NewBohemia.art: Birth of a 2nd Renaissance
After six months of grueling coding sessions deep into the night, NewBohemia.art was built, completed, and ready to ship on November 15, 2025! I pressed send, and before I could blink, my post on r/Artisthate had 93 upvotes, my artsite had 29 new members and the world’s first 100% free Anti-AI creative multimedia platform was born.
Our verification-first policy meant every new member we gained brought more value than every hundred potentially AI-using noncreatives or bots on any other open-gate artsite, because we knew we had let someone into our community after confirming their work was human-made, and thus on the basis of credible trust.
However, while we found ourselves amongst many supporters, fans and allies, we were not exactly making friends with subreddit moderators who were uncomfortable about the fact that in advertising our platform, we were also implicitly pointing out that Reddit had changed its ToS to grant itself the right to use, and license, user content for AI training. (See Section 5 (“Your Content”) of the Reddit User Agreement, which says Reddit’s user-content license includes the “right to use Your Content to train AI and machine learning models.” It also points to Reddit’s Public Content Policy, where Reddit says it may license public content and related data to others, including “Large language model makers.”)
So I had two choices. I could either let the platform sit at 48 people, like some kind of glorified Discord channel, and continue to watch as my fellow creatives got hoodwinked by this social media behemoth and its hypocritical enablers. Or I could go to every related subreddit, spread our awareness-raising ad, and when told to stop, say “Ban me.”
6 months later, we have nearly 1,000 verified users with almost 2,000 uploaded works from hundreds of active members in a bona fide sanctuary of Homo sapien creativity.
If you’re interested in a place where safeguarding Art is our sacrosanct ethos, this is the home for you. Our platform hosts all creative mediums, from artists to musicians to writers to photographers and more! We offer a multimedia option as well. Along with the 6 most recently uploaded works, our homepage displays a showcase of 3 random ones from our magnificent galleria so every work by every user gets a chance to be discovered every day. We feature medium-specific labels, embedded certification seals, a cozy café-like Lounge for real-time conversation, an elegant Forum for long-form discussions, followers, replies, a DM inbox and group chats. Not to mention, we also host a Weekly Masterpiece Series, where the most liked work of any medium earns a coveted homepage top feature slot for the weekend, with four runners-up receiving honorable mentions.
Our platform is built on industry-standard infrastructure with strict access controls. Sensitive verification materials (like personal documents, non-public proof of published work, standard-tier proof-uploads) are access-restricted, stored in a private area, and handled with the same care we give to your work.
We offer four Verification Options that analyze an uploaded piece of creative work, from any medium. Basic Tier, Standard Tier, Pre-2022 Social Media Proof and Published Work. Within 24hrs we come to a conclusion whether the uploaded work is above a percentage threshold to be likely human-made or not. If in question, we give chances for explanation and proof of process in resubmission. If without a doubt someone uploads something AI-generated, we ban. Whether they are trying to get verified or already have been. We also used crowd-sourced reporting, so every artwork has a “Report AI” button on it. However, each case is handled discreetly, and public-AI-accusations are against Community Guidelines. We want to ensure a warm-inviting, non-confrontational community on this subject and thus far have been proud at our success in doing so.
Our Anti-AI detection system works behind the scenes in both verifying new users and doing routine checks on our existing userbase with the rigor of the scientific method. We use a novel and proprietary combination of publicly accessible tools backed by 3 highly credentialed and experienced experts who serve as our edgecase consultants in the respective fields of Art, Music and Writing. We’re constantly refining our process, and staying on the utmost cutting edge of the field.
Why I Built It
“Art saved my life. To return the favor, I built NewBohemia.art." Those were the first words of my Reddit ad, and each syllable was heartfelt. I grew up in a complicated living situation, and used creative writing as an instrument of escape, self-therapy and self-empowerment. I defined my identity by the word “wordsmith.” Then, in the summer before I went to my first semester at SUNY Purchase college in 2011, I watched Ray Kurzweil appear on Real Time with Bill Maher andread his famous book "The Singularity Is Near." He explicitly foresaw that the arts were also going to be performed by machines sometime in the 2020s. At the time, his predictions were known to have a 86% success rate. I was about to enter art school for creative writing so I had kind of an existential panic about this career-dooming prognostication. I told myself it was a thought experiment and moved on with life.
After spending a decade crafting intensively lyrical hip hop music, I was someone with passion and purpose. Yet in 2022, with the release of Chat-GPT and large language models, not to mention the Art-generating ones like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion, it was clear Ray’s prophecy had come true and I fell into the worst depression of my life. It lasted about two years. I wrote a song called darkdog about it. Then stopped writing music. Then stopped writing altogether.
Soon, many adversarial pro-gen-AI-Art communities emerged, weaponizing their envy to bully us creatives online by scraping our work without permission, feeding it into generators, and mocking us with artificial bastardized recreations, along with a gleeful gloat at our supposed newfound uselessness. It felt like a global mental health crisis amongst the human creative community that barely anyone outside of artist circles was even talking about, let alone aware of.
One day on one of many daily pointless-feeling walks, I saw a Peregrine falcon fly by, just as I turned to hear the sound of an airplane. I realized though the plane was faster, the bird was far more beautiful. It became obvious that while gen-AI does have practical real world usage for non-creative purposes, most humans still want the authentic experience of art from other humans, and most artists still want the authentic experience of creating art themselves.
So I decided to pick myself up, dust myself off and fight. I built NewBohemia.art from May 2025 to November 2025, and run it to this day.
We don’t know what the future holds for our species in terms of artificial intelligence, but we are hopeful for what it holds in our platform’s fight against one of AI’s lesser, but most pernicious downstream dangers; the enfeeblement of mankind’s artistic soul. At NewBohemia.art, like the historical equivalents it aspires to pay digital homage to, we are honored to bring humanity back to the arts. If you want to become part of our renaissance to make Art human again, now you know where to find it.
Recommended Reading: Margriet van Breevoort on Hybrid Creatures, Silicone Skin, and the Uncanny
BIO:
Evan Greenberg is the Founder and Admin of NewBohemia.art. He has, in articles, been proclaimed as "the prodigal son" of Purchase College, SUNY a renowned school for the creative arts in New York State. A school he was accepted into based on a recommendation letter from Macmillan Publishers. He is an autodidact with an omnivorous intellect ranging from literary theory to music production to aesthetics to software development. He has spent more than a decade under the alias the4realmcg as a high-art hip-hop artist, winning the 2015 C.L.R. Blood Moon Cypher and working with innumerable musicians, visual artists and vocalists on bringing his songwriting opus’ to life. He has worked with industry professionals such as Takoda Shane in creating music videos featuring a cornucopia of creatives and from 2023-2024 created viral YouTube comedy shorts. Most importantly, he built the platform and runs it.
Please follow on social media: Instagram / Pinterest / X / Facebook / Bluesky
