So... I still use DeviantArt, if only because my account is ancient and I still get a decent amount of traffic to my page. I've spent the time heavily curating my experience - as you can do with any social media - and only follow / buy from artists I know and trust. I never browsed the home page to begin with, even in the good ol' days, because it was usually littered with uncensored fetish art and worse, so running into AI hasn't really been a huge issue for me, personally.
youll be looking at a nice deviantart submission and right there will be an ai "adopt" right next to it, and when you try to click a link to the artist like their ko fi or page, the advertise the same same frickin ai adopt on the 'you will be redirected page' like what the frick. the deviantart shop is just all ai "adopts" there is nothing original on it, stop shoving crap ai shiz down my throat deviantart. like its kind of foul ngl, that an ART platform would allow something generated crap. deviantart wanted to be artstation and now it wants to cater to ai scammers