Artists rarely agree, but at the moment, most of them are angry about AI art, not necessarily about its concept or its almost inevitable commercial use, but about its sudden emergence and flooding of the Internet's various artistic watering holes. Not necessarily for its concept or its almost inevitable commercial use, but for its sudden emergence and flooding of the various artistic watering holes of the Internet. The biggest is ArtStation, owned by Epic Games, a site where artists can share photos, create portfolios, and network with other artists.

This week, complaints seem to be boiling over about the flood of AI-created art and the site's inability or unwillingness to address it. The images created by Alexander Nanichkov have become the focus of protest and have been reproduced in myriad variations, the most common being the basic form, with the "AI" logo removed and the text "Say no to AI generated images" below it

Others have been reproduced with the "AI" logo.

There are other images, but artists decided to adopt this one en masse, and so many artists submitted this image that it threatened to completely take over the ArtStation home page. Currently, the image remains widely available on the home page, but for a time it looked like this:

"ArtStation's content guidelines do not prohibit the use of AI tools in the process of creating artwork to be shared with the community. Nevertheless, ArtStation is a portfolio platform designed to enhance and celebrate originality by a community of artists. Only user-generated artwork should appear in a user's portfolio, and we encourage transparency in that process.

Epic added, "We are working to give ArtStation users more control over how their work is shared and labeled, and will provide more details soon." [The question of how AI art fits into the future of the art world is certainly more complex than "Let's ban AI art," and at the same time, it seems reasonable to insist on a firm, up-front line between what humans create and what software creates It seems reasonable to insist on a firm, up-front line between what is created by humans and what is created by software. But ArtStation itself has since dipped its toe in the water with a new FAQ (opens in new tab).

The replies to it certainly suggested that ArtStation had done something wrong, and the FAQ infuriated some users: a simple request to "change ArtStation's ratio (open in new tab)" got 14.6K "likes" and is currently the top reply.

Particularly frustrating is the line that ArtStation does not want to be "a gatekeeper with site terms that inhibit AI research and commercialization when respecting artists' choices and copyright laws," and critics Critics feel that this puts the creative act of AI in a disproportionate position to human creation.

ArtStation's statement said that it plans to introduce tags that would disallow artists from allowing their work to be used to train AI, but that these tags would not be added by default. When we asked for feedback on this "rapidly evolving" issue, we received a lot of feedback, some of it in capital letters.

As of this writing, ArtStation has not released any further comments, but anti-AI images continue to flood the front page. Hey, at this rate, by next week the AI software itself will be creating AI images.