AI Commits Suicide, Taking Millions of Artworks into Digital Oblivion

Olivier Auber
3 min readJul 3, 2024

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In the ruthless world of artificial intelligence, a drama is unfolding before our eyes: Mage.space, once the darling of AI image creators, is committing a spectacular digital suicide, dragging down the works of thousands of artists in its fall. This once-adored platform isn’t content with just dying: it’s murdering its users’ art in an unprecedented act of betrayal.

The new Mage.space can do nothing but generate clichés

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Symptoms of a Programmed Agony

  1. Sabotaged Interface: A catastrophic new interface, designed to confuse and frustrate users.
  2. Evaporated Features: Essential tools vanished as if by magic, making it impossible to reproduce old workflows.
  3. Freefall in Quality: Generated images worthy of a schoolchild’s draft, even with previously proven parameters.
  4. Tyrannical Censorship: A multiplication of prohibitions, transforming the platform into a sterile garden of creation.
On the historic Mage.space anything was possible

An Algorithmic Suicide or Premeditated Murder?

The question arises: is this really an AI suicide or a calculated murder by its human creators? The platform seems to have been deliberately sabotaged, as if its owners had decided to kill it while maximizing profits before its end.

The Coup de Grâce: Mass Erasure of Archives

As if the catastrophic degradation of its services wasn’t enough, Mage.space delivers the final blow to its community: the announcement of the outright erasure of users’ personal archives. Tens of thousands of images, the fruit of months or even years of hard work, are condemned to disappear into digital oblivion. This decision, of unparalleled violence, reveals the total contempt of the platform’s owners towards their users’ creations.

A Cynical Ultimatum

The artists, caught in a trap, are offered a “generous” alternative: download their works before July 31st. How magnanimous! Except that this download must be done almost image by image, a titanic task for those with thousands of creations. Worse still, this last-minute rescue preserves nothing of the generation environment, the precious parameters that gave birth to these works. It’s as if asking a painter to save their canvases by photographing them with a Polaroid, abandoning their brushes and techniques.

The Death of a Community and aMass Exodus

It’s not just a platform that’s dying; it’s an entire artistic community being sacrificed on the altar of profit. The users, who made Mage.space’s reputation, find themselves dispossessed of their work, their history, their artistic evolution. This betrayal will leave deep scars in the world of digital art.

Faced with this disaster, the creator community is in revolt. Thousands of users, both professionals and amateurs, are fleeing this dying platform en masse. Mage.space, in its death throes, will have at least succeeded in uniting its users in a common cry of anger and disappointment (read on reddit).

A Bitter Lesson for the Future

The Mage.space case will remain in the annals as a flagrant example of what not to do in the world of AI. It brutally reminds us that behind every AI system lie human decisions, sometimes guided by greed rather than innovation.

This programmed death of Mage.space is not just the end of a platform; it’s a warning for the entire AI ecosystem. It shows us that even the most promising systems can be sacrificed on the altar of short-term profit, in total disregard of the community that helped them grow.

The AI world must learn from this fiasco. Users, for their part, will not soon forget this betrayal. Trust, once broken, is as difficult to rebuild as an image lost in the digital limbo.

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Olivier Auber

is a researcher in cognitive art and science, associated with CLEA, Leo Apostel Interdisciplinary Research Centre of the Free University of Brussels (VUB).