The website plans to update its Terms of Service and introduce new tags.
Following yesterday's massive protest against AI-generated images, the ArtStation team has published a lengthy statement responding to the concerned artists and sharing their intentions on dealing with questions of artist permissions and AI generators.
In case you somehow missed it, yesterday, thousands of 2D and 3D Artists joined the "No to AI-Generated Images" protest, demanding that ArtStation removes AI content from the website. Acknowledging the worries shared by creators from all across the globe, ArtStation released a detailed response in which they spoke about the presence of AI imagery on the platform and explained how they plan to make the user experience more convenient going forward.
Firstly, regarding the AI content in general, ArtStation stated that they currently have no plans on banning it from the platform, saying that the rules of the website don't necessarily forbid creators from using artificial intelligence in their workflows.
"ArtStation’s content guidelines do not prohibit the use of AI in the process of artwork being posted," reads the statement. "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."
Secondly, the team shared how they plan to deal with questions about artist permissions and AI art generators, claiming that they are set to introduce new tags, which will allow artists to mark whether they want their art to be used in AI training or not, and update the website's ToS to reflect the new tags.
"We plan to add tags enabling artists to choose to explicitly allow or disallow the use of their art for training non-commercial AI research and 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."
And lastly, the team responded to the accusations of having business deals with the creators of AI generators, stating that they don't have any and that they wouldn't sell the artworks of their users to other companies under any circumstances.
"As part of our Terms of Service, all of the artwork you post on ArtStation belongs to you. We will not sell or license your artwork to other companies. Epic does not make any agreements with companies allowing them to scrape content on our website. Any use of ArtStation content that is not consistent with our terms of service may be an infringement on the rights of ArtStation users."
You can read the full statement here. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.