by I go to ArtStation almost every day to browse the art and see what the artists are creating. I am always looking for great artwork and talented artists for possible future collaboration. Well, browsing some of the pictures today I noticed something very different, usually the front page is full of stunning and beautiful artwork, but today the page is full of ‘No artificial intelligence art’ badges!
This intrigued me and I started researching what was going on, and it turned out that artists were protesting ArtStation because its owner, Epic Games, is not removing artificial intelligence-generated art. Artists are concerned about the legal and ethical implications of art created by artificial intelligence.
There are a ton of complaints and many artists are even closing their accounts. Epic has since made a statement that artists have been mocking and dissatisfied with. Here is the description:
“ArtStation’s content guidelines do not prohibit the use of artificial intelligence in the publishing process of artwork. ArtStation is a portfolio platform designed to amplify and celebrate originality powered by a community of artists. The works in your portfolio must be works that you create and are created by us. We encourage you to be transparent in the process. Please only publish work that you own or have permission to publish.
We believe that your projects belong to you and you have the right to control how they are used. While doing just that, we’re actively working on updates and improvements to give you even more control. Stay tuned for more information on new features.
Now, AI art programs are basically scraping original content to learn from the material, but these may be “violations of the rights of ArtStation users”, so ArtStation plans to add tags to allow or not use the art for commercial or non-educational purposes. – commercial AI. They say:
We believe that artists should be free to decide how their art will be used, and at the same time, we don’t want to be on guard with site terms that hinder AI research and commercialization when it respects artists’ choices and copyright law. Here are our current plans:
We plan to add tags that allow artists to explicitly allow or disallow the use of their art for (1) non-commercial AI research training and (2) commercial AI training. We plan to update the ArtStation website’s Terms of Service to disallow the use of art by artificial intelligence where the artist chooses not to. We do not plan to include any of these tags by default, in which case AI use of art will be governed solely by copyright law rather than by the restrictions in our Terms of Service.
As a result, ArtStation will not uninstall AI Art. This certainly seems like the easiest solution to fix the problem, but they are willing to choose to support AI art over talented artists who actually spend time creating AI art. This is sad.
