There was no “incident”. Some people read the terms of service and raised a kerfuffle over it because the devs are based in Russia. So far we have no knowledge nor reasonable suspicions of anything nefarious on their part.

The information (if you trust it) is clearly there on the website.

Your photos are sent to our servers to generate portraits. We won’t use data from your photos for any other purpose and we'll immediately delete them.

So basically you have to trust them.

https://towardsdatascience.com/progan-how-nvidia-generated-i...

Extract of "Why":

"AI Portraits Ars uses Artificial Intelligence to reproduce artistic human portraits, with different styles and levels of abstraction. For our model training, we adopt a data set of tens of thousands of paintings from the Early Renaissance to Contemporary Art. This type of portraiture is quite distinctive of the Western artistic tradition. Training our models on a data set with such strong bias leads us to reflect on the importance of AI fairness. In the previous work AI Portraits Celebrity, we explored the concept of micro-bias linked to the training data of only actors, which in some way imposes an actorization of the user's portrait: “a collection of faces from the society of spectacle that are sedimented in the neural network, and vaporize my selfie in a cinematographic self." AI Portraits Ars introduces a very different type of bias with unique themes to explore."

// edit: Added extract of "Why"