

Hit the nail on the head here. Does AI rob commission sales? Yes and no. Yes, because there is a cheaper alternative. No, because commission prices climb. Pricing out who can buy the luxury item. Which is why I laugh at this situation. The more priced out people are, the more they turn to AI. But being told not to, and commission artists. It's a catch-22: the only "acceptable" way out is to get a better-paying job.

IMO. If you price out customers, you can't be mad when they find cheaper alternatives. Steam and Spotify are great examples of this. People want legit. People will pay for legit. But the price needs to be right.

Pretty much exactly what I was thinking. Regardless, shutting down the site won't magically stop people uploading and sharing AI artwork online. Remember that you can't uninvent the gun. To add, If they go after the site, what's to say they won't go after the Discord server? Or if another site/spiritual successor comes along? Or if people flood Inkbunny?

This whole closure feels really short sighted.

I'm honestly really bummed about this, I've met a lot of great people on this site, and I can't imagine how hurt many of you must be. I'm hoping to see the community's work flourish somewhere else!

Damn, this is really sad news. It was lovely to get to know many of you folks!

A lot of people poured a lot of time into this site, I really hope it survives in some way.

I like Discord, but it's no replacement for a searchable image board.