Kickstarter

Founded in 2009, Kickstarter is the crowdfunding platform that channeled billions of dollars from backers to independent games, films, comics, and design — a business built on the trust of exactly the creative communities that generative AI most alarmed. It became the first major platform to draw enforceable lines around AI projects.

Unstable Diffusion and the disclosure rule

In December 2022, Kickstarter suspended the campaign for Unstable Diffusion — an unrestricted, NSFW-capable image model that had raised over $56,000 from 867 backers — while CEO Everette Taylor published a post declaring the platform would always side with “the humans behind” creative work, and questioning projects whose training data exploited artists without consent. The suspension made Kickstarter an early hero to the anti-AI art movement.

In August 2023 the policy became systematic: projects using AI tools or building AI technology must disclose how they use it and whether the training data was obtained with consent, answering questions during submission that are published on the project page. Undisclosed AI use risks suspension. Trust and safety director Susannah Page-Katz framed the rule as requiring human creative input and permission for referenced work. Kickstarter did not ban AI projects — hundreds have since funded with disclosure labels — but tabletop publishers and backers continue to police AI art on the platform aggressively, and the disclosure rule gave them the tool to do it.