Curator

.art has a ban on AI 'art' because the big models people use to generate AI 'art' – e.g. MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, etc. – trained on other artists' work without their consent. There are well known ethical and moral implications around the use of AI 'art', especially when it's presented without being clear about how it was made, and even more especially when it's sold – as this is directly profiting from other artists' skill and hard labour with nothing going back to those original artists. Even when you don't specify an artist style in the generator prompt, the resulting image is produced from a tool which learned from studying other artists' work. If you use one of these tools to create imagery and then sell that imagery, you are a part of the problem, you are culpable, and you are profiting off the backs of other artists. If you are an artist yourself who creates anything by hand, you should know how demoralising it is to have your work stolen/infringed upon with no credit or payment going back to you; this is no different.

Recently we've been getting increasing reports of AI 'art' being posted around the fediverse, and almost all of these link to either Pixels or FineArtAmerica galleries. These other instances may not have the same rules as we do, and AI imagery might not be against the rules of those instances (or might make allowances for it to be posted as long as it's tagged as AI), but as the majority of our users specifically join .art because of our stance on AI 'art', we tend to suspend off-instance accounts that we see posting AI images because of the above mentioned implications on artists.

Both Pixels and FineArtAmerica are print on demand galleries, and they both promote and encourage the sale of AI art.

This doesn't sit right with us given that it's profiting off the backs of other artists. However, since we have also have artists here who make genuine hand-made art and sell it on those sites, we can't ban links to those galleries without also impacting genuine artists.

Do be aware, though, that if you use AI 'art' generators to create images and then sell those images, you do so knowing that you are using a system that abuses artists and we would hope that you reconsider.

If you have an account on .art and you have a Pixels and/or FineArtAmerica gallery that includes AI imagery that you're selling, we kindly ask that you move to another instance in respect of our stance as outlined above.