Epic Games recently acquired ArtStation, which among other things is one of the biggest websites that artists use for sharing their portfolios. That means it’s also a target for AI companies looking for lots of categorized visual art to use as free training material for their machine learning algorithms. Although Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney hasn’t taken any kind of hard stance against generative AI systems in general, he says he doesn’t like that companies are ingesting people’s artwork without permission.

“They’re scraping the web to find people’s artwork and then using it, and not getting their explicit say-so on the thing,” Sweeney told PC Gamer in a call earlier this week. “And a company shouldn’t do that sort of thing, right? Maybe that’s in bounds for research, but when you’re selling a commercial product that’s used to generate commercial artwork, you shouldn’t do that.”

Last year, Epic created a “noAI” tag artists can apply to their ArtStation works to explicitly …