ArtStation has made its NoAI tag the default and applied it retroactively to every existing upload.
ArtStation has switched its NoAI tag on by default for new uploads and applied it retroactively across every existing project and profile. If you keep concept art, character sheets or marketing shots there, your back catalogue now carries the tag without you touching anything, and the terms of service changed with it.
The announcement on 2 September has three parts. ArtStation is using Cloudflare's bot-management and AI-crawler tooling to identify and block known crawlers and automated scraping before they reach the site's content at scale. The NoAI setting, which previously had to be enabled per project, is now on by default, and artists who do want their work used for training have to turn it off. The same tag has been applied across older work so nobody has to go back through years of uploads. Ordinary search engines are unaffected, so studios, recruiters and clients can still find portfolios the usual way.
ArtStation is candid that this is a deterrent rather than a wall: no system can make publicly shared work impossible to scrape. That is worth taking literally. The NoAI meta tag is a request honoured by whoever chooses to honour it, in the same spirit as robots.txt, and the Cloudflare layer only stops crawlers it can recognise. Neither does anything about work already sitting inside a trained model. What has changed in practical terms is the default and the paper trail: the platform now states the position on the artist's behalf, which matters more for a licensing argument than for a scraper.
The company also conceded that the existing #CreatedWithAI label and its filtering tools are not enough to stop generated work burying professional portfolios in discovery, and said better controls are coming without committing to what they are. For small teams that treat ArtStation as a shop window, the immediate job is a five-minute one: check that the default is what you actually want on your own profile, particularly if any of your marketing images are meant to circulate freely. ArtStation has been owned by Epic Games since 2021.