Round 8! Artstation has forgotten its purpose

Round 8 already?

Artists who kept this protest alive have joined together to create a discord to organize, discuss and do more for the art community. If you would like to join, follow the link: https://discord.gg/7cAAEtzs

Now, with that said...

It's not ideal having to move portfolio websites in the middle of seeking new work within the industry, but it looks like that's what more and more starting artists will have to do, in the face of Artstation offering even less protection against AI image generators grabbing your work as "training data" without consent than DeviantART. I won't suggest alternatives here, lord knows AI scrapers will just flock over to begin their trolling campaign there, because that's all the loudest of them seem to care about. I have never been happy to not have posted much to Artstation this year, until now.

Artstation was first and foremost used as a portfolio website for artists and recruiters. How are recruiters supposed to find anybody worth hiring when they have to wade through a pool of idea guys with a fun new toy who can't stay in their lane? It is a real shame that Artstation hasn't thought this through and decided harming artsists, whether established or not yet established is worth not just leaving AI prompt creators to the various websites specifically made for them. It is a shame they thought they could get away with making your art being scraped opt-out, much like DeviantART, but with none of the plausible deniability. A lot of trust has been lost, and it will never come back after all of this. Artstation decided that being something like Instagram where one might just go to look at pretty images rather than find someone to hire is something worth doing when it goes directly against what set them apart from the crowd.

I've stayed quiet on here because I don't have a far reach in the community at all, but I am tired of seeing the arguments used by the AI image generation fans. It's things like "You only care about money." We've seen all the get rich quick talk among the AI prompt community. It seems a large part of them are just the angry remainders of the NFT crowd who just want to get back at artists, but it's only bad when we talk about money. "You're gatekeeping!" Yes, we are. Art has always been "gatekept", I can't post my 2D images under 3D media, nor my traditionally made images under digital media. They keep comparing AI generation to photography, but photography is both not comparable and not allowed on Artstation. Photography is art, but it's a different medium that requires different disciplines than what Artstation made this website for. "It's just a tool." A tool that relies on taking the work of others by scraping images without consent nor credit. "You can't stop the advancement of technology." Just like no one can stop the advancement of ethics and copyright laws.

They call us disingenuous over these things where they're the ones scrambling to hide the metadata of their image which says they're AI-generated. They want so bad to be us that they claim we're the 1%, the bourgeois who should be knocked down by them. No, we're just a small group of passionate people who kept doing what we loved despite the many warnings of becoming "A starving artist." How can we be both the elite and the struggling? Now it's supposedly stealing to use the same prompts as someone else, even though the AI will not create the same image twice. If "you can't copyright a style" then how can you copyright an idea when the execution isn't the same?

I have gone on long enough. Artstation has forgotten what set it apart from the crowd and decided to make their explore tab more like a generic image hosting website. I am not an expert on this, but that sounds like a very bad business move to me.