Illustrator Nicholas Kole sparked the protest, which Kotaku first reported on, after seeing costume designer Imogen Chayes post the "No AI" illustration, which was designed by illustrator Alexander Nanitchkov.The company stated that its “content guidelines do not prohibit the use of AI in the process of artwork being posted.” However, it says, “users’ portfolios should only feature artwork that they create, and we encourage users to be transparent in the process.” The company claims it doesn’t want to “become a gatekeeper with site terms that stifle AI research and commercialization when it respects artists' choices and copyright law.” A spokesperson from Epic, ArtStation’s parent, also told Motherboard that it did not make any agreements with AI companies that would allow them to scrape content from its website and that it is in the process of giving users “more control over how their work is shared and labeled.” The FAQ additionally states that AI companies scraping ArtStation for training images may be an "infringement on the rights" of users.Lensa AI, which uses the open-source image-to-text model Stable Diffusion, has faced severe backlash from artists who say that their work has been stolen to generate the AI images.Artist David O’ Reilly spoke up against another AI text-to-image model called Dall-E, which is a competitor of Stable Diffusion, saying in an Instagram post, “Paying for it benefits a tech company on the back of a century of human effort—a bullshit deal.Dalle-E undermines the work of creators of all kinds, most obviously photographers, illustrators, and concept artists who shared their work online, and never asked to be included in a proprietary learning model.” As a result, many artists are calling on the public to boycott AI art and AI art generators, to avoid the temptation of quick gratification and image personalization, in order to support the ethics of artists."