ArtStation

Launched in 2014 and acquired by Epic Games in 2021, ArtStation is the de facto portfolio home of professional concept artists, illustrators, and VFX artists for games and film — precisely the community that felt most directly imitated by image generators trained on their work.

The “No AI Art” protest

In mid-December 2022, as AI images spread across the site’s front page, thousands of artists — including prominent names like Greg Rutkowski, whose style had become a Stable Diffusion prompt staple — flooded ArtStation with an identical protest image: “NO TO AI GENERATED IMAGES.” For days the trending page was a wall of protest logos, the most visible artist labor action of the early AI era.

ArtStation’s December 14 FAQ response declined to ban AI work, stating its content guidelines “do not prohibit the use of AI in the process of artwork being posted,” and saying it did not want to become “a gatekeeper” with policies that “stifle AI research and commercialization.” It instead added an optional “NoAI” metadata tag artists could apply to forbid use of their work in training datasets — off by default — and updated its terms to bar scraping of tagged work. Artists widely deemed the measures insufficient, some deleting portfolios or moving to opt-out-by-default rivals like Cara; the protest image itself was reportedly scrubbed from trending. The platform has held its position since, with AI-assisted work remaining a routine part of the site.