ArtStation artists stage mass protest against AI-generated artwork

On Tuesday, members of the online community ArtStation placed "No Artificial Art" images in their portfolios in protest. The protest images dominated ArtStation's page. The artists want to criticize the presence of artificial intelligence on ArtStation and possibly disrupt future models trained with artwork found on the site.

The protest began on December 5 when Alexander Nanitchkov, an artist from Bulgaria, said that current artificial intelligence is creating art on the backs of hundreds of thousands of artists and photographers who make billions of images and spend time, love and dedication to have their work soullessly stolen.

There is a logo with the letters "ai" in white and a strike-through symbol. There is a caption that says no to artificial images. The logo spread quickly on ArtStation and became the basis of many protest images.

Dan Eder, a character artist on ArtStation, was sad when he saw that the art was on the main page. It's disrespectful to put something that was generated using a prompt alongside artwork that takes hundreds of hours and years of experience to make.

1/6 I created this image for everyone to use wherever they want.

Ai creates the “art” you see on the backs of artists being exploited. Ai “art” is currently scraping the web for art and uses it in datasets. No artist gave consent to have their art used. We were not compensated pic.twitter.com/eGn352MyCj

Zekuga Art promoted the protest further on social media four days later. "No to artificial intelligence art" and "no to generated images" were the two most searched for terms on ArtStation. The results represent separate artist accounts.

By participating in the protest, some artists want to disrupt how Stable Diffusion training works, which resulted in several jokes on social media showing garbled image results that some people took seriously. Whatever ArtStation artwork Stable Diffusion currently draws upon was trained into the Stable Diffusion model long ago and the protest won't have an immediate effect on images generated with artificial intelligence models.

ArtStation's management responded to the protest with a FAQ on the use of artificial intelligence. According to the FAQ, the site will allow artists to allow or prohibit the use of their art for non-commercial research and training of commercial artificial intelligence.

SD and ArtStation: Like peanut butter and jelly

ArtStation and Artificial Intelligence image synthesis have a relationship that goes back to the summer of 2022. A popular image-synthesis model is Stable Diffusion.

Adding "Trending on ArtStation" to a prompt would add a distinctive digital art style to any image it created. The images that "taught" Stable Diffusion how to create images were included in the public domain. The scraper did this without the permission of the artists.

The prompt text "trending on ArtStation" became an easy way to get high quality results from almost any prompt, and the idea spread quickly among users of Stable Diffusion.

The popularity of "trending on ArtStation" will likely become a historical curiosity in the future. The underlying data from ArtStation was likely still included in the Stable Diffusion 2.x training dataset, despite the fact that "trending on ArtStation" wouldn't work as a prompt anymore.

“Trending on artstation” doesn’t actually work on #StableDiffusion2 as we stopped using the OpenAI CLIP as is used in DALLE2 and SD1 which over-represented on this and artists in general.

Will be interesting to see how this whole area develops with some upcoming releases.

— Emad (@EMostaque) December 14, 2022

There's still a question of consent when including an artist's work in an artificial intelligence training dataset.

Artists will be able to opt out of training for Stable Diffusion 3.0 if they register on the Have I Been Trained? website. Not being included and having to manually opt in should be the default state according to some artists.