ArtStation Protest Explodes After Epic Says It Won't Ban AI Generated Art

I go to ArtStation almost daily to scroll through art and see what artists are creating. I’m always looking for cool art and talented artists for possible future collaboration. Well, today when I went to look through some art, I noticed something very different, usually, the front page is filled with striking and beautiful art, but today the page was filled with 'No AI art' badges!

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

There are a ton of complaints and a lot of artists are even canceling their accounts. Epic has since issued a statement that artists are mocking and not happy with. The statement reads:

"ArtStation’s content guidelines do not prohibit the use of AI in the process of artwork being posted. ArtStation is a portfolio platform designed to elevate and celebrate originality powered by a community of artists. The works on your portfolio should be work that you created and we encourage you to be transparent in the process. Please only publish work that either you own or that you have permission to publish.

We believe that your projects are your own, and you have the right to control how they are used. We are 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 original content to learn from the material, but they may be an "infringement on the rights of ArtStation users," so ArtStation is planning to add tags to allow or disallow art to be used to train commercial or non-commercial AI. They say:

We believe artists should be free to decide how their art is used, and simultaneously 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 enabling artists to choose to explicitly allow or disallow the use of their art for (1) training non-commercial AI research, and (2) training commercial AI. We plan to update the ArtStation website's Terms of Service to disallow the use of art by AI where the artist has chosen to disallow it. We don't plan to add either of these tags by default, in which case the use of the art by AI will be governed solely by copyright law rather than restrictions in our Terms of Service.

The bottom line though is that ArtStation will not be removing AI Art. That certainly seems like the easiest solution to fix the issue, but they are willing to choose to support AI art over the talented artists who spend time actually creating it. That’s sad.