you're not listening

for anyone at artstationHQ reading this:
-all art should be tagged "NoAI" by default. this should be an Opt-In situation, not an Opt-Out. artists who are out of the loop, or taking an extended break, or who are uninformed, or recently deceased, will be victims of scraping for datasets.
-it's unconvincing that "NoAI" tag would even do anything at all. how would that even prevent scraping? unless it puts some invisible watermark in the metadata that makes it impossible to be scraped, it's useless.
-your use of the word "gatekeeper" is a dead giveaway of how you really feel about this. you want AI datasets to scrape our art, it's the same reason you won't make the above system opt-in.
-this response is wholly inadequate. you SHOULD be the gatekeeper for scraping for AI research. you SHOULD be protecting us! this technology should be only public domain and voluntary anyway. you know that what they're doing, and by extension what you're doing, is wrong.

anyway

Substance Designer, using my own retro pixel art colorizers, but at full resolution. lighting is baked into the albedo for an oldschool look.
Substance Designer is a visual scripting program made for procedurally creating textures. it doesn't use machine learning; instead artists direct the look and functionality of every aspect of the art, and enables them to parameterize them to create flexible custom tools to use in an art pipeline. it's a program that was made for artists, by artists and engineers, to take the tedium out of creating tiling textures. what we have is now a powerful tool that has made texturing a joy, more than it's ever been. this is what an art tool does, it's what an actual art tool looks like. we still create art from start to finish, it's not a make-art-button.

I'm so tired. again and again technology we never asked for is pushed upon us. AI image art, like NFTs, is an initially promising tech that upon further inspection reveals itself to be built on a foundation of dishonesty, and exists not to truly to ease the problems of artists but rather to exploit and capitalize on us.

ethical AI can exist. but I'm not holding out hope that day will ever come. until then, art remains a joy to create, and I happily embrace technology that makes the process of art less tedious, and lets me focus on actually making art.

Articles about the protest:
On VICE https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake9me/artists-are-revolt-against-ai-art-on-artstation
On KOTAKU https://kotaku.com/artstation-ai-art-generated-images-epic-games-protest-1849891085
On Kotaku AGAIN https://kotaku.com/artstation-ai-art-generated-image-protest-controversy-1849895978

a GOFUNDME for hiring a lobbyist to represent concept artists
https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-artists-from-ai-technologies?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_content=undefined&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer&utm_term=undefined