ArtStation is a website that, for a very long time now, has been a very popular platform for both viewing and hosting professional art. Chances are that if you are or know a video game artist, their portfolio is hosted on the site. To give you an idea how important it has grown to be, I ran an art feature at Kotaku for over a decade, and I'd say 90-95% of portfolio links I pointed to weren't to standalone websites, they were to ArtStation pages.
The thing is, ArtStation as an organisation hasn't always enjoyed the most stellar reputation among the artists using the site. While it was under the ownership of Epic Games, for example, the community engaged in mass protests over ArtStation's inaction over AI-generated imagery flooding the site, and there were repeated allegations in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that moderators were removing pro-Ukrainian artwork.
Last month, though, the site was sold. As Epic continues to shed the websites it pointlessly purchased while high off Fortnite money, on August 10 it was announced that ArtStation had been sold to KitBash, the company behind 3D art platforms KitBash3D and Greyscalegorilla.
The first thing new management has done is issue a statement titled "ArtStation Should Put Artists First", in which it's acknowledged that the site needs to be better at protecting artists’ work from being scraped by AI companies, and that more needs to be done to prevent AI-generated works from clogging up ArtStation's search and discovery. To that end, they’re making some changes to the default toggles, tags and settings.
It is, as far as a new ownership statement goes, a promising one. This is stuff ArtStation users have been waiting a long time to hear! Sadly there's also a bit of "shut the barn door after the horse has bolted" to the whole thing, seeing as the site will have been scraped endlessly over the past three years already.
I've seen a lot of professional artists discussing this on social media in the past week, and reactions have mostly landed somewhere between "finally" and "fine, but it's too late". I think that's fair: ArtStation's reputation has taken massive hits in recent years, with new options like Cara having emerged as alternatives, so while this statement is definitely an improvement over what took place under Epic's ownership, I think there's a long way to go before the platform is able to rebuild the trust that has been lost over the last few years.
Luke Plunkett
