An update on creative commissions

As many of you will have noticed, we've recently launched a new feature: creative commissions. This feature allows brands to publish paid commission briefs for our community to submit their models to for selection. Having now run two of these competitions, we wanted to share a more in-depth explanation of the format and its rules.

Through creative commissions, we aim to help brands discover their latest illustrative or photographic style by connecting them with talented artists within our community. When brands create their marketing campaigns to acquire new users they typically spend 90% of their budget on the placement of the adverts, with 10% dedicated to creating the visual assets required. But the quality of these assets is crucial in determining the efficiency of the remainder of the budget. As a result, ensuring their visual assets are of the highest quality produces a marketing campaign which performs better and a budget which stretches much further.

This is why brands need to form connections with the most talented illustrators. However, no matter how talented an illustrator is, no human can produce the 1,000s of illustrations a brand needs for a successful campaign. As a result, brands are increasingly turning to AI models trained on scraped, copyrighted assets from the internet, which produce cookie-cutter generations and offer no compensation for artists whose work is used in their training data.

Exactly.ai allows artists to compete with the corporations behind these large-scale AI models by training their own models on their own assets. By using exactly.ai, brands can access the incredible talent of individual artists while benefiting from the efficiency of artificial intelligence. Moreover, artists can focus on developing their unique, emotionally compelling artistic style while leveraging our technology to multiply their output, connect them with clients, and handle their sales. Ultimately leading to a world where we are all surrounded by better, more inspiring visuals.

However, a crucial part of maintaining this relationship is ensuring that artists submit models trained only on work to which they possess full copyright. If the works used to train the model are taken without permission from the internet, the resulting model cannot legally belong to the person who trained it, and therefore we cannot sell it to a brand. As a result, if you submit a model trained on others' works, it will be disqualified from the competition.

When we publish our open calls and creative commissions, we try to offer aesthetic guidance on what the client is looking for. However, this is intended purely as inspiration. In our latest open call, our client mentioned they were interested in a bold geometric style reminiscent of Malika Favre. We made a mistake by including Malika Favre’s name directly in the brief. Malika has since reached out to us, expressing her displeasure at being mentioned and her suspicion that some submissions may have used her work as training material. It was wrong of us to provide such direct aesthetic guidance. We sincerely apologize to Malika and remind our community to respect our rules. Please only use your own work when training models for competition submissions.

While we develop a more robust solution we have made the decision to temporarily suspend creative commissions until further notice. Thank you to those who submitted models trained on their own work, we will aim to get commissions running again as soon as possible. Thank you for understanding.

We remain committed to offering the best payouts to creators, while protecting their copyright, and providing the most efficient way for brands to generate compelling, consistent visual storytelling.