Recently, I started publishing some of my photo edits on DeviantArt. Although I get one or two favorites sometimes, it's mainly an account just for having the gallery feature and I'm not sure if I have even one follower (follow me, by the way). In spite of this, I got the following message today:
I’m truly impressed by your distinctive style and artistic vision—it’s incredibly inspiring. I’m very interested in acquiring one of your works for my collection and would love to discuss a fair price. Could you kindly let me know which pieces you currently have available?
A chat message on DeviantArt
If it wasn't obvious for the em dash—which I'm pretty sure no human being actually uses or knows how to use—or for the fact that I'm only posting photo edits, not illustration or anything that has any "distinctive style"—although the presence of "artistic vision" may be debatable—this is clearly an AI-generated spam message.
But just to be sure before reporting and blocking this user, I googled it to see if other people had ever received similar messages. To my surprise, I found a thread on Reddit about the same thing happening on ArtStation, which is a different art platform.
I got this too a few months ago, someone wanted to buy my stuff as NFTs as well. Sadly it’s a scam
Skryuska, 10th of September, 2023 [https://www.reddit.com/r/artstation/comments/16fdwtm/is_this_offer_a_scam/] (accessed 2025-06-30)
This whole experience was full of surprises to me.
The first surprise was that DeviantArt's GUI is a horrible mess. I have notifications on one side, and on the other side there is a letter icon that also has notifications for messages, but you have direct message notifications and chat notifications which are separate and clicking on one thing doesn't show the other. I was wondering why there was a red dot on it despite me not having any mail for two minutes before I realized it was a chat message and I had to click on Chat to see it (there was no indicator that it was a chat message and not a mail message).
The second surprise was the scam had been going on for 2 years with the same spam message! I thought this was AI-generated so surely they would have generated a different chat message for each victim? Nope. They probably just used ChatGPT once and then copy pasted it! In fact, there is a tiny chance this isn't even ChatGPT, but the scammer just actually uses em dash, which is a pity, seeing a fellow em dasher becoming a scammer like this...
The third surprise was that NFT's are still somehow a thing in 2025. I thought the fad had died 2 years ago when AI became the new fad. I'm pretty sure someone has already created some AI that generates NFT-looking images by now, as a way to automate right clicking on the JPEG's to save them. Although perhaps the opposite happened and they are now selling AI-generated images as NFT's? Who knows. I haven't heard about them for a while.