Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Use magic to defeat 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 works of art.

Now, the site's home page is being scrubbed by the same picture with a red prohibition sign and the word "AI", with a small print at the bottom that says "say no to AI."

The design of this picture is very simple, but it is also a work of art designed by a live artist.

The original author of the picture is a Bulgarian illustrator named Alexander Nanichkov (Alexander Nanitchkov). On ArtStation, each of his illustrations is watermarked with a boycott of AI, in case his work is automatically referenced by AI.

Nanychikov's ArtStation page reposted the image first by a fashion designer, then by another illustrator, Nicholas Kole. Kohl not only retweeted the picture, but also called on other colleagues and passers-by on social media to join the boycott of AI.

Cole has provided designs for many big companies such as Disney and Nintendo and is well-known in the industry. At his call, there was a wave of using the same picture to protest against AI on ArtStation.

Among the artists who took part in the protest, including Kohl, many were hostile to AI painting and did not want to see an art website full of "non-art" content generated by AI, let alone let their work be plagiarized by AI.

Others may be less hostile, complaining that ArtStation lacks a systematic policy on AI-generated content.

Unlike the illustration site Pixiv, ArtStation has not designed a special classification tag for AI works, nor does it leave options for screening and blocking, making it difficult for users to distinguish AI works from other works of art. And because AI is much more efficient than human art creation in generating content, ArtStation's home page is easily brushed by AI works.

One user complained on Twitter that AI content was occupying the home page in the face of user protests. ArtStation officials first deleted a large number of initial images, but failed to stop more users from browsing the screen.

On December 13, Epic, the owner of ArtStation, issued a statement through several media outlets. The statement said they had not reached any agreement with artificial intelligence companies to allow content to be crawled from ArtStation, which "may infringe the rights of creators", but did not say whether AI was currently illegally crawling content on the site.

The next day, ArtStation updated a frequently asked question (FAQ). The answer points out that the website content Guide does not prohibit the use of AI; in the process of publishing works of art, but also emphasizes that "the works in your work collection should be your works" and "please publish only those works you own or have the right to publish".

On the question of how to deal with the AI generator, the official responded: "We believe that artists should be free to decide how to use their art, while we do not want to be gatekeepers of the terms of the site, stifling AI research and commercialization that respect artist choices and copyright laws."

Therefore, the following plans have been officially announced. The first is to add tags so that users can choose to allow or prohibit AI to use their work for training. Then there is the update of the site's terms of service to prohibit AI from crawling works if users have chosen to prohibit them. Officials do not intend to add these tags and options by default, which will need to be set manually by users, so that the use of art by artificial intelligence is "restricted only by copyright law" rather than by "terms of service", according to FAQ.

ArtStation's statement did not quell anger from human artists, but added fuel to the fire because it was made public as an AI platform and failed to provide any immediate measures.

Kohl said in an interview with foreign media Vice that he was glad to see the official recognition of their protest, but the official response was "inadequate", "vague" and "self-contradictory".

He believes that AI works are "works generated by machines that extract data from the results of human labor." they are not original in themselves, nor are they "works that you own or have the right to publish." Our main demand is to develop a proactive policy to prevent the spread and existence of AI images on a website designed to showcase a collection of professional and aspiring professional artists. This is clearly something that ArtStation does not want to do explicitly at the moment. "

The rest of the protesters are also escalating their weapons and editing the picture of boycotting AI. What's more, he began to draw by himself and express the same theme in different artistic styles.

In view of AI's poor finger painting, a middle finger drawn by a human artist is undoubtedly the ultimate insult to AI's work.

As the innovation speed of artificial intelligence technology far exceeds the ability of national legislators 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 human art in front of AI and its massive content.

So far, the attitude of ArtStation officials and Epic towards AI content is still ambiguous, which is understandably unsettling for users. Protests from real-life artists are unlikely to end simply until the authorities give a more conclusive commitment.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: Zhaoyue

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