04/22/2026

interesting ticket
https://level1.fineartstudioonline.com/rep/details.asp?id=810670

Comment from Jason Lee Tako:

Hello, I understand that FASO blocks AI crawlers and non-browser HTTP requests. While I can appreciate this, is there a way to unblock these for my website. Given that images of my work are in numerous other places that AI can access, and that AI Discoverability is quickly becoming the dominant new way people search for things online, blocking AI from my site is not really doing much to protect me and may actually hinder me as things change from SEO to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Thank you! 

response from our Jason:

This is a conversation our dev team has had numerous times. Recently, they have begun to consider making some changes to the firewall rules to allow some AI user agents through but they have not come to any finalization or determination.

I meet with the developers every morning and will be happy to share your feedback and request with them. I can't make any promises or guarantee anything will change but it will give them an additional angle/perspective to weigh as the continue their evaluation.

Comment from Jason Lee Tako:

If anything could be done as I feel this is very important. I would be very grateful. I used to be in marketing and was a graphic designer, and I've been following this AI stuff pretty closely. It's not going away, so I figure we need to adapt.

I'm certain you guys have already talked about all of this, but I talked with Claude and it basically said AI can still train from all the other places my work is shown - gallery websites, show websites, Pinterest, social media, etc. 

I think with the massive amounts of art on the internet, any training off my images will have very little impact, like adding a raindrop into the ocean. Also, any savvy person wanting to get AI to make an image similar to my work could just download or screenshot my stuff, upload that to the AI platform, and let it go to town. I think not letting it see me for GEO purposes will do more harm than it training off my images. And IMHO, AI will flood the world with this cheap, replicated "art" and people will just get sick of it and look for the real deal on reputable websites when they want to see art.

For a compromise, is it possible to only have certain pages be unblocked? Maybe just the Bio page? At least AI could get any GEO biographical data from our own website. That is what I'm most concerned about. Or give each artist the option to have a block on or off on their entire site?