ArtStation Protest Erupts After Epic Says It Won’t Ban AI-Generated Art

I go to ArtStation almost every day to scroll through art and see what artists are creating. I am always on the lookout for beautiful artwork and talented artists for possible future collaborations. Well, today when I went to look at an artwork, I noticed something very different, usually the front page is filled with amazing and beautiful art, but today the page was filled with “No AI art” badges!

This piqued my interest and I started looking into what was going on, and it turns out that artists are protesting ArtStation because its owner, Epic Games, won’t remove AI-generated art. Artists are concerned about the legal and ethical implications of AI-created art.

There are a lot of complaints and many artists are even deleting their accounts. Epic has since released a statement that the artists are mocking and not happy about it. The statement reads:

“ArtStation’s content guidelines do not prohibit the use of artificial intelligence in the artwork publishing process. ArtStation is a portfolio platform designed to elevate and celebrate originality nurtured by a community of artists. The works your portfolio should have work that you have created, and we encourage you to be transparent in the process.Post only work that you own or are authorized to post.

We believe your designs are yours and you have the right to control how they are used. We’re actively working on updates and improvements to give you even more control in doing just that. Stay tuned for more information on new features.

Now, AI art programs basically scrape the original content to learn from the material, but it may be an “infringement of the rights of ArtStation users”, so ArtStation is planning to add tags to allow or disallow the use of art to train commercial or non-commercial AI. They say:

We believe artists should be free to decide how their art is used, and at the same time we don’t want to become a gatekeeper with site terms that stifle AI research and commercialization when it respects artists’ choices and copyright law. So here are our current plans:

We plan to add tags that allow artists to choose whether or not to explicitly allow their art to be used to (1) train non-commercial AI research and (2) train commercial AI. We plan to update the ArtStation website Terms of Service to disallow the use of art by the AI ​​where the artist has chosen not to allow it. We do not plan to add any of these tags by default, in which case AI’s use of the art will be governed solely by copyright law rather than the restrictions in our Terms of Service.

The bottom line though is that ArtStation will not be removing AI Art. This certainly seems like the simplest solution to fix the problem, but they are willing to choose to support AI art over the talented artists who spend their time creating it. Is sad.