With artificial intelligence encroaching art so heavily, for long time I felt discomfort of losing trust to anything I see online. Creators - even when opposing genAI - are rarely vocal about being so (for probably good reasons such as work safety, but still), which makes researching whether something has genAI used in it or not incredibly hard.
That being said, there are creators who do state their opposition - either in social media, or art itself. And so, inspired by @burgrym comment on Twitter, this collection was made to list who declared themselves to not use genAI in their creations. It's something I needed for myself anyway, and if this gets any traction, it can become useful public resource.
Repository is split into categories:
- creators - being general list of creators, to be referred sometimes in later lists
- games - games and bigger mods that are explicitly said to not use genAI
- music - bands/projects who explicitly opposed genAI and never used genAI cover art
- movies - movies with no use of genAI and directors who oppose it
The repository will only collect list of artists who are explicitly against genAI and didn't
use it in their pipeline. The collection is meant to both promote human artists, but also
let us feel safer when interacting with art of said person.
Therefore, not being on this list does not mean anything except just lack of explicit
declaration.
We (artists) know this for long time, but AI grifters (and some their listeners) tend
to do not:
We oppose generative AI, not AI as a whole.
Things like selection tools or code completion are useful tools and no artist nor coder fights them. The underlying issue of genAI is that it is meant to replace the process, all while undermining workers' power in favour of enriching companies and scammers.
AI as term used for LLMs and image generators is something that AI companies realised quickly they can use for diversion - after all, it's catchy, and opposing something so broad is much easier to ridicule. That's also why technical terms (LLM, GAN etc.) are also very uncommon in public sphere.
While this list is meant to be rigid, it will be curated in mind that we oppose genAI specifically. It is not meant to promote self-censorship, but transparency and credibility.
I made this list myself mostly because I wanted the list that I can trust to be maintained,
and being fairly active, I will try my best to keep it updated.
That said, there are other people who follow similar mission, so I thought I can promote
these as well:
Anyone is free to contribute entries to this repository - in a way, this repository makes sense primarily if many people add their entries. Feel free to create issue, PR or message repository author.
What I will request however for any contribution is to put proof (social media link,
screenshot from game or album cover) for submitted entries.
Additionally, since it is a whitelist, submissions must be positive, we are not trying
to target anyone.
I haven't covered visual artists because of my small knowledge of this field
and also because this field has the most unified and solidary stance.
If anyone wants to start (either as contribution here, or as separate repo) lists for
these categories however, feel free to.
Note: Since genAI usage started from 2022 (debut of Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT), there's no point in listing games pre-2022, hence games that debuted before that (and haven't received content updates) will not be added.
The list is not promised to be 100% correct. It is built heavily on trust and it being iteratively corrected by community whenever there's a need. Some statements cannot be verified (e.g. it can be incredibly hard to tell if code is generated, not to say games usually don't include their source) and that's okay - it's just a limitation of such initiative.
That said, as a creator I will put my best to keep it as much reliable as it is possible within these limitations, reviewing every entry and ensuring it has good sources, including doing additional research on creators' consistency.
If you don't know me, hello, I'm Toma400, or Toma. I put up my stance against AI on
September 2022, before even Steven Zapata's video and ArtStation protest. It can be
found on my Discord server. Ever since, I've been vocal about this issue and active
in social media for a while, supporting various protests.
Creatively, I'm a polymath programming games, creating music, writing/poems, drawing
and worldbuilding my steampunk/fantasy universe. Art is the dearest thing to me
(both as an artist and enjoyer) which is why I was radically opposed to it from the
very start.