Hey All,
The idea behind kiri.art was to make AI art accessible to everyone. Launched before image generations were publicly available in ChatGPT and Google, I think it was a great success, with over 50k registered users, over 1m total requests, and a wonderful community gallery.
Unfortunately, focusing on accessibility, as opposed to running it as a business, severely limited the amount of time and money I could spend on it, and indeed, it became a huge money drain. I believe it’s not the right time to retire it.
I’d love to hear any user feedback. But to be honest, beyond updates and bug fixes, it’s been a few years since any new features were added, whereas other sites continued to improve and innovate.
The one alternative I considered, is perhaps to shift from server hosted models to in-browser local inference. Then we could continue offering things for free, but, initial model download would take a long time, and, only users with suitable GPUs would continue to use the site. I’m not sure if there’s sufficient interest to justify to the work behind all that.
Nevertheless, would love to hear from any remaining regular users, if you’re still around. And hope you’ve had fun on the site over the years! Really appreciate you loyalty, especially in the very early days where there were a lot of hiccups, and the time, efforts, and creativity you’ve invested here!
Regardless:
- The site itself will stay up (with the gallery), only new generations would be disabled.
- You’ll continue to be able to export all your user data, or permanently delete it, from the account menu, at any time.
- I’ve turned down the many offers received to buy the site (and user data), it remains sentimental to me, and I respect your privacy.