A portfolio site met an AI protest with an opt-in meta tag

The process wall

In December 2022, ArtStation's own help centre published an FAQ, 'AI Artwork on ArtStation,' dated 14 December 2022, responding to concern among its artist community about AI-generated images on the platform. The document does not ban AI-assisted work: 'ArtStation's content guidelines do not prohibit the use of AI in the process of artwork being posted.' What it changes for a working artist is narrower and slower than a ban: a promise to build a preference system, not an immediate technical block.

What the documents show

The December FAQ sets out a plan rather than a shipped feature: 'we plan to add tags enabling artists to choose to explicitly allow or disallow the use of their art for (1) training non-commercial AI research, and (2) training commercial AI,' with no tag applied by default. A January 2023 update to the same article records delivery: 'projects tagged using NoAI will automatically be assigned an HTML NoAI meta tag. This will explicitly disallow the use of the content by AI systems.' The update also states a commercial-labelling plan still pending at the time, that content sold for reuse and made with AI would 'soon' be required to carry an explicit AI label. Both documents repeat that ArtStation 'will not sell or license your artwork to other companies' and that its owner, Epic, 'does not make any agreements with companies allowing them to scrape content.'

Authorship and limitation

The mechanism named plainly is an HTML meta tag: a machine-readable line in a page's code declaring the artist's preference, not a technical barrier that stops a script from copying the image beneath it. ArtStation's own language concedes this distinction by leaving the choice opt-in rather than default and by pairing the tag with a promised change to its own Terms of Service, since a tag only carries force where a scraper's operator agrees to honour it or where a dispute treats the declared preference as relevant. The FAQ is explicit that silence is neutral: not tagging a project 'neither allows nor disallows' its use, leaving the question to copyright law, which the same document calls 'new and unsettled' as applied to AI training.

What survives

Editorially, what an artist keeps from this record is a documented, dated statement of preference attached to specific work, useful as evidence of intent even where it cannot compel compliance from an unrelated scraper. Applying the NoAI tag is a low-cost step; treating it as a technical protection would be a mistake the company's own FAQ does not make.

• Check whether a portfolio upload actually carries the NoAI meta tag before assuming it is set.
• Read the January 2023 update against the December plan to see what was delivered and what was deferred.
• Ask whether a platform's opt-out is a metadata flag or an enforced technical restriction.

ArtStation's own record turns a widely discussed protest into a narrower, checkable fact: a declared preference exists, on an opt-in basis, expressed as metadata rather than as a lock.