To defeat magic with magic.
ArtStation is a comprehensive visual art website that allows professional artists in games, film and television, media and entertainment to display and share their artwork.
Now, the site’s homepage is being swiped by the same image with a red prohibition sign and the word “AI,” along with a line of small text below it that reads “Say no to AI-generated images.”
The design of this picture is very simple, but it is also a piece of art designed by a real artist.
The original author of the picture is a Bulgarian illustrator named Alexander Nanitchkov. On ArtStation, each of his illustrations is watermarked with an AI-resistant image to prevent his work from being automatically referenced by AI.
Nanichkov’s ArtStation page
The image was first retweeted by a costume designer and then by another illustrator, Nicholas Kole. Cole not only reposted this picture, but also called on other colleagues and passers-by on social media to join the ranks of resisting AI.
Cole has provided designs for many major manufacturers such as Disney and Nintendo, and has a certain reputation in the industry. Under his call, ArtStation set off a wave of using the same picture to brush the screen to protest AI.
Among the artists who participated in the protest, including Cole, many people are hostile to AI painting, unwilling to see an art website full of AI-generated “non-art” content, let alone let their works Caught and plagiarized by AI.
Others, perhaps less hostile, complained about ArtStation’s lack of a systematic policy on AI-generated content.
Unlike the illustration website Pixiv, ArtStation has not yet designed a special classification label for AI works, nor has it provided filtering and blocking options, making it difficult for users to distinguish AI works from other works of art. And because the efficiency of AI-generated content is much higher than human art creation, the homepage of ArtStation is easily swiped by AI works.
One user complained on Twitter about AI content taking over the front page
In the face of user protests, ArtStation officials first deleted a large number of initial swiping pictures, but failed to prevent more users from participating in swiping.
On December 13, Epic, the owner of ArtStation, issued a statement through multiple media. The statement stated that they did not have any agreement with the artificial intelligence company to allow the scraping of content from ArtStation, which “may violate the rights of creators”; but did not indicate whether any AI is currently illegally scraping content on the website.
The next day, ArtStation updated a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). The answer pointed out that the website content guidelines do not prohibit the use of AI in the process of publishing artwork; at the same time, it also emphasized that “the works in your portfolio should be works created by you” and “please only publish works that you own or have the right to publish”.
On how to deal with AI generators, the official response: “We believe that artists should be free to decide how their art is used, and at the same time we don’t want to be the gatekeepers of the terms of the site, stifling AI research and development that respects artist choice and copyright law.” commercial behavior.”
Therefore, the official announced the following plans. The first is to add tags, giving users the option to allow or disallow the AI to use their work for training. Then there’s updating the site’s terms of service to prohibit the AI from scraping the work if the user has already chosen not to. The official does not intend to add these tags and options by default, and users will need to manually set them at that time. According to the explanation of the FAQ, the use of artificial intelligence for art is “only subject to copyright law”, not “restricted by the terms of service”.
ArtStation’s statement did not quell the anger from human artists. On the contrary, it added fuel to the fire because it was openly an AI platform and failed to provide any immediate effective measures.
Cole said in an interview with foreign media Vice that he was happy to see the official acknowledgment of their protests, but the official response was “inadequate,” “ambiguous,” and “contradictory.”
He believes that AI works are “machine-generated works that extract data from the labor of real people”, are not original in themselves, and are definitely not “works that you own or have the right to publish”. “Our main appeal is to have an aggressive policy to stop the proliferation and existence of AI imagery on a ‘site designed to showcase the portfolios of professional and aspiring professional artists’. This is clearly something ArtStation is not currently willing to explicitly do matter.”
The rest of the protesters are also gradually escalating their protest weapons, making some edits to the image of the boycott of AI. What’s more, start drawing on your own, expressing the same theme with different art styles.
Given that AI is not good at drawing fingers, a middle finger drawn by a human artist is undoubtedly the ultimate insult to AI works.
Since the innovation speed of artificial intelligence technology far exceeds the ability of legislators in various countries to follow up and formulate relevant laws and regulations, real-life artists have to rely on the policies and terms of use of commercial platforms to defend the purity of real-life art in the face of AI and the massive content it generates sex.
So far, ArtStation officials and Epic have remained ambiguous about AI content, which of course makes users feel uneasy. The protests from real artists will not simply end until the official promises are more conclusive.
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