So I'm glad I left ArtStation. Epic Games is no longer even seems to be responding to the ongoing protests and even allowing people to commercially sell AI-generated reference packs on the website's store, not the least bit concerned about how a single artist can produce 5,000 packs of reference images that include 200+ familiar-looking references each without stealing or cheating. Clearly major gaming companies have learned nothing at all from the NFT fad that lasted just until recently (Ubisoft is jumping into this most recent fad, too, because of course they would), and we have to fend for our own future, assuming websites filled with AI-generated garbage aren't already being seen as trashy "Skid Row Dollar Store"-looking visual noise even to consumers who are unaware of why artists are protesting this.
I'm sure you've already heard of this, but you can check with this website if your art is being used by Stable Diffusion and its ilk.
Luckily, I have yet to find any of my art or characters on here, but it is telling that a lot of the images that do show up are blatantly famous copyrighted images, video thumbnails from extremely well-known YouTubers like Pewdiepie, book covers and magazine covers. Hopefully that alone should give reason for large companies to sue people stealing their work into oblivion.
If you have money and don't feel TOO icky about how The United State's money-obsessed lobbying system works, then consider giving to this GoFundMe so that artists in America can pay to have a lobbyist fighting for them in Congress:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-artists-from-ai-technologies
There is unfortunately legal precedent that the act of scraping the Internet for images to use in an AI program is okay with a U.S. court case back in April saying it's legal. Yet these programs operate under some fancy-sounding "LAION-5B" license that basically states these images can only be used for experimental, learning and overall non-commercial purposes, and particularly on ArtStation, the game High on Life and Adobe Photoshop's latest big update, the images are definitely being used for commercial money-making purposes when they are not supposed to. I'm extremely confident the otherwise-terrible "lawyer up" culture of US companies will put a stop to this blatant plagiarism of their IPs, though the courts move slowly here and it may be years before we get some clear guardrails that allow human jobs and AI to at least co-exist. Politicians may even work on this for their own sakes because the misinformation potential of AI deepfake technology specifically concerns them. But hopefully this GoFundMe succeeds to increase the chances of things working out before it's too late.
Seriously, ArtStation's transformation since being bought out by Epic Games is like the classic 1980's movie Pretty Woman being played in reverse--whereas the fictional prostitute in that movie was transformed into a well-respected member of society by the end, ArtStation went from being a classy site for potential employees and employers in art-and-animation-related industries (by its very nature as a portfolio site, there was no drama because drama obviously hurts one's chances of getting into these tough industries), to a frankly slutty-looking dumping ground for AI-generated shitposts either because ArtStation being bought out by Epic made them financially immune to the consequences of people canceling their Premium and Pro subscriptions (or people outright deleting their accounts like I did), or they are deluded into thinking they can compete with other trashy, declining general social media sites like Twitter without having to at least make a less-cumbersome mobile site or phone app, first. Seriously, Newgrounds has made far greater progress in improving the mobile version of the site without "Daddy Money" from Epic, what's ArtStation's excuse?