I am currently working for DeviantArt for the third time. I left once to become a professor and another time to form a company but am currently back once more, co-leading the DeviantArt AI team. Why? It’s a good job that has gotten even better. DeviantArt has always appealed to my contrarian sensibilities, and building machine learning and artificial intelligence systems there lets me play with its immense amounts of interesting data in a small group while having a direct impact on our end users to make their experience a better one. We’re like a small startup backed by a big company with all the data we can ask for, and I like to think we’ve been pretty successful over the years in showing that machine learning can have an outsized impact in a content creation community like DeviantArt. Plus, it’s really nice to work for a social network that isn’t trying to make money in a way that hurts their users, but actually by helping its users.
We’ve designed many recommendation systems for DeviantArt over the years, and recently have also started defending its artist community against art theft, especially in the form of NFTs.