for the past week, ArtStation– the world’s #1 favorite portfolio site for professional (and amateur!) artists working in the entertainment industry –was rocked by protests from its usersby owner Epic Games refused to offer anything reasonable Protection from the growing threat of AI-generated images.
In the early days of this protest, most users just pasted clean bold image of Alexander Nanichkovusing repeats in numbers to make the site home page look like this:
However, as the days go by, ArtStation and Epic are refusing to offer more suitable ones Protection for the very artworks their website was designed forArtists have moved on, choosing to create slightly more elaborate and personal pieces.
I thought I’d highlight some of my favorites in this post. You will find links to their passionate, creative and deeply human portfolios of the responsible artists in the names under each picture.
we wrote about this saga for the first time on December 13thas more and more AI-created images emerge ArtStations The front page sparked a backlash from artists. In response, ArtStations Owner Epic Games said:
ArtStation’s content policies do not prohibit the use of AI tools in the creation of artworks to be shared with the community. That said ArtStation is a portfolio platform designed to encourage and celebrate originality powered by a community of artists. Users’ portfolios should only contain artworks they create, and we encourage users to be transparent about this process. Our content guidelines are here.
ArtStation then published an FAQ that attempted to “clarify” the issue, but instead only made things worseImplementing a policy that would require users to opt out of having their artworks scraped by AI (and even then couldn’t guarantee that AI wouldn’t scrape them just like that). There were no updates in the dSince then, the protests have continued, with today’s front page looking very similar to last week’s (many of the images that don’t use the default pasted response are still anti-AI).
