Hello to my fellow artists and to this company, CGTrader.
First off, I ask that all of you who read this upvote it and give it as much traffic as you can. Comment, upvote, comeback, and try to give it as much exposure as possible. Treat this as our petition of sorts.
Now for the request that I have.
CGTrader you profess that you read this particular message board regularly, so I hope you are seeing this and everyone who has supported and commented on this.
You advertised yourself as a site that promoted fair dealings and a place where those of us who had skills in 3D work could make some money honestly without being tied to a singular studio. You promised us a ladder with which we could climb in sale percentage through making models and selling them in a moderately linear fashion. You took a reasonable percentage which was better than what anyone else offered at the time. You had everything set out for yourself.
Now, with the advent of AI, you took the choice to start turning our models into training data. Granted you gave us an option to opt out through the NO AI license option. However, older modellers with thousands of models were not about to go edit their models and change them all to NO AI. Firstly, this was already violating your promise to us of providing a platform for us to sell equitably by providing companies and our own clients with AI versions of our models. If you were going to train AI on our models then you should have paid us for each and every model and paid us royalties for every usage the AI made. Now you advertise AI modelling right next to our models. This is directing traffic away from us and funnelling it into the AI. Once again, breaching your promise to us. You promised to provide us with clients, not to bring them here then direct them to a machine.
So, I would kindly ask you to remove your AI feature or make it a separate entity from CGTrader with no links on your site. Instead, brand yourself as AI free to allow us modellers a safe haven to sell without being overrun by a machine you made using our models. Please consider this with the utmost care as this is us modellers speaking at you.
Thank You.
