Epic Games CEO says AI companies shouldn't be 'hoovering up everybody's art data'
Epic Games recently acquired ArtStation(opens in new tab), which among other things is one of the biggest websites that artists use for sharing their portfolios. That means it's also a target for AI companies looking for lots of categorized visual art to use as free training material for their machine learning algorithms. Although Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney hasn't taken any kind of hard stance against generative AI systems in general, he says he doesn't like that companies are ingesting people's artwork without permission.
«They're scraping the web to find people's artwork and then using it, and not getting their explicit say-so on the thing,» Sweeney told PC Gamer in a call earlier this week. «And a company shouldn't do that sort of thing, right? Maybe that's in bounds for research, but when you're selling a commercial product that's used to generate commercial artwork, you shouldn't do that.»
Last year, Epic created a «noAI» tag artists can apply to their ArtStation works to explicitly prohibit their use in AI training. A number of users felt the company should've applied that tag to all artwork by default rather than leaving it up to users to add it, but for now, it exists as a way to make a proactive statement.
«Choosing not to use the tag leaves copyright law to govern whether or not the artwork was fairly used,» reads ArtStation's AI policy page(opens in new tab), which was last updated in February. «AI's use and its place in copyright law is new and unsettled, leaving open many questions about copyright law's enforceability against use of work in AI. Adding the 'NoAI' tag empowers you to clarify that regardless of the state of copyright law, use of your work in AI is not permitted.»
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