Anti-AIOrganization

Concept Art Association

Entertainment Artists’ Nonprofit

Nonprofit for the concept artists behind films and games that became visual artists’ vehicle in the AI fight — crowdfunding a Washington lobbyist in 2022 and co-sponsoring California’s AI training-data transparency legislation.

Organization Artist

conceptartassociation.com CAA Advocacy

In their words

Thousands of illustrators have found the entirety of their works, both personal and professional, used to train Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) datasets without anyone having acquired consent, or having offered them any kind of credit or compensation.

— Concept Art Association, advocacy statement

Biography

The Concept Art Association is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, led by Emmy-winning producer Nicole Hendrix and co-founder Rachel Meinerding, dedicated to raising the profile of concept artists — the largely invisible designers who visualize characters, worlds, and props for film, TV, and games. Its normal business is mentorship, community events, and the annual Concept Art Awards; generative AI turned it into a political organization.

Taking the artists’ fight to Washington

In December 2022, weeks after image generators trained on scraped artwork went viral, the CAA launched a GoFundMe titled “Protecting Artists from AI Technologies” — raising $32,000 on day one and ultimately enough from some 5,000 donors to retain a full-time Washington lobbyist for artists’ interests, a first for the field. The campaign, championed by artist Karla Ortiz, helped put working illustrators in front of the U.S. Copyright Office, the Senate, and the White House at a moment when, as ARTnews reported, policymakers were barely aware artists had AI concerns at all.

The organization’s advocacy has since matured from crowdfunding to lawmaking: it co-sponsors California Assembly Member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan’s AI Copyright Transparency Act (AB 412) alongside SAG-AFTRA, NAVA, and the Authors Guild — a bill requiring AI developers to disclose copyrighted works in training data, which passed the State Assembly in July 2025. It also commissioned the CVL Economics “Future Unscripted” study on generative AI’s impact on entertainment jobs, and publishes contract language artists can use to keep their work out of training datasets. The campaign drew some criticism from within the art community over its brief plan to align with the Copyright Alliance, whose maximalist copyright history made some digital artists uneasy.